Danish braided pastry

One of the perks of working in the US is the lovely pastries served for breakfast when you attend morning conferences.  Unhealthy but tasty.  I have always shied away from attempting such things at home after a disastrous pate-choux experience - they were lovely in the oven, all puffed up and golden, but flatened down to a spatula as they cooled!  All that butter and eggs just wasted!

Then I happened upon the Artisan bread in five minutes a day and they had a lovely recipe for a Brioche dough and a lot less butter and egg intensive than the memory of my previous pastry attempt.  Their Danish fruit pastry looked a lot less finicky than attempting the eclair and bought back happy memories of my days in the US.  I modified it a little and got started.

 Brioche Dough

1/2 cup lukewarm water
2 tsp honey
1 tbspoon fresh yeast

100g butter melted
3 eggs lightly beaten
A pinch of salt

2.5 cups maida (APF)

1/2 litre milk made into paneer
4 tbspoon good quality (Blackberry) jam

Dissolve honey and yeast in the water.  Wait for 5 minutes, Mix will get very foamy.

Now mix in the butter, eggs

Stir in the flour with a spoon

Let sit covered lightly for about 2 hours

Refrigerate overnight.

Next morning roll half the dough into a rectangle about 1/8" thick

Mark off middle third off th dough

Smear the paneer and jam along the length of the dough in the middle portion.

Cut off 1/2" intervals in the tow end thirds, criss cross the cut edges over the centre.

Brush with milk, sprinkle sugar

Let rest 20 minutes

Place on a buttered tray and bake at 215 deg C for 20 - 30 min until pastry is golden brown.

I did not have any parchment paper handy, so I proceeded to roll my pastry directly on a well floured counter with predictable results.

The dough stuck a bit in a few places.  I was not able to pick the entire pastry and put it on the baking tree.

I ended up making 5 individual, slightly misshapen pastry instead of 1 big one.

Tasted great though.

I had half the dough still sitting in the fridge and I want to make a new batch of yeasted dough for pizza tomorrow.  So I decided to make a muffin bun.
 I threw in a table spoon of sugar into the remaining dough, 1 tbspoon of raisins and 1/2 tsp of cardamom powder.  I added enough APF to knead the dough so that it didnt stick to my hands much.
I divided the dough into three, rolled each part into a ball, divided the ball into 2, rolled and placed the ball in a 6-muffin tin,  I finally had a 6 muffin-bun to bake.  I brushed the top of each muffin-bun with a little milk and sprinkled granulated sugar.

I rested the dough for about 25 minutes then put it into oven preheated to 215 deg C for about 12 minutes.  Nice

The crumb was lovely.  It just lacked a little sweetness.

I am submitting this to Tangy Mind's An International Celebration  U.S.A round up.  This series was launched by Jagruthi and september's Host is Archana.