Hubby Bakes! - Le pain d'épices de reim

Le pain d'épices de reim  in english "spice bread",according to wikipedia "it is sometimes loosely translated as ginger bread. Again,the husband came home with baking ingredients,he said he'll bake a french bread which is his favorite childhood food when they used to live in the french speaking part of switzerland,in Moudon.




It looks easy to bake,it took him maybe 15min. or less to do all the work then 1hr in the oven.On the photo above it's wrapped to keep the moist of the bread.




The 4-spice






Ingredients


450g Chestnut honey, dark, liquid

25 cl of milk, lukewarm

100g butter, melted

150 White flour

300g full corn flour

1 Tbs. Bicarbonated baking powder

30g brown sugar

1 Egg

1 pinch of salt

2 Tbs.olive oil

1/2 Teaspoon cinnamon

Fresh Muscat (freshly grated)

Ginger Powder

Cloves Powder

Anise, ground

Butter for the form.

Preparation:


Mix all the ingredients into a dough, pour into a greased Loaf pan 170 ° C bake for about 45 minutes an wrap overnight to keep the moist. So easy right?

How to bake Swiss Butter Zopf

Zopf  is a swiss-german for "knot"

Swiss butter Zopf is a popular sunday bread in switzerland ,aside from cheese and chocolates swiss poeple love to eat bread for brunch. This bread is a very unique because of it's appearance like a knotted hair braid.

I will show here a very easy recipe of Butter Zopf.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees celsius.

Ingredients:

1 kg. white flour

1 tsp. salt

20 gr.yeast

1 tsp.sugar

125 gr.butter (let it sit on a room temp. To make it soft)

7dl  milk

1 egg yolk


Preparation:

*Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. ( better sift first the flour to avoid some hard parts) then put the wet ingredients. ( egg,yeast,milk & butter)

*Knead to a soft dough ,we do it usually by hand so i can't give exactly how many minutes you have to roll it but depends how good you knead the dough until it's good to set aside  (cover the bowl with a cloth) and let it rise until it doubled the size.

*cut the dough to two parts and weave it like a knot and create a long roll size each.

-put the two long dough on cross position

-hold the two ends of the first dough and cross it over then take the two ends of the second dough and same procedure cross it ove

-just repeat until you reach the end of each dough and just simply fold the ends to have a nice zopf form.

Put the finished zopf dough in a tray with backing paper and cover again for about 30mins. After that brush the egg yolks on it to have that brownish shiny look.

Bake for about 45mins. @ 200 degrees celsius.

Just a tip on how to know if your Zopf is perfectly baked,try to knocked on each side of the Zopf and if you hear that string sound like knocking on your door and it's has a hard appearance ,it's ready to eat!

You can eat it with butter and marmalade or with cold cuts. (Ham,pepperoni etc.)