Braiding Bragging Rights

Good Evening!
Last night I came ten minutes late to class. As a result, I had no partner, and instead of grouping me with another pair, Chef had me work alone for the first part of class. While I really do like my classmates and enjoy working with them, this was a rare treat. I should come late every night! What freedom! Unshackled by my anxiety of being bossy and controlling, unfettered by fears of screwing up not only my own product but a partner’s, I began baking. [ Note: doing things by yourself is more time consuming and often more confusing than it is when doing it with a partner.]
I made my own soft bun dough and my own Biga starter (this pre-ferment was a lot thicker and drier than either the sour dough or polish, but it should make for some good Ciabatta next week). Because I was working alone and Chef didn’t want to over load me, I didn’t make hot cross buns. I had never seen, let alone eaten a hot cross bun, but I did offer to play it for Chef on my recorder. I wish I was making that last bit up, but I did tell her that. When she stared at me blankly, instead of letting it go, I continued to explain how we learned to play the recorder in the fourth (?) grade. Then, to my horror, I started singing it…except the only words I know to the song are “hot cross buns” and I was forced to just hum the rest. Thankfully a classmate backed me with her own elementary school story and I was spared further embarrassment.
What hot cross buns actually are, are small sweet buns with a thin dough/paste piped on top in an X (or cross depending on how you hold them). Once they come out of the oven, the whole thing is basted in a light syrup. They looked delicious. I believe they originated in England, which makes them even more endearing.
Because I didn’t make the Hot Cross Buns, Chef gave me the great honor of feeding her sour-dough starter (yes, I’m STILL talking about that sour dough starter/pre-ferment. The hurricane threw everything off, and now we aren’t baking our sourdough until Tuesday). When I feed my own starter, I don’t measure anything. Apparently, we are supposed to use only a pound of starter and add eight ounces high gluten flour and nine ounces water. I only know this because I looked it up in a panic after contemplating messing up Chef’s pre-ferment, and after feeding hers I went right back to my hap-hazard ways with my own pre-ferment. Old habits die hard.
Soft bun dough is different than the other dough we had been making in that it has fat in it- Eggs and oil. For someone such as myself who has only ever made bread with an egg dough, this wasn’t so strange, but classmates were exclaiming over how smooth and springy the dough was. Chef demonstrated how to shape the dough- either into braided loaves (read: Challah) or small rolls that were shaped like garlic knots (read: challah rolls). The dough itself wasn’t quite the same as challah dough (which is more similar to brioche dough) but it was close enough for me to segue into my own experience and rhapsodize about it to both Chef and classmates. Now, I have attempted to make challah many times to various degrees of failure, but this time was different. Normally they come out misshapen and doughy. While I cannot vouch for the taste of my loaves from last night’s class, they looked great- large and round and nicely brown, shiny from the egg wash. A classmate took them home to her mother.

-Sarah, the Recorder Prodigy