Snow Day. Will Stop Worrying about Politics for Five Minutes.

And in that Five minutes, I think I'll make bread. Make Brioche dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Spend next five days cooking and eating everything you ever dreamed of with Brioche dough. I actually made a batch of the basic dough two days ago, pulled it chilled from the refrigerator and made the sticky buns version, let it rise, stuck it back in the refrigerator overnight and baked it in the morning for breakfast without having to get up any earlier than it took to preheat the oven. This is simply a fabulous recipe. The picture below is from the website I linked to, but my version looked just as yummy:

Brioche dough (makes about 4 loaves)

1 1/2 cups lukewarm water

1 1/2 tablespoons granulated yeast (2 packets)

1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt

8 large eggs, lightly beaten

1/2 cup honey (this is my all time favorite!)

1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, melted

7 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

Mix the yeast, salt, eggs honey and melted butter with the water in a 5-quart bowl, or lidded (not airtight) food container.

Mix in the flour, using a spoon until all of the flour is incorporated.

Cover (not airtight), and allow to sit at room temperature for about two hours.

The dough can be used as soon as it is chilled. This dough is way too sticky to use after the initial rise, but once it is chilled it is very easy to handle. It can be used to create the Tatin or any of these brioche recipes: caramel sticky buns, grilled fruit tart, Fresh Fruit Muffins, Brioche à tête, apricot pastries and fabulous doughnuts! The dough can be stored in the refrigerator for up to 5 days. After that you can freeze the dough.

If you don't need your slow cooker and you have a really big one its perfect for the size of this dough. And it has the required lid but is not airtight. The dough is not very sweet so if I knew for sure that all I was going to make were danishes and cinnamon buns from a given batch I'd add a bit of sugar and cardamom or nutmeg, plus lemon zest. I plan to also experiment with doing the entire bun thing and then freezing it and defrosting it the night before I need it. I also used some amazing caramel sauce that I had on hand instead of making my own caramel for the top of the sticky buns.