Red Bean Buns

by t

how to make anpan sweet red bean buns first in a bubbling brewing bucket of boiling unsalted tears add red beans, one at a time, showing respect and gratitude for their personal space and lively individuality. second there’s no better time to be young and fresh and hard bodied before one day a soft boiled mash looks into your eyes from the mirror’s edge and you actually remember divulgent guilt about one night decades ago when you ate sweet buns after 9pm and felt bad about it going straight to your stomach? third that’s thinking like a dinosaur, a scaled stegosaurus burdened by plates on its back killed by its own disappointment. a reptilic, microfascisitic prehistory that will be rewritten and glorified for its big boned benefit of coal. lastly consider these buns future fossil fuel.

it’s a matter of morality to never turn down food that is offered to you in another person’s home. especially if it includes sugar, cheese, or butter. denying all three is a dinosaur holocaust though i suppose an exception should be made for vegetarians offered triceratops chops. just kidding. what really killed them were the sesame seed meteors. streams of conscious unconsciousness like fantasiastic rites of spring rounds. stravinsky was a paleontologist who dug out the full skeleton of trombones from the wood of rotting cellos, and disney was the artist who after much thought and cultural sensitivity decided to watercolor the tyrannosaurus pink.  the jurassic period was the good ol days. a golden sun like eggwashed baked bread blessed brachiosaurus and diplodocus alike, and their bones weren’t so burnt as to cause them UV ray damage from life giving dough.

if poetry is supposed to make cents then why haven’t starving writers used their dusty dimes and melancholic nickels to buy and bite these buns?

Recipe: Anpan Japanese Sweet Red Bean Buns

The Evolution of Bread

by t

Bread break. Change of pace. Fresh start. Yeast fart.

Sugar+Spice Brioche Buns

by t

Late night boss-baking baby making. This baby bump is our oven bump: our oven number two, bumping to the beat, rising to the heat, browning til I eat. Sleep late, blog later. Speak straight, blog in twisty coils. Nothing against squares and ninety-degree corners (straight edges aren’t necessarily sharp – it’s a question of the material): it’s just that my head is round, my toes are cold, and once I think I saw the shape of my pre-frontal cortex in a cloud. Head in the sky, feet in the grass; hands in my pockets, intestinal gas.

Irene says I make the blog unappetizing. My shrink says that I should analyse things from the perspective of the psychoanalytic unconscious to figure out why I do the things I do. Well here’s my confession. It all probably perhaps maybe in theory has to do with my anal stage of psychosexual growth, that second phase when I derived pleasure from expelling and withholding feces, which Freud says came into conflict with my parents’ desire to potty train me. Ah, society and the superego has sublimated my sensualities into writing, an appropriate form of control, and the creation and consumption of sweet desserts as a metaphor of ordure is a heavy-handed rebellion of the Id, a systematic neurotic perversion expressed in the unconscious anxiety of a suppressed coprophagia. Something like that. Cue the eye-rolls of psychology-majors-or-anyone-who-has-read-more-psychoanalysis-than-Civilization-And-Its-Discontents-which-wasn’t-even-psychoanalysis-come-on.

And there you have it: sugar and spice brioche rolls!

I brushed the risen and baked cubes with butter and rolled them in cinnamon, white sugar, nutmeg, and ground cloves, and ginger powder. The dough was leftover from our sticky buns. It would’ve been waste, but we ate it instead.

High-Octane Sticky Buns

by t

“Even if you have a vagina, you are a man if you’re eating a cinnabon. That moment, you’re a man.” – Louie C.K.

[Tim] Oven puberty: our rite of yeasty passage, a coming of age of risen dough, a departure from the innocence of raw flour, about coming to terms with one’s own sticky, icky identity, growing up and growing wide (around the waist), becoming a man. Please direct your leftist criticisms of patriarchy and heteronormativity and equality and flexibility and coprophagia and all the isms (racism, sexism, polytheism, optimism) at Louie, who already took the glazy jism joke in his standup. No matter. Our caramel santorum is brown, and it graces our vicey pleasure called sticky buns – please, the joke tells itself. Self-evident humor for a conditioned mind. Foreigners probably don’t get the joke, but you, soaked in the signifiers of euphemismistic language do. Dirty, sticky mind.

[Tim] The sticky buns are Joanne Chang’s signature recipe. That fact justifies all the coming of age platitudes up there. Irene really got into this recipe, hence the fluffy baky ambient pictures, which I use by stuffing into collages. Food and photography philosophy: waste not, want not; bake not, make not; snake knot, blood clot. Food for thought.

[Tim] Room temperature butter? Ain’t nobody got time for that, but we do have time for overmelting it, forgetting to add our water, making a soupy mush, overcompensating with flour, and voila! A beautiful, silky dough not like this baby’s bottom (too many creases), but a giant earlobe off an elephant leaf or Buddha. If someone would make a pillowcase the texture of buttery rolled-out dough, that’d be great.

[Tim] If you don’t have flour, butter, mixers, nuts, or the time to make this tortile pastry, this is a great recipe to use for when you go to the beach and play Cook in the sand like a little kid. Get a towel from your mom (don’t tell her what it’s for), cover it with sand to simulate the sugar and cinnamon, and with rocks and shells for the nuts. Roll it up, chop it up (garden shears work well for this), and voila! Your own sticky beach roll. Now you can bury your friend and give hir sandy oversized breasts and a mermaid tail, dig holes for no apparent purpose or meaning, and run and scream hysterically when it starts to rain.

[Tim] Not shown: our caramel-making. A boiling brown pot of cream, water, honey, sugar, butter, and water. Society gives mixed messages when it comes to selling your body. If you aren’t homeless and in debt, you can probably afford this, even if it costs you a trip to the egg/cryobank. But making a post on the Personals section of Craigslist with the intent of making cash off a consensual physical experience will land you in prison. You can’t sell your blood or your kidneys, or eyeballs, or lungs, but you can sell your plasmids, and your saliva. Further, costs of living forces you to sell your body as labour-power, to borrow a term from Mr. Marx. Not taking any sides here, but this all just seems awfully inconsistent to me. Someone up in Washington ought to sit down with some buns and coffee and sort this all out — that’s really the best way to sort out anything. Sugar, butter, coffee: the only trifecta that matches chocolate, peanut-butter, banana.

Now for a series of before and after:

[Tim] A visual representation of an undesirable roommates situation. When things get heated up in the sticky goo you’re all marinating in, feeling suffocated and close. Some of you might like this. I personally have made good friends with all my roommates. Cheers to sweet and buttery roommates!

[Tim] Pictures like this remind me of tan people. The sun bakes your skin brown! Remember that urban myth of baking an egg on a sidewalk? It’s like that, except your own body. Has anyone ever lay on a sidewalk until cooked through? Sorry – I know my audience doesn’t fit the cannibal demographic. But it’s something to think of the next time you go tanning.

[Tim] Straight up one of the best things that has come out of our Oven. Gooey, slimy, nutty, coiled. A perfect number two.

[Irene] Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve written on the blog. Like Tim said, I got into this recipe, but I’d say we both “got into it.” We stayed up till 2 in the morning to eat these freshly baked sticky buns. He even said it was one of the most enjoyable things he’s has ever done.

This recipe was indeed somewhat near and dear to my heart, because these sticky buns are one of my best friend’s favorites at Joanna Chang’s bakery, Flour. Since my college is located close to Boston, I’ve had the privilege to enjoy Joanna’s pastries several times (the bread pudding? deliishh). However, I do have a confession to make… I’ve never actually tried her sticky buns. I figured, hey, I try making them myself, and it probably won’t taste as good as hers. BUT when I try it at Flour, it will be so much better!

Anyways, this fall (wowww, it no longer summer) has been a different experience for me since I decided to stay home with my family and take the semester off. It was a hard decision, but ultimately one that I think was right. I’m currently working full-time, going to school part-time, and being a full-time sister & daughter. It’s been quite a change, and I think these sticky buns made me a little home sick for my friends and school.

It’s interesting how your expectations of life doesn’t always aline with what happens, that’s what makes life sticky. I love it, but hate it. As much as I hate the leftover sticky residue on my hands and face, it’s necessary. Your hair might stick to your face, the napkin may be blued to the fork, but to enjoy it all, the full experience, we gotta dig in.

Taiwanese Pineapple Cakes (鳳梨酥 – Fong Li Su)

by t

An Asian Invasion. Our Ethnic Oven Number 二. Once you go yellow, your taste buds perk, “Oh, hello,” your stomach will mellow, your body turned relaxed and rubbery like jello. Magic muffins from an odd Chinese fellow. A warm bubbling in the chest, rising to the tip of the head like a green stalk pouring up from the ground to the cloudy houses of giants, or my name isn’t Jack. It isn’t. But if there were a fairy tale named after me, it would be Tim and the Butterstalk. Imagine the largest slab of butter your mind is able to. I want a new indoor sport: butter climbing. Like those rock-climbing gyms, but with a wall of butter.

Ah, I do love glorifying butter. Among bakers, butter is a common language.

The Taiwanese use a fruit known as winter melon to flavor their pineapple cakes. Lacking it, we made jam with pineapple and mango. Like Sasquatch, the raw dough was not captured on camera. But you can imagine dough sheets like dumpling casings as we took the jam and filled them in a cute circle to be pressed into a square pan. A round peg in a square hole. Make it fit, or it’ll overflow and form a muffin top. Love handles you love to handle.

Butter bombs, exploding with pineapple mango jam. Good with Pu-erh tea, better with coffee. Dressed up as appropriate: with sugar and butter. We’re Fusion-types, that marketed mixture of Asian and American. If our kitchen were a country, then some might say our baking is identity politics. You are what you eat – that’s an old Chinese saying. But did anyone ever ask if it’s reverse causal? Is what I am also what I ate? If I’m Asian-American, does that mean that I eaten… oh garlic! I can’t remember any of the meals that I ate before I was about three-years old! What if all our parents just fed us the races, genders, and traits that they wanted us to be? I suppose if you want to be existentialist about it, you still have the choice to create your own identity, just by choosing the food you eat. I want to be a burrito: close to all my friends I pair well with, and wrapped in warm doughy blanket.

The recipe for our dough was borrowed from here, and their end product looks better… as per usual. But do they have butter fantasies? Are their posts filled with lewdities? Do they rant parades of non-sequiturs?!

Sigh. My apologies – I didn’t mean for my inferiority complex to be known to the readership. I’m just merely self-conscious about the size of my rolling pin. Does this baking sheet make my oven look big?

Homemade Croissants // This Is Not A Cronut

by t

It is the key to living well. The Good Life, as Aristotle said. It’s the vital aspect of happiness and accessing full human potential. The faces of the Greats have been sculpted in it, and who-knows-how many cows are ritually sacrificed in its name.

Our not-at-all-secret ingredient: butter.

Lay that slab on my core and fold me. Roll me like bowling balls and backgammon dice and acrobats, tumbling down a grassy hill faster and faster down, picking up speed and beetles and ants and dizziness (or better, schwindelig, a German term that also connotes giddiness) until at thirty miles an hour the grass flattens out onto a flour beach and I spin uncontrollably into a sea of butter.

That’s My Beautiful Light Straight Edge Fantasy, and if virtual reality ever catches up to my imagination I will live that day dream, doing a backstroke in warm, shiny butter. Soak it in through the skin like a cucumber facial. Au naturale. The only better administration I can think of is through a mother’s teat. Isn’t that how Superbabies were fed? Someone get NASA working on that technology.

 

It took as much time to make these croissants as it did for Jesus to rise from the dead. Three days — wrapped not in linens but in plastic wrap, chilling in the dark cold cave of a shut-door refrigerator, to be brought out and refolded, and flattened like the Pokemon move rollout: turn after turn, over and over. But we aren’t rock types here, we are butter and flour types. Super effective against all but diet-types and vegan-types.

Rolling croissant spirals ranks up there among peeling beet skin and playing with hair in terms of tactile pleasure. I wish you were there with me to do it; it was just magnificent. Live a little vicariously and watch this being done. If there were a Butter God, his ceremonies would involve rolling croissants.

  

And on the third day, they rose. We left them in a warm oven to let the yeast number two their gasses all in our spirals to make them flounce and fluff and soften like a bloated animal floating face down in a lake. Slice through it with a speedboat (or in the non-metaphor, a knife) and have a whiff of some of those lovely gasses as the carcass sinks down to be eaten by the fishes. And like the unidentified animal under the summer sun, bake those croissants until their skin gets leathery. Yes, just like that. Beautiful.

The best croissants I’ve ever had. They may look the same as the ones you buy by the two-dozen at Costco, but boy, you don’t know the meaning of floof. Unless you’ve eaten a croissant fresh out of a Parisian Cafe, I don’t expect you to believe me. As Christof “The Creator” says in The Truman Show, “We accept the reality in which we are presented.” My first bite of these, and my senses waltzed through that black door at the edge of the horizon like Freedom and Truth themselves were to be rediscovered. You think I’m exaggerating and I am. But I’m leaving now and in case you don’t see me, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.

This is Not A Cronut

It is not a “dossant” or “doissant.”  it is not a “cronot,” or “cronaught,” and gods help us not a “Fro Cro-Dough“. When it comes to names and labels and patents, copies and copyrights and trademarks and bootlegs, I don’t give a Two.

All that’s needed is some common understanding: this is not a Cronut. But using the croissant dough we made, we fried up something innovatively-astounding.

Ugly leftover dough that created a delicious doughy monstrosity. Not pictured. Instead we airbrushed up a perfect little thing for your viewing pleasure and jealousy. Much love from our Oven.

Mickey-nut

We rolled this in cinnamon sugar, filled it with pastry cream, and dipped it in glaze. And for all those that missed out on these, you can thank Obama.

If you’re one of those clueless anti-hipsters who don’t keep up to speed on the inner supply and demands of the pastry world, you should learn about what a cronut really is.

Our croissants were made from Joanne Chang’s recipe book Flour. It was four page long page-turner, which we assuredly slathered in butter. You can find it here, along with some better pictures. There’s always someone on the internet better than you.

Leftovers

by reenrene

Cleanup on Oven Number 2: we got leftovers. Only pretty pictures of dessert to see here folks, have a move on.

They see me rollin — cake pop balls, popping them out of my fridge like rabbit pellets. Pop pop hope cops don’t see me eating these furiously.

If you thought this was a pizza, you are correct. Except our tomato sauce is raspberry jam, and our cheese is sweetened lemon dough. You mad, pizza aficionados?

The dessert I’d bring to a funeral. Disregard sadness, acquire sweets. That’s an overstatement, but I’d hope that your soft nibbles would make you miss mourning if only for a second.

This would be a giant oreo, if only we were Epic Meal Time enough. Instead, it’s just a cake.

HAHAHA just a cake?! You wish you had this — just look at that picture, LOOK AT IT!

Dwight and Rasputin’s Favorite Beet Pie

by reenrene

Fact: bears eat beets.

Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.

And now Tom Robbins, to whom this post is dedicated and would not have existed if I had never read his Jitterbug Perfume. Here for the recipe? Skip to the end. But I wouldn’t miss this reading if I were you. It’s important.

TODAY’S SPECIAL

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip . . .

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t—.

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren’t sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.) An old Ukranian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.”
That is a risk we have to take.

If you like beets, you’re in good company. Perhaps the most intense of companies – can you see in in those eyes? If Grigori Rasputin and Dwight Shrute had a child, it would come out hairy as a bear, skin smooth like beets. A visionary Shrute who could predict the harvest cycles and heal rotting crops. To grow beets with the seriousness of a peasant on a pilgrimage, the stoicness of paper printers, and the intensity of Battlestar Galactica.

You may have associated beets with goat cheese and candied walnuts, that often-leafless, green-deprived ‘salad’ that is found on the menus of  fine-dining joints on the corners of posh neighborhoods and cities whose skies are scraped with orange smog the same color of the beets they serve. Rather now, create associations of congealing blood, and the indomitable grimness of furrowing eyebrows; the unperturbed indulgence of satanic sacraments, and a hemorrhoidal mystery whose consumption and growth is limited only by the proliferation of porcelain anuses.

Out of our oven and onto your ceramic bunghole. Was Kurt Vonnegut served beets for breakfast? If so, I bet he took it like a champion.

You are eating your salad off this plate, red remains of a juicy beet staining the puckered star, imitating your crimson lips stained with serious pleasure. Lap up that nectar from your orifice, and if you find that luscious syrup delicious, is there anything stopping you from licking off the plate?

A beet in the hand is worth two testes in a jar. Specifically, Rasputin’s preserved pickled babymakers. In their search for power point project images and facts for paper prompts, high schoolers cramming for European history assignments everywhere have stumbled upon Rasputin’s “moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma.” There are those that say Rasputin’s canned genetailia is a hoax, a ploy by crafty Russian curators who use the charm of the enigmatical mystic’s member the same way that pop-up advertisers from early internet days deployed promises of free cruises and Playstations, and why this blog has nice pictures and poop jokes: attention grubbing! and with enough attention comes money. Slimy Russian museum marketers.

The surface of a skinned boiled beet is not so much slimy as smooth, and slippery. Peeling the steaming beet with one’s bare hands is perhaps one of the loveliest tactile feelings that one can experience — right up there with stroking silky pastry dough and the play of skin-on-skin.

I’ll remind you of the association with beets to hemorrhoids, and say simply this: don’t sit on one of these.

Repulsive? Come come, tis merely jest, for jokes about the grim and grisly may be the greatest way to deal with them. As the maxim goes: life is far too important to be taken seriously. Yet there are those (puritans, sycophants, and policemen) who regard life as the grave!

To beet, or not to beet, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Tastier in the mind to salivate
The Sugars and Appetizers of outrageous Food-making,
Or to take Yums against a Sea of tastes,
And by opposing end them: to dine, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Stomach-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to?

Interpreters and literature obsessionists have debated: did these “natural shocks” mean the food coma, or indigestion, or constipation? The resolution is up to the scholars. But my personal opinion has a relation to a certain ceramic butthole.

This is Beet Poetry. We are cooking off the beeten path. The puns can’t be beet, but the beets can, and indeed already are:

“The kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies”

If mystery were a place, its citizens would be called mysticists. But mystery is not a location but an ingredient, so chew, and eat the meat of beets with feverish teeth like a Russian mystic and nibble on the riddle of the taste of a foreboding and glowering hemorrhoid. As a lyricist I’m a nobody so forgive me my peon pride, but as sentences are flavored and cooked by the rhythms and beets of their syllables, the previous one made me salivate – even so wholly contrived.

Somehow in this discussion of farms and pilgrims and butts and mystery, a our oven ejected a pie. And we didn’t even get to discuss the red piss, the pink lemonade of that wonderfully worded condition: beeturia. It’s a high probability that Rasputin had a case of dyed water, but alas, we are out of space for speculation. That’s why we’re called Oven Number 2, and not Oven Number 1.

Bears eat beets. Here is the beet pie recipe. Put on your bear face.

Pastry Cream Sugar Filled Dogged Donuts

by reenrene

When you think donuts, I think holes. Donut holes. Dig it up, dough dough, dig it. Not a consumer of puns? Suck my doughnuts. If you can’t stand the nuts, get out of the oven. There’s a long line of cold people out here, and they’d appreciate their turn in the warm womb, the sweet bowels we present here.

Show me the donuts, and I’ll show you a hungry dog face:

Tim from Oven Number 2 apologizes for the insinuations made in this post. Yes, this blog is about food, and yes, that is my dog. We might be Chinese, but we don’t eat dog. There’s a doughnut drought picture dearth, so we have dogs and no doughnuts. D’oh. Nuts.

Handmixers are to blowdryers as standmixers are to souped up salon  hood hair dryers. I’ve never tried it before, but I imagine that it’s like putting my head into a giant baby’s mouth before it monstrously inhales all the moisture out of my wet hair. Professional HD baby.

Back to donuts. It’s a dough made with cake flour, and stuffed with the pastry cream filling featured in the brioche post (see below). Boring as dough, delicious as nuts. That is, if sugary hot cream suits your taste.

— — —

Ingredients:

• 1 package (2 1/2 teaspoons) active dry yeast or 2/3 ounce (18 grams) fresh cake yeast
• 2/3 cup (160 grams) milk, at room temperature
• 3 1/2 cups (490 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 1/3 cups (270 grams) sugar
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 3 eggs
• 7 tablespoons (3/4 stick/100 grams) butter, at room temperature, cut into 6 to 8 pieces
• Canola oil, for frying

Vanilla Cream Filling

• 6 tablespoons (90 grams) heavy cream
• Pastry Cream , chilled

Recipe:

In a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, combine the yeast and milk. Stir together briefly, then let sit for about 1 minute to dissolve the yeast. Add the flour, 1/3 cup (70 grams) of the sugar, the salt, and the eggs and mix on low speed for about 1 minute, or until the dough comes together. Then, still on low speed, mix for another 2 to 3 minutes to develop the dough further. Now, begin to add the butter, a few pieces at a time, and continue to mix for 5 to 6 minutes, or until the butter is fully incorporated and the dough is soft and cohesive.

Remove the dough from the bowl, wrap tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 6 hours or up to 15 hours.

Lightly flour a baking sheet. On a well-floured work surface, roll out the dough into a 12-inch square about 1/2 inch thick. Using a 3 1/2- to 4-inch round biscuit cutter, cut out 9 doughnuts. Arrange them on the prepared baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap, and place in a warm spot to proof for 2 to 3 hours, or until they are about doubled in height and feel poufy and pillowy.

When ready to fry, line a tray or baking sheet large enough to hold the doughnuts with paper towels. Pour oil to a depth of about 3 inches into a large, heavy saucepan and heat over medium-high heat until hot. To test the oil, throw in a pinch of flour. If it sizzles on contact, the oil is ready. (It should be 350 degrees if you are using a thermometer.) Working in batches, place the doughnuts in the hot oil, being careful not to crowd them. Fry on the first side for 2 to 3 minutes, or until brown. Then gently flip them and fry for another 2 to 3 minutes, or until brown on the second side. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the doughnuts to the prepared tray and let cool for a few minutes, or until cool enough to handle.

Place the remaining 1 cup (200 grams) sugar in a small bowl. One at a time, toss the warm doughnuts in the sugar to coat evenly. As each doughnut is coated, return it to the tray to cool completely. This will take 30 to 40 minutes.

To make the vanilla cream filling: While the doughnuts are cooking, whip the heavy cream until it holds stiff peaks. Using a rubber spatula, fold it into the pastry cream . You should have about 3 cups.

When doughnuts are completely cooled, poke a hole in the side of each doughnut, spacing it equidistant between the top and bottom. Fit a pastry bag with a small round tip and fill the bag with the filling. Squirt about 1/3 cup filling into each doughnut. Serve immediately.

Brioche au Chocolat

by reenrene

[Tim] Holy bread! Give us this day our daily brioche and forgive us our sweet teeth, as we forgive those who diet against us. Like manna, this brioche was dumped. That’s the Oven Number 2 Process (ON2P): Prep em, bake em, dump um, eat em. Pardon my language but the pun is intentional – that’s good shit. Double stuffed tangy nuggets in-between those cheeks. Pastry cream is cream for pastries. If all words followed that logic, a chocolate bar would be a bar for chocolate, and a cook book would be a book for cooking. Which it is.

Sometimes you can let pictures speak for themselves, but I want is a picture to taste for itself, hear, smell, walk, and unicycle for itself . A fully sensual unicycling picture – that’d be my second wish if I had a magic genie bottle. The first would be for super powers (not needing to sleep), and I’d save my third for emergency circumstances.

Making brioche is fun… the filling made it fabulous. Why is that word affiliated with gays? And why is the word gay associated with homosexuals? This gay bread made me gay – hopefully it’ll make you gay too.

Here’s the recipe, shamelessly copied from this blog. They did it too, and the adage holds true: “There’s always someone on the internet better than you.”

Brioche au Chocolat
from Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery + Cafe
makes 10 pastries

1/2 recipe Basic Brioche dough (recipe follows)

1 recipe Pastry Cream (recipe follows)
4 oz (114g) bittersweet chocolate (62 to 70 percent cacao), chopped, or bittersweet chocolate chips (just under 2/3 cup). POC Note: This pastry is not supersweet- the bittersweet chocolate adds a hint of sweetness with a bitter kick. If you are truly opposed to all bittersweetness and insist that your pastries must be perfectly sweet (Hey, to each his own)- use a good quality semisweet chocolate in its place.
1 egg

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

On a floured work surface, roll out the dough into a rectangle about 20 inches by 10 inches and 1/4 inch thick. It will have the consistency of cold, damp Play-Doh and should be fairly easy to roll. Position the rectangle so a long side is facing you. Spread the pastry cream evenly over the bottom half (a 20 by 5 inch section) of the rectangle. Fold the top half of the rectangle completely over the bottom half, then press down gently so the halves are smooshed together.

Use a bench scraper of a chef’s knife to cut the filled dough into 10 pieces, each about 2 inches wide; each piece will be about 2 by 5 inches. (At this point, the unbaked pastries can be tightly wrapped in plastic and frozen for up to 1 week. When ready to bake, thaw them, still wrapped, in the refrigerator overnight or at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours, then proceed as directed.)

Carefully transfer the brioche to the prepared baking sheet. Cover the pastries lightly with plastic wrap and place in a warm spot to proof for about 2 hours, or until the dough is puffy, pillowy, and soft. Position a rack in the center of the oven, and heat the oven to 350 degrees F.

In a small bowl, whisk the egg until blended. Gently brush the tops of the pastries with the beaten egg.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until golden brown. Let cool on the baking sheet on a wire rack for 20 to 30 minutes. The pastries tend to bake into one another in the oven, so break apart into 10 pieces. The pastries are best served warm or within 4 hours of baking. They can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 1 day, and then warmed in a 300-degree-F oven for 5 minutes before serving.

Basic Brioche
from Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery + Cafe

*Makes 2 loaves
Note: Do not halve this recipe. There won’t be enough dough to engage the dough hook of your mixer, and the dough won’t get the workout it needs to become a light, fluffy bread. Don’t worry about having too much: Both the dough and the baked loaves freeze well, and having a freezer filled with brioche is never a bad thing.

2 1/4 cups (315 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
2 1/4 cups (340 grams) bread flour
1 1/2 packages (3 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast, or 1 ounce (28 grams) fresh cake yeast
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon (82 grams) sugar
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1/2 cup (120 grams) cold water
6 eggs
1 cup plus 6 tablespoons (2 3/4 sticks/310 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature, cut into 10 to 12 pieces

In a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, combine the all-purpose flour, bread flour, yeast, sugar, salt, water, and 5 of the eggs. Beat on low speed for 3 to 4 minutes, or until all of the ingredients have come together. Stop the mixer as needed to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl to make sure all of the flour is incorporated into the wet ingredients. Once the dough has come together, beat on low speed for another 3 to 4 minutes. The dough will be very stiff and seem quite dry.

On low speed, add the butter one piece at a time, mixing after each addition until it disappears into the dough. Then, continue mixing on low speed for about 10 minutes, stopping the mixer occasionally to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl. It is important for all of the butter to be mixed thoroughly into the dough. If necessary, stop the mixer occasionally and break up the dough with your hands to help mix in the butter.

Once the butter is completely incorporated, turn up the speed to medium and beat for another 15 minutes, or until the dough becomes sticky, soft, and somewhat shiny. It will take some time to come together. It will look shaggy and questionable at the start and then eventually will turn smooth and silky. Then, turn the speed to medium-high and beat for about 1 minute. You should hear the dough make a slap-slap-slap sound as it hits the sides of the bowl. Test the dough by pulling at it: it should stretch a bit and have a little give. If it seems wet and loose and more like a batter than a dough, add a few tablespoons of flour and mix until it comes together. If it breaks off into pieces when you pull at it, continue to mix on medium speed for another 2 to 3 minutes, or until it develops more strength and stretches when you grab it. It is ready when you can gather it all together and pick it up in one piece.

Place the dough in a large bowl or plastic container and cover it with plastic wrap, pressing the wrap directly onto the surface of the dough. Let the dough proof in the refrigerator for at least 6 hours or up to overnight. At this point, you can freeze the dough in an airtight container for up to 1 week.

To make two brioche loaves, line the bottom and sides of two 9 by 5 inch loaf pans with parchment, or butter the pans liberally. Divide the dough in half and press each piece into about a 9-inch square. The dough will feel like cold, clammy Play-Doh. Facing the square, fold down the top one-third toward yo, and then fold up the bottom one-third, as if folding a letter. Press to join these layers. Turn the folded dough over and place it, seam-side down in one of the prepared pans. Repeat with the second piece of dough, placing it in the second prepared pan.

Cover the loaves lightly with plastic wrap and place in a warm spot to proof for about 4 to 5 hours, or until the loaves have nearly doubled in size. They should have risen to the rim of the pan and be rounded on top. When you poke at the dough, it should feel soft, pillowy and light, as if it’s filled with air – because it is! At this point, the texture of the loaves always reminds me a bit of touching a water balloon.

Position a rack in the center of the oven, and heat the oven to 350 degrees F.

In a small bowl, whisk the remaining egg until blended. Gently brush the tops of the loaves with the beaten egg.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the tops and sides of the loaves are completely golden brown. Let cool in the pans on wire racks for 30 minutes, then turn the loaves out of the pans and continue to cool on the racks.

The bread can be stored tightly wrapped in plastic wrap at room temperature for up to 3 days (if it is older than 3 days, try toasting int) or in the freezer for up to 1 month.

Pastry Cream
from Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery + Cafe

1 1/4 cups (300g) milk
1/2 cup (100g) sugar
1/4 cup (30g) cake flour
1/2 tsp kosher salt
4 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla extract

In a medium saucepan, scald the milk over medium-high heat (bubbles start to form around the edges of the pan, but the milk is not boiling). While the milk is heating, in a small bowl, stir together the sugar, flour, and salt. (Mixing the flour with the sugar will prevent the flour from clumping when you add it to the egg yolks.) In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks until blended, then slowly whisk in the flour mixture. The mixture will be thick and pasty.

Remove the milk from the heat and slowly add it to the egg-flour mixture, a little at a time, whisking constantly. When all of the milk has been incorporated, return the contents of the bowl to the saucepan and place over medium heat. Whisk continuously and vigorously for about 3 minutes, or until the mixture thickens and comes to a boil. At first, the mixture will be very frothy and liquid; as it cooks longer, it will slowly start to thicken until the frothy bubbles disappear and it becomes more viscous. Once it thickens, stop whisking every few seconds to see if the mixture has come to a boil. If it has not, keep whisking vigorously. As soon as you see it bubbling, immediately go back to whisking for just 10 seconds, and then remove the pan from the heat. Boiling the mixture will thicken it and cook out the flour taste, but if you let it boil for longer than 10 seconds, the mixture can become grainy.

Pour the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a small heat-proof bowl. Stir in the vanilla, then cover with plastic wrap, placing it directly on the surface of the cream. This will prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours, or until cold, or up to 3 days.