Coffee Buns

The aroma of coffee is simply hard to resist, especially for coffee lovers like me. I love anything with coffee and chocolate. Remember the time when "Roti Boys" was in vogue. I remembered queuing at the China Square outlet for a bite of the aromatic bun. After "Roti Boys" came onto the scene, there's a lot of others baking the same type of coffee buns. In my opinion, "Roti Boys" was the best and the next best one would be "Roti Mum". Or is it "Papa Roti"? I cannot remember the exact name. The bun is sinfully delicious. Why sinful? Because it's loaded with butter. Eat first and think about excersising and eating healthier food later on. Go the whole hog and savour the delicious moments ........
Bread making is not my first love. You need patience with bread making. You need to wait for the kneaded dough to rise, shape it, rest the shaped dough and bake it before you can finally see and taste the end product. But it's rewarding. The process of kneading and shaping the dough is quite fun and de-stressing. It's fun and amazing to see the shaped bread rise into a puffy dough. Then it goes into the oven and you keep peeping into the oven to see how the bread is doing. While waiting, the kitchen is filled with the aroma of freshly baked buns. Bet I will be baking more breads now.

Here's a picture of the coffee buns after the shaping and rising and before popping into the oven. Looks beautiful. Don't you agree with me?

I baked this bread using the recipe from 65°C Tang Zhong (汤种) book by Yvonne C. All the bread in this book are baked using the 汤种 method. What is so special about this method? If I understand correctly, Tang Zhong method of making bread originates from Japan. You mix 1 part of bread flour to 5 parts of water and bring the temperature to 65°C. Allow it to cool to room temperature before adding it to the rest of the ingredients for making the bread. This method will yield soft and fluffy bread that will still stay soft for the next 2 days. 

Ingredients:

(A)

190g bread flour

55g sugar

2g salt

4g instant yeast

(B)

20g eggs

50g fresh milk

12g instant coffee granules

60g tangzhong

(C)

20g unsalted butter

(D)

Chopped almond flakes

Method:

1.     Preheat oven at 180°C.

2.     Add ingredients in (A) into a mixing bowl and whisk gently to distribute the ingredients evenly.

3.     Add ingredients (B) to above. Start on low speed to mix the dry and wet ingredients. Change to medium speed after the dry and wet ingredients are moistened evenly.

4.     Change to low speed and add in ingredients (C) after the above comes together into a smooth dough.

5.     Once all the butter has been incorporated into the dough, increase to medium speed and knead until the dough leaves the mixing bowl, becomes smooth and shiny. At this point, do a “window pane” test. Take a small portion of the dough and stretch it thin until you can see light shining through it. Once it has reached this stage, you can stop.

6.     Remove the dough from the mixing bowl and shape it into a round ball. Place it in a greased bowl big enough to hold it.

7.     Cover tightly with plastic wrap over the bowl. Let it proof at room temperature for 40 minutes or until doubled.

8.   To test if the dough has risen to the right state, sprinkle some flour onto your finger and dip your finger vertically into the centre of the dough. If the dent you have created stays, it is ready. If the dent bounces back, proofing is not complete yet.

9.     Remove the dough from the greased bowl and cut into 12 pieces of weight 30g each.

10. Shape them into round balls and proof for 10 min at room temperature. You need to cover them during the proofing stage. You can either use tea towel or plastic wrap.

11.  \Shape them into round balls and place them into a loaf pan or disposable aluminium loaf pans of size 19cm x 8cm x 4.5cm.

12. Proof at 38°C environment until the loaf pan is 90% full. Brush the top of the bread with egg wash and sprinkle the almond flakes on it.

13. Bake at about 150°C top heat and 180°C bottom heat for about 20 minutes.