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| mmmmmm Jam |
Jam (and lemon) Iced Buns
After trying to find a good recipe for traditional iced buns with jam in the middle, and failing I settled for a bit of experimentation using a simple iced bun recipe (courtesy of englishmum) to try and get that lovely oozy jam in the middle of my buns. My experiment involved using jam and lemon curd to see which 'stayed put' best inside the bun.
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| Lemon buns |
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| The yellow is the leakage of lemon curd! |
Basic sweet bread dough recipe:
450g strong white bread flour
1 tsp salt
75g sugar
1 x 7g sachet dried yeast
150ml milk
150ml water
50g butter
Additional
jam (flavour of your choice) or lemon curd
Icing sugar
Red food colouring
Lemon juice
Method:
1. Sieve the flour into a bowl, mix in in the salt, sugar, and dried yeast.
2. In a saucepan, warm the milk, water, and butter over a low heat until the butter has just melted,( The liquid should be at no more than blood temperature when it’s added to the dry ingredients)
3. Pour 3/4 of the liquid mixture into the dry ingredients and stir it with a knife until you get a light dough. Try to make the dough quite sticky as this will help get that soft pillow texture.
4. Knead the dough for around 10 minutes- put a light dusting of flour down (to avoid you have to scrape it off the units!) As you knead, it will become more elastic and smooth and less squelchy, so bare with it. Try to keep your fingers together so the dough doesn't get stuck in between them. (It is a nuisance to get off!). when the dough is as smooth as a babies bottom (literally) set the dough aside somewhere warm (I choose next the the radiator), and cover in cling film until it’s doubled in size (approx 1 hour)
5. 'knock it back' the dough- basically you want to knead the dough for a few minutes until it looks like it did before you set in to rise.
6. Now the tricky part. divide the mixture into equal size balls (depending how big you want your buns to be) I settled for 12.now flatten out the ball with your hand, spoon in a teaspoon of jam in the centre of the dough, then wrap the dough around the jam so the jam is sealed inside. make sure you press the ends of the dough together well to prevent any jam eruptions in the oven, Then turn the dough ball upside down and put on a well greased tray, so the joint in hidden and the smooth side of the dough is upper most. Repeat until you have 12 jam filled dough balls.
7. Then leave to rise until doubled in size again (Approx 1 hour)
8. Bake for about 15-20 minutes at 180/gas 6 until they sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
9. leave to cool slightly (these buns are definitely best fresh from the oven with warm oozy jam/lemon so have 1 (or 2, or 3) fresh from the oven, then leave the others to cool so the icing will set properly on them.
10. Mix icing sugar and water (a dash of red food colouring for the jam buns and a dash of lemon juice for the lemon curd ones if you like)
Drizzle icing over the tops of each bun. Then enjoy!
This recipe is a bit fiddly, and does take a while mainly due to the 2 hour proving period, but trust me, fresh from the oven these are completely delicious.
I tried experimenting with a variety of shape and size buns, but I found a medium sized round buns rather than the traditional long finger shape buns tended to keep the jam in better, resulting in less 'jam eruptions' in the oven.
My conclusion on jam versus Lemon curd- both were tasty however the lemon curd seemed to go more runny than the jam in the oven so pretty much all of it leaked out on the the tray. That said it was still nice just very sticky on the bottom. perhaps I will try with lemon marmalade next time.
