Brioche. This is not the first time I have waxed lyrical about this French bread, nor will it be the last. It is love, and like all true love, it lasts forever. Except if you eat it.
My last blog on brioche was all about bourbon bacon cinnamon rolls and rhubarb white chocolate brioche rolls, but I did mention the possibility of brioche with raisins and goobs of custard. This was the first brioche I ever had, back when I was less than ten. Mum and dad would bring it home from the Southern Cross Bakery, a little French bread shop that used to live on the corner of High St and Victoria St in Auckland. Their brioche was a kind of pull-apart affair, thick with creme patissiere and rum soaked raisins or sultanas, glazed heavily with sticky apricot jam. It was binge bread – so hard to stop eating.
Yesterday, struck with a lurgy, guess what I had a craving for? Yup, a bread that came from a bakery 2500km and three decades away. So I had to make my own.
Of course, if you have a stand mixer, like my wonderful huge Kenwood, then making brioche is not the ” slaving all day and a hot kitchen” escapade that you might imagine. Really the mixer does all work, and then the dough has to sit around and rise (so then it’s doing all the work) and then you bake it. The filling simply required me to cover some golden sultanas with a bunch of golden rum and let them sit around (again, not me doing any work), and make a custard-powder custard. I even used the microwave for that, so it took three minutes plus stir time.
Okay, I admit that I am probably much quicker in the kitchen than some (it comes with practice and I really do blame Cupcake-a-day-May for my speed now), but if I can do this with a pounding headache and a sinus infection, then you can definitely crack some of these out on a Saturday afternoon. By the way, it was (and for you it will be) worth it.
Rum Sultana Custard Brioche Rolls
makes 12-16 brioche rolls depending on the size you want
ingredients
200mL golden rum
300g golden sultanas
2 tsp dried yeast
1/4 cup warm water
2 tbsp sugar
4 1/4 cups flour, another 1/4 cup if needed
1 tsp salt
2 whole eggs
2 egg yolks
1 cup milk, lukewarm
150g butter, softened
1/4 cup custard powder
6 tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla
500mL milk
1/2 cup good quality apricot jam, to glaze
mixing
Heat the rum until it just begins to boil, then remove from the heat and add the sultanas. Let sit while you do the rest of the recipe.
Stir the yeast into the warm water, add sugar. Let the mixture froth up – about 5 minutes.
Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl of an electric mixer. Add the yeast mixture, eggs, milk and butter and mix, using the dough hook attachment until the dough is smooth and supple. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a clean tea towel and let sit in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size (about an hour).
While the bread is rising, make the custard. Whisk the dry ingredients in a medium saucepan to combine, then add a little milk to make a smooth paste. Whisk in the rest of the milk and the vanilla. Heat the mixture, stirring occasionally at the beginning, then constantly as it gets hot, until the mixture boils and thickens. Cook for a minute once boiling, then remove from the heat. (Or do the whole process in the microwave, cooking for a minute at a time and stirring in between until the mixture is thick (about five minutes), then cook for a further minute.) Cover the custard with a film of cling wrap directly in the surface of the custard, and refrigerate to cool.
When the dough is nicely risen, knock the dough back and scoop out of the bowl and cut it in half (the halves make the rolls easier to handle). Roll the dough out to two rectangles about 25x40cm. Whisk the cold custard until smooth, then spread over the dough rectangles, leaving a couple of inches of the dough bare at one long edge (this edge will seal outer edge of the roll). Drain the sultanas well and reserve the leftover rum for something else (like sipping it whenever you feel like some). Scatter the sultanas over the custard, then beginning at the long edge which has filling all the way down to it, carefully roll the dough into a long log. Gently cut each log into 6-8 pieces, and transfer into well-greased jumbo muffin pans. Cover the brioches with a clean tea towel and leave in a warm place for a final proof (rise) of about half an hour.
Bake the brioches at 180 degrees Celsius for about 30 to 35 minutes. Warm the apricot jam and use this to glaze the brioches as soon as they come out of the oven.
Enjoy!xxx
