Pistachio Twist and Pinwheels (23rd Bread Braid)

The assignment for this, our 23rd bread braid, was to make pumpkin pie brioche and use it to create a pistachio twist and pinwheels.  I decided to only make half the recipe and make a smaller pistachio twist and only 6 pinwheels since it's just my husband and I and we just can't eat, nor do we need to eat, all that bread.  I wanted to try to improve the texture of the pumpkin brioche, so I tried leaving out the vital wheat gluten all together, but that didn't seem to help at all.  Instead of buying rose or orange blossom water for the filling,  I used 3-4 drops of fiori di sicilia, an oil I got from King Arthur Flour, that's good to use when making panettone. 

Here is my dough all ready to roll up:

I couldn't really spread the filling onto the dough so I just used my fingers to place it evenly over the dough and then smoothed it a little with the back of a tablespoon.  I wasn't sure I understood quite how to twist this thing after I rolled it up, but here's my interpretation of a twist tie twist:

 Unfortunately, my twist also erupted in the oven and didn't

look so pretty so I didn't take a picture of it.  I think I should've

now though, cause it would've been funny to look back on it.

The twist tasted OK, but the pumpkin brioche dough is not

my favorite.  It's kind of dry, cake-like and doesn't have much taste

at all unless you at least double the spices, which I didn't do this time,

because I didn't want to overpower the other flavors in the breads.

The pinwheels were fun to make.  I felt like it was a craft project, which I love to do, and so I was carefully trying to make them look pretty.  I could not figure out what preserves went with pumpkin, so I finally just ended up choosing cherry preserves, which I will use in a ham glaze around Christmas time.  Here's my pinwheel process:



I couldn't fit 2 tsp of cream cheese filling and preserves in the center of those pinwheels without ending up with quite a mess, so I used no more than a teaspoon of each in the centers.  The pinwheels tasted OK too, but the lemon flavor didn't go so well with cherry.  I think an almond flavoring would've been better.  My husband didn't really care for these as he is not a cream cheese fan so I had to eat 5 of them.

With the rest of the pumpkin from my 15 oz can, I was able to create a batch of pumpkin spice bagels and half the recipe for harvest pumpkin scones (with cinnamon chips).  Those bagels and scones went really well with some piping hot pumpkin spice coffee from Fresh Market.

I also made a loaf of 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread from Reinhart's book "Whole Grain Breads" last week.  I didn't think to take a picture of it, but it was awesome sandwich bread. 

Sticky Buns made with Pumpkin Pie Brioche (20th Bread Braid)

Wow! This week I had an awesome fun time working with the Pumpkin Pie Brioche to create 3 delectable desserts. 

I'm so glad we had cooler weather this week and last.  It was so much more enjoyable in the kitchen.  I chose to make the Pumpkin Pie Brioche dough for these recipes for two reasons.  One, it looked tastier and, two, I'd never roasted a pie pumpkin before and was eager to do it for the first time. 

Here is my pie pumpkin ready to go into the oven to be roasted:  I scooped the seeds out before I roasted it.

 After I roasted the pumpkin, I peeled off the skin, roughly chopped it, put it into the food processor for a spin, and then into a cheesecloth lined colander to drain for a few hours:



I got almost exactly my 1 3/4 cups pumpkin puree from a 3.15 lb pumpkin.  We got a good bit of seeds from this little pumpkin and we found them quite tasty after roasting for an hour.  We tossed the seeds with melted butter, salt, Worcestershire Sauce, sugar, garlic powder & a pinch of cayenne.

The dough went together quite easily.  I did make a few modifications as I went along.  Usually, brioche recipes call for egg yolks and not the whites.  This time I used just the yolk for only 1 of my 4 required eggs, but in the future I might try tweaking/playing with the recipe further.  My other modifications were:

+ 1 Tbsp sugar

+ 2 tsp Madagascar Vanilla (-some of the honey)

+ 1.5 times the amount of spices

- 1/4 cup of water

I made the dough on Friday and on Saturday my husband and I dove into the Sticky Bun project.  I was really nervous as I had never made any kind of sticky bun before.  My hubby was just hungry and said "Let's get started!!!"

Dean doesn't like sticky buns that are really sticky, nor excessively sweet so we went to kingarthurflour.com/recipes/ridiculously-easy-no-knead-sticky-buns-recipe and used their recipe for the topping that went into our 9" cake pan.  We omitted the sticky bun sugar (as we didn't have any) and only sparingly sprinkled the pan with pecan pieces.  (Dean's not a fan of nuts in his desserts.)  For the filling we combined 2/3 cups sugar, 1 Tbsp cinnamon, and maybe a 1/2 tsp of orange zest.  We were going to sprinkle some raisins over the dough before we rolled it up, but we forgot.  Before we sprinkled our cinnamon/sugar mixture onto the dough we tried spreading some honey on the dough.  It was kind of tough to spread, but we got some on.  Here is our dough ready to be rolled:

Here is our before and after (rising for an hour) picture for our assembled pan of buns:

I was up and down the stairs all during the "rising" hour checking on the progress of the buns.  I was so excited that they were puffing up, expanding out until they touched, and then pressing up against one another.  Dean wasn't quite so excited as I was, just still hungry.

Tucker was just bored,

but loving the smells:

Finally, the anticipated moment when it's time to eat and share with neighbors these Pumpkin Pie Brioche sticky buns that were just amazing!!!  (I wish I could install a smell-a-vision feature here)

Make sure you visit Big Black Dogs to take a peek at what others have done with their Honey Caramel Sticky Nut Buns.