Butter Roll Crisp Bread & New Style Calzones

Do you find yourself running out of time? I do. There's so much on your plate, things that have K.I.V. for awhile now, but you just did not bring yourself to do it? That's me sometimes. It's frustrating, with the ongoing daily routine, it's really easy to get those things slipped out of your mind. *sigh* Take this post for example, it was meant to be posted out last Sunday, but I only got time to seat down to write out till today. :-P Nevertheless, I always tell myself it's better to keep oneself busy rather then wondering what to do next. Expected, this will be a busy week for me as I need to make mooncakes, not just for the family but friends as well. I already have all the ingredients but putting them on hold till the last few days because I want them to be fresh. :) Anyway, that will be in another post. Today the usual stuff, bread. It's Butter Roll Crisp Bread to be specific. Again something that I saw awhile back but waited till now to try it out.

I got this recipe from a Taiwan blog..I think. Next time I should really copy down the blog link as well! One important note to this recipe is to again use the best quality butter, it will be worth the money you paid when you taste the buttery fragrant bread. Anyway, I did change a little of the recipe, here it is:

Ingredients for Butter Roll Crisp Bread:
400g bread flour
20g quality unsalted butter
50g caster sugar
6g salt
1 egg yolk
220ml fresh milk
6g instant active yeast

Filling
60g quality salted butter, room temperature (divide into 2 portions)
30g cream cheese, room temperature

Method:

• Knead the ingredients bread dough together till it's smooth and elastic.
• Let proof in a covered container up to 90 minutes or more till double in size.
• Punch out the air and roll into a ball. Let rest for 20 minutes before shaping.
• Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface into 20cm by 40cm rectangular sheet.
• Spread one portion of the salted butter on to the dough evenly, leaving 1" at the edges.
• Fold up the dough in a letter form and again roll out into 20cm by 40cm rectangular sheet. At this point if the dough is hard to manage, chill in fridge for 15 minutes before working with it again.
  
• Spread the 2nd portion of the rectangular sheet dough and fold in letter form again. Again repeat the above, then spreading the cream cheese at last. Finally fold and roll out into 10cm by 20cm.
• Using a rubber scraper, cut the dough into half, meaning 2 pieces of 10cm by 10cm.
  
• While working on one, chill the other portion. Cut the dough into 10 strips of 1cm by 1cm. Do not worry if you don't get the measurement accurately, just make sure you can get at least 8 to 9 strips of dough out of one portion.
• Twirl the strips, cut side facing up and coil the dough up and place in a greased baking pan of your choice. Repeat till all dough is used.
  
• Let proof for 45 minutes. Preheat the oven to 200°C.
• Brush the top with egg wash and bake in the oven for 20 to 24 minutes till top is golden brown.
• Once out of the oven, you can glazed the top with warm jam else leave it to cool on rack.
  

Since I did not put a lot of cream cheese, there was no evident taste of it present. But the butter taste of the bread was real nice. And since I also glazed the surface with some warm apricot jam, it kind of loses it crisp top too. :-P But the shine from the glaze looks good, haha!
I experimented baking the dough in different baking moulds. It turned out the muffin cups looks really good! Like a "flower" bun blooming away, haha!
The bread was really soft, certainly a dough that can be used in any bun recipe . But eating it plain with a cup of tea is really nice too. ;) Try it out and let me know how it turns out for you. :)

Last Sunday evening, I was really in the mood for some pizza. But decided to twist the recipe and change it into a calzone! I used the usual wheat pizza dough and pasta sauce I have, and get it all "wrapped" up into 2 giant calzones. Actually, it looks more like 2 giant curry puffs to me, haha! Due to my poor sealing method, the cheese was oozing out from the sides while baking in the oven! But my husband was really happy when he saw that and commented he loves "crispy" cheese, haha!
In my version of the calzone, I added hard boiled eggs, honey baked ham and the usual pasta sauce. It was an instant hit! My family loves it! The 2 whole calzones were gone in a flash soon after it came out from the oven. ;) I used to make calzones all the time while I was in California. But kind of forgotten about it until when we went dinning at a place call Murni's in SS2. At Murni's, they serve up this "Dragon Pizza" which is actually a calzone that looks like a dragon's back. Anyway, I will definitely make calzones again in the future but perhaps with different filling and shaping method. ;) Cheers!