HBinFive: Red Beet Rolls and Chocolate Espresso WW Bread

This time for HBinFive, we were assigned two different dough recipes: Red Beet Buns and Chocolate Espresso White Wheat Bread. There were several ingredients that I didn't have on hand. For example, the main ingredients of beets and chocolate! And I also ordered some spelt flour from Amazon because one of the recipes called for spelt flour and being as I can't even get white wheat flour in town, there's no way I could get spelt flour within any sort of reasonable distance from town. I made them both the same evening, but didn't use the dough until the next day. I hadn't read the recipes through enough ahead of time as usual. The chocolate bread said not to use before refrigerating at least two hours. So I made up my chocolate bread the following morning. The beet dough recommended letting it age at least twenty four hours for the best taste. So I had it in the fridge several days before I managed to get back to it. These produced two very colorfully striking doughs. I was curious to know how the breads would turn out.

I have to be honest, the chocolate espresso bread had caught my eye from the first time I opened the book. I planned to make it and bought some black cocoa powder to try with it. Then when I saw how soon it was on the baking schedule, I just waited until it was time to post it. I didn't get around to making the tangerine bar variation with this dough, but made "cupcakes" with it. I just formed the dough into small balls and put it into my muffin pan. I made twelve large muffins and sixteen mini-muffins. I loved them--especially the almost bite-sized mini's. They were had a delicious crunchy outside texture and the inside was just a bit of sweetness and plenty of chocolatey-ness. Paul was disappointed with this bread, though, because I think he was expecting something more cake-like. So it wasn't sweet enough for his expectations. Everyone else seemed to like it--especially Holly and Finn. The only thing I did different was cut the honey back just a smidge when I halved the recipe. The whole recipe called for 3/4 cup of honey, and I only added 1/4 cup to the halved recipe.

And we discovered if you give Holly a muffin, she's going to call it a moose. And she'll want another and another and another and finally she'll cry when you tell her there aren't any more. Have you seen this cute story? If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Joffe Numeroff is a darling little kids story book. It's actually part of a series of books with this sort of theme. The story follows from one point to the next, eventually winding around right back to the starting point. Apparently Holly isn't quite sure on the difference between mooses and muffins, though, as she asked for a moose every time she wanted another muffin.

The dough for the red beet rolls was met with initial skepticism. Nobody aside from myself seemed to think much of the color of the dough. And telling them it was from beets didn't do anything to allay their qualms. I opted only to make a half recipe of this because they barely had beets at the store in town. And what they did were little and puny and expensive. And I was a little bit concerned that nobody would eat it anyhow.

I unfortunately got sidetracked after I shaped the dough into portions and it had much more time than the forty minutes the recipe called for. I think it just gave them more time to spread way out. They came out looking like some kind of over-sized cookies. They spread way out from the picture you see here. And then they were the victims of neglect again because I happened to be out of the room when the oven timer went off and nobody informed me. I don't think they were in very much more than a couple minutes over the recipe time. For the most part, the bottoms didn't get too browned. They had a lovely aroma as they cooked like a deli or something from the onions in the dough, I think. I split a roll in half to share with Paul because I had a feeling he would have refused a whole one. He took a bite of it and said it was different. After another bite, he handed me the rest of the roll and said he didn't think he'd finish it. Ivy wasn't interested in trying one, but Holly carried one around and snacked on it. The onion flavor was the flavor that carried through the rolls and they weren't bad, but I'm not sure what to do with the rest of the dough if nobody really wants to eat it. I'm sure the chickens wouldn't turn their noses up at fresh bread!

Check out what others did with these doughs by visiting the HBin5 Bread Braid hosted at Big Black Dog.

I like the opportunity HBinFive gives me to try out recipes that I might not get to on my own. I doubt I'll be using the beet roll dough again, but we did revisit the Soft Wheat Sandwich Bread again from the last time. Paul asked specifically for me to make hamburger rolls from it again, and we had Boca burgers on them one night and turkey burgers another night. I hadn't been sure if we'd use that recipe again, but apparently it made an impression on Paul. As for the espresso bread, I can see that one again in my future, just not too often as the temptation to eat the entire batch myself was a bit strong.

I've found a recipe calculator that I have been using a lot to figure out the nutritional values of foods and be able to work out how they fit into the Weight Watchers program. I thought I'd post the link for it in case anybody else would be interested. It can be found here. I like how you can input your own serving size for the recipes and then it gives you the nutritional information for one serving size. From my calculations, the big chocolate rolls were four points each and the minis were just a point each. The beet buns were about two points each for the size I made them.