Bake 52 Week 24: Cinnamon Swirl Bread

This week we made bread, yummy cinnamon bread. I usually bake on Sunday mornings before church. I have 1:00 PM church and get up at 5:00 AM so that is usually plenty of time. But I have really, really bad luck with getting bread products to rise. When I read the recipe I saw that you could make the dough the night before and let it "rise" in the refrigerator over night. I was all over that!

The dough was pretty quick to make but I forgot to put in the 1/4 c. of the cinnamon/sugar mixture until I had mixed up the dough. The dough was still sticky so I had to add more flour so I decided to add the cinnamon/sugar mixture at the same time.



It seemed to work. The next morning the dough was perfectly raised and after 30 minutes of sitting at room temperature, ready to go.

I had issues getting my dough to the right size rectangle. After multiple measurings I finally got it long enough but then it was too wide. Rather than start over I just folded in the sides.



I knew it was likely to give me uneven bread but I wasn't willing to start over. After sprinkling the dough with the rest of the cinnamon/sugar I was ready to roll it up.



You can see from the picture below that the ends were fatter than the middle.


But after letting it rise for 45 minutes or so it had evened out pretty well.



I hate undercooked bread. The taste of dough makes me sick so I was worried about the middle of the bread not being fully cooked. So I got on line and found a recipe that told me how hot the inside should be to be fully cooked (190 - 200 F). When the timer went off after 40 minutes I checked the temperature. It was around 160ish. So I threw it back in for 10 minutes. After ten minutes it was perfectly done.



The bread was very good. The cinnamon/sugar mix on the top pretty much flaked off when I cut it but the inside swirl was pretty tasty. There was one section where the swirl was thicker than the rest and it was the best part. Since I have the biggest sweet tooth I thought the whole swirl should be that thick. If I made it again I'd probably double the amount of sugar/cinnamon mix.



I cut up most of the loaf and took it to work and left it in the breakroom. When I came back at 9:00 to get more water the bread was gone. That's the fastest any of my baked goods have disappeared. The bit I left at home was gone when I got home too. Jonathan really enjoyed the bread. :)

Check out Bekah's blog for the full recipe.