Brown Sugar Cinnamon Bread Recipe

Tits much easier to do than it looks. Even without the added sugar and cinnamon, the recipe produces a lovely soft, sweet and milky bread. I adapted it from recipes for cinnamon rolls and Hungarian bread aranygaluska. When you remove it from its box, you may find that sugar has seeped in, making the sides sticky and the bread difficult to remove. Persevere!

Preparation time: 35 minutes, plus rest time | Cooking time: 35 min

MAKES

a loaf

INGREDIENTS

• Butter, for greasing
• 400 g plain white bread flour
• ½ teaspoon of salt
• 7g of dried active yeast
• 50g caster sugar
• 85 ml whole milk
• 30g butter
• 1 tsp of vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature,
• lightly beaten
• Icing sugar, for dusting (optional)

For filling

• 55g butter
• 175 g light brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon

METHOD

1. Butter a 15 x 25 x 6.5 cm cake tin and line the bottom with parchment paper or parchment paper. Butter that too.
2. Put two-thirds of the flour in a large bowl with the salt.
3. Sprinkle the yeast and ¼ teaspoon of sugar in a small bowl. Add four tablespoons of lukewarm water and leave in a warm place to lather. Add the rest of the sugar to the flour.
4. Heat the milk and butter together in a saucepan until the butter melts. Add 85ml of water to it and leave it until its temperature is around 40C. Add the vanilla extract.
5. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the foamed yeast. Then, stirring as you go, gradually add the milk and butter mixture. Now fold in the eggs, little by little, adding the rest of the flour as you go. The mixture will eventually get very sticky.
6. Using oiled hands – I just rub them with peanut oil – remove the mixture from the bowl and put it in a blender. Using the dough hook, knead the dough on low speed for seven minutes. If you don’t have a blender, do it by hand on a lightly oiled surface. It should finish soft and mellow.
7. Transfer to a lightly oiled bowl, cover with cling film and let stand for 1 to 1 ½ hours, or until doubled in size.
8. Preheat the oven to 180 ° C / 170 ° C hot air / thermostat 4.
9. Iron the dough and, using about two tablespoons of flour if the dough is still quite sticky, knead the dough a little. At this point, you can return the dough to the bowl, cover it and put it in the fridge overnight. You just need to take it out 30 minutes before you want to work on it the next day.
10. Roll out the dough using a floured rolling pin to form a rectangle of approximately 50 x 30 cm. Try to keep the piece of even thickness.
11. For the filling, melt the butter, let it cool a bit, then brush it all over the dough.
12. Sprinkle with brown sugar and cinnamon. Using a good, sharp knife, cut the dough lengthwise into six equal strips (so they are about 5 cm wide and 50 cm long). Carefully stack these strips on top of each other, then cut the stacked set into six rectangles. Fill the prepared pan with these, stacking them vertically so you can see the edges facing up, like the spines of books. Cover with lightly oiled cling film and let rise again for about 45 minutes.
13. Place the loaf pan on a baking sheet – this is in case the sugar seeps in – and bake for 35 minutes. It will be quite dark during this time and that is normal (you can cover the top with foil if it is too dark). If you take the bread out of the oven too early – when it is just golden – the inside will not bake properly.
14. Leave the bread in its mold for about 15 minutes. Pass a very sharp knife between the inside of the mold and the bread. Unmould the bread and leave the bread as is or sift a little icing sugar on top. It is best to eat it right away, when it is still hot.