Honey and Pumpkin Square Toast

Hi everyone, I'm back to Melbourne and blogging...
 
Taipei and Singapore are great but both places can be a little too warm and humid for us. We were perspiring like crazy and now happy to be back for this nice and cool autumn weather. Apart from our preference for Melbourne weather, departing our family and friends in Singapore is always depressing and I hope that baking and eating Asian-style food can always make us feel better.

This honey and pumpkin square toast is the perfect therapeutic Asian-style bread that I need to bake. Its autumn colour is beautiful and I can't stop admiring the nice orange-y glow of this bread...

This bread recipe is from the book, The Second book of Baking for Beginner by Carol. Although, I'm not very good in translating Chinese language, the nice photos of this recipe have been telling me that I have to bake this bread. To bake this bread, I think my nightmare now is to translate this Chinese recipe into English language. Glad that Google translate can help.

Although the bread is very rich in its colour, the pumpkin and honey flavours are lightly detectable and not very intense. I think that I might have over-baked the bread slightly as it became dry on the next day. Otherwise, we do like this bread especially for its nice and fluffy texture and unique taste but only on the day that it was freshly baked.

Honey and Pumpkin Square Toast

It all started with this...

Roasting the pumpkin...

My son is happy helping me with this...

Shaping my seed-infested bread

Baking the bread

Love this orange-y glow. Nice?

Nice and fluffy only on the day that it was baked

Here's recipe adapted mostly from the book, The Second book of Baking for Beginner by Carol, original in Chinese language, now briefly translated to English.

Make one 20cm x 10cm x 10cm loaf or square toast

150g pumpkin puree
280g bread flour
1 small egg (50g)
20g honey
1/8 tsp salt
30g butter, softened
30ml milk
1/2 tsp dried yeast
80g pumpkin seeds, pepita

To make pumpkin puree, start by either steam or roast pumpkin pieces until tender. I have chosen to roast mine for a light caramelized taste. To roast pumpkin, place medium chunks of pumpkins on a baking tray and baked them in a preheated oven at 170°C (or 150°C fan forced) for 30 mins or until soft and tender when tested with a skewer. Trim off dried edges and pumpkin skins and set aside to cool.

Mash pumpkin in a zip-lock bag or with a fork until smooth and creamy.

Instead of kneading by hand as illustrated in the book, I've placed all my ingredients except pepita into my bread-maker and use "dough" setting to knead for at 30 mins and prove the dough for 1 hr.

Roll out dough roughly into a 8 cm square flat dough. Roll it up and shape into log shape which is about 8 cm long and coat it thoroughly with pepita.

Place dough with seam side down into lightly oiled baking tin.

Prove for another 50-60 min or until the baking tin is 80% full.

Preheat oven to 210°C (or 190°C fan forced).

Place the cover of the tin when the baking tin is 90% full and bake for 40min.

Remove the bread immediately from baking tin when it was baked and allow it to cool completely on a wire rack.

Happy Baking
Please support me and like me at Facebook...