Cinnamon Bread

* Beagle not included with recipe.

I am an excellent baker. I don't say that to brag. There are a lot areas in life in which I do not excel, but I'm pretty good with the baking. Except for when it comes to baking bread. Oh, how I suck at baking bread. I once made baguettes that could have doubled as deadly weapons - it was Professor Plum, in the conservatory, with one of Hillary's baguettes, Inspector. My focaccia (Ok, I just spent five minutes trying to figure out how to spell focaccia and getting increasingly annoyed, only to realize that I am spelling it correctly and it is Word that is wrong) was flat and boring, and my rustic Italian bread was inedible. I do ok with pizza crust and calzone dough and rolls, but for some reason, I cannot produce a decent loaf of bread.

However, I recently had a craving for cinnamon bread. Irritated beyond belief that all of the bread at the grocery store had 50 different preservatives, plus high fructose corn syrup and some sort of hydrogenated oil, I decided to give making my own cinnamon bread a try. I stomped over to the baking aisle, grabbed a couple of packets of yeast, a bottle of cinnamon, and a bag of bread flour and headed home.

Imagine my surprise when I got home and realized that most cinnamon bread recipes don't use bread flour. I poked around on the internet for a while and eventually settled on this recipe, which turned out to be delicious. I'm pretty sure I found it on Serious Eats, but I can't find it now, so I can't link to it and give them credit. It is light and fluffy and cinnamon-y and fantastic. The recipe is only supposed to make one loaf, but I got two out of it. I have no idea why. My co-workers enjoyed the second loaf though (me, anxiously setting it out in the kitchen: I hope they'll like it. What if the second loaf isn't as good as the first? No one's going to want my silly bread. Oh, look, it's all gone already.) so I have proof it is a crowd pleaser.

Cinnamon Bread recipe:
1 package active dry yeast (1/4 ounce)
1 ¼ cups warm milk
1 cup sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, melted & cooled, plus more for brushing
3 large egg yolks
1 tsp salt
3 ½ cups all purpose flour, plus more for dusting
2 tablespoons cinnamon

In the bowl of a mixer with a dough hook, dissolve the yeast in ¼ cup of the warm milk. Sprinkle with a pinch of the sugar and let the mixture stand until the yeast starts to foam - about five minutes.

Turn the mixer on low and add the rest of the milk, ½ cup of the sugar, the egg yolks, the butter and the salt. Add two cups of the flour and turn the speed up to medium. Continue mixing until the flour is incorporated. Gradually add the remaining 1 ½ cups flour and mix until the dough holds together and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. The dough will be very soft.

Turn the dough out on a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic - about ten minutes. Put the kneaded dough into a large bowl. Cover with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel (I always go with a towel. It makes me feel retro) and let rise until doubled in size. That should take about 1 ½ hours. Test the dough by pressing two fingers in it. If the indents remain, the dough has risen enough.

Combine the remaining ½ cup of sugar and the two tablespoons of cinnamon in a small bowl. Brush the bottom and sides of a 9x5 loaf pan (I think this is the standard size) with melted butter.

Roll the dough into a rectangle about the size of the loaf pan. Brush the surface of the dough with melted butter and sprinkle the cinnamon and sugar evenly across. Starting on one of the long sides, roll the dough up into a long cylinder and pinch the seam closed. Place the roll in the loaf pan, seam side down. If you're me, then repeat this with the remaining dough. If you haven't mysteriously ended up with extra dough, cover the loaf pan and let the dough rise a second time, until the dough is just about level with the top of the pan. This takes about 20 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Brush the dough with more melted butter. Bake until bread is golden brown - 45 minutes to an hour. Cool in pan for five minutes, then transfer to a rack to cool completely. I wrapped my bread up very carefully in plastic wrap and then stuck it in Tupperware. It stayed good for the four days it took to eat the whole loaf, but probably would have started getting stale pretty soon after that.

Anyone have any good recipes that do call for bread flour?