This weekend I faced one of my culinary fears: Making bread. Bread making has always seemed like it was super difficult and required some measure of skill that I did not possess. However, I proved myself wrong by making these delicious looking cheese buns I found on The Pink Peppercorn‘s food blog:

Cheese Bun

Cheese Bun

The recipe is for a basic dough (PP says she actually usually uses it for pizza dough) which is then kind of cinnamon-rolled with aged white cheddar and baked. Not only was the process easier than I expected, but they tasted great too.

I think the fact that these buns were meant to be “rustic”-looking (as opposed to perfectly proofed) put me more at ease with making them. The process was pretty simple: activate yeast, mix in with dry ingredients, allow to rise, stretch out, sprinkle with cheese, roll, bake. I think the part that most intimidated me was the “stretch out” step, because I have had some bad experiences trying to use rolling pins (don’t ask). However, with this dough, I was able to easily stretch it out using only my hands and copious amounts of flour. Once the dough is stretched out (into a pizza shape, “but more oblong”), you sprinkle shredded cheese over one long half and then roll the dough up like a cinnamon roll, so the cheese is in the center. Then, simply cut slices from the roll and position on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

Mario and I actually had these with bacon and eggs for breakfast, but I’d imagine they were meant to pair with a nice pasta dish of some sort. I’ll just link to the Pink Peppercorn’s post with the recipe, but I do have a few pointers to mention:

- When shopping for yeast, buy the “Dry Active” kind, not “Rapid Rise”
- Just like her recipe says, kneading is mostly optional. I felt I did the bare minimum and these came out great.
- I thought the recommended 600g of cheddar was way, way too much. Two 8-oz blocks should be plenty.

Recipe here.