Hello! I fell a little behind on posting, but not on baking/cooking…in fact, I made a few other recipes over the same weekend as 17-29: Envelope Rolls, so there’s a few in the queue behind this one. When you find a “rare” ingredient, you capitalize on it.
Also, “envelope” seemed easy in theory, but seemed to elude me at the beginning in practice. Jump past the cut to see my demo (once I worked it out) so you won’t have to struggle like I did.
So, here’s the reason I made a few recipes over one weekend–cake yeast. I determined via a web search that a nearby store had some, and since I sent my sous chef all the way to said store (multiple stores, in fact, prior to the aforementioned web search) just for said cake yeast, I figured I’d ask for more than one cube. They don’t last long, so I was incentivized to knock a few of these cake yeast recipes out in one go.
Ingredients. I’ve never actually used real cake yeast, so this will be a new experience for me.
Unwrapped the two cubes and tossed them in my BIG bowl. With multiple recipes going (including one that had to rise overnight), I had to be strategic with my bowl usage.
Adding in the cold milk.
Creaming the butter and sugar.
Mixing in the egg was not going well with the mixer itself, so I switched to just using a spatula.
Adding the “mixtures” together.
I started working the flour in with a whisk and then finished it up with my hands.
Wrapped in plastic and then left on the counter for 15-ish minutes.
No major changes after 15 minutes, but time to knead.
Can you tell the difference between the before and after (other than the missing flour and a slightly smoother ball)?
Now it gets banished out to the garage for an hour or so to rise.
While the dough rises, I made the filling (as advised).
It’s essentially frosting, but if you accidentally used granulated sugar instead of powdered sugar.
OK, now there’s clearly a difference after an hour in my warm garage.
Time to split some dough…choppity chop chop.
I’m busting out every fancy pastry tool I’ve got for this one…why not use the wheel while I’m at it?
Do you think it’ll make a difference once they bake? Guess we’ll find out together.
I did half with the wheel and half without to see if there’s a difference once I bake them. SCIENCE!
To make it easier on myself, I put the filling into a small pastry bag (more tools!) and used that to fill each roll.
SO much easier than trying to do it with a spoon. If you don’t have pastry bags (because most people don’t), a regular sandwich bag with the corner cut off works just as well.
So I’ll be honest–I had a HARD time (initially) figuring out how to fold these rolls the right way. I even mostly just crammed them all into the cups and was going to hope for the best, but decided to try again at the last moment and I’m glad I did.
To help YOU, I took pictures of each step to make it clearer on how to do this. Start with your square as a diamond, filling in the middle, as shown above.
Next, fold the bottom corner up until the tip is in the middle.
Then, fold one of the sides (right or left) over the bottom fold, tip in the middle again.
Repeat with the other side. See how it looks like an open envelope?
Now, “close” the envelope by folding the top corner down to the middle to finish it.
Place each envelope in a cupcake liner within a tin. You could probably also do it just in the tin if you grease the heck out of it.
Whipping up some egg wash.
Quick brush of the egg wash on each roll.
And in the oven they go.
After baking. The top “half-tin” got some good color, but…
…the rest didn’t look as good. Luckily, that’s an easy fix–just stick them back in for a few more minutes.
That’s better. I even ate one–for quality assurance purposes. Quality assured.
Final picture, in my best attempt to replicate their cover picture. These are very good and freeze/unfreeze well. If you find any cake yeast around, they’re worth a go.
Grade: A
