OK…so it’s the day after Easter and you either have a pile of Easter candy left over after the weekend or you are planning to head to the store with your money in hand to take advantage of the clearance sales on all the goodies that will now be 50% off. I don’t know about you, but every Easter I always go a little overboard on those crazy good Cadbury Easter eggs. My absolute favorites are the caramel filled ones, but they also have a dark chocolate truffle filled egg and another one with a mint filling…boy, am I in trouble.
The stores usually start selling Easter candy about 3 weeks before the actual holiday and I have to be very careful when I go shopping. I tend to eye the pecan nougat eggs while strolling the isles, and always seem to find myself right back in the candy isle before I get ready to check out. I don’t know how that happens, but those nougat eggs and Cadbury filled eggs just do me in each and every time.
I grew up enjoying Cadbury chocolate in Australia, and my favorite then was a milk chocolate bar filled with toasted coconut. Even though the chocolate has changed over the years, it’s still one of the better ones out there for the price.
While doing my research on Easter breads, I came across a really unique recipe on a great site called Simple Recipes.
She shared an interesting technique that apparently is widely used in the Asian community, where a cooked roux is added to the dough to create a lovely moisture to baked breads. I was a little skeptical, so I checked a few baking chat rooms that were discussing the topic. I had never heard of this before but the comments that I read were all favorable… so I decided that I was going to try this. In her recipe using the roux, she made a marbled chocolate dough which I wanted to reproduce as a base to which I could add in some leftover candy.
You can add any candy that you like, but if you don’t have extra candy around, don’t feel that you need to use it in the bread–it is super delicious on its own, with or without the marbling. I would encourage you to try this unique technique and see how you feel about your results.
As for me, I found that the roux did give an extra tenderness to the bread that I can only achieve when I use fresh yeast…and believe me, there is a difference between dry and fresh yeast. This technique is something I will be experimenting with a little more using my existing recipes…but for now, I’m going to cut myself a huge hunk of this candy bread and call it a day…
Marbled Easter Candy Bread
Water Roux:
1/3 cup flour (she said to use bread flour but I used all purpose with great success)
1 cup water
Add both into a small stock pot and whisk until you see lumps beginning to form. Continue whisking to prevent larger lumps from forming and remove when it has started to thicken but not as thick as a paste. Allow it to cool completely before using in the dough. It should look like this…
Main Dough:
2 ½ cups flour (she said to use bread flour but I used all purpose with great success)
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt (increased from ½ teaspoon)
¼ cup milk, warm
1 ½ teaspoons dry yeast
1 ½ tablespoons cocoa powder
2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons butter, room temperature
Egg wash (egg plus water)
Apply jelly **optional to use as glaze for bread after baking
Add all of the ingredients except the water, cocoa and butter into the bowl of your stand mixer, and using a paddle begin mixing everything together until it forms a soft dough and begins to pull away from the sides of the bowl, about 5 minutes.
Once the dough has formed, add in the soft butter and incorporate well into the dough until no butter is visible.
Remove the dough and cut off 1/3 of the dough ball and place this smaller piece back into the bowl. Add the cocoa powder and water and mix the dough again until it is uniformly chocolate in color. Add each dough ball to a small, oiled bowl and allow it to rise until doubled. When the dough has proofed, remove the plain layer and with your hands, gently push it out into a large rectangle shape.
If you need to do this with a rolling pin you can, but the dough is very soft and easy to stretch. Do the same for the chocolate layer and place it over half of the plain dough. If you are going to add candy like I did, you can follow my procedures, but of you are simply going to marble the dough, then you can click on the link above and see exactly how she did it to get a lovely marbling throughout.
If you are going to fold in some candy, decide on what you are going to use and cut it up into small pieces. I used Cadbury caramel eggs and cut them into small pieces…
I then put the candy pieces all over the chocolate layer, and then folded the plain layer on top of this.
Since I was only going to make 2 small loaves, I cut it into 6 strands, 3 for each loaf that I could braid. As I braided each strand over the other, I twisted it slightly so that the gooey candy pieces plus the marbling would peek through the bread.
Make sure to grease your loaf pans well and then place each braided loaf into each pan.
Let them rise again until doubled, brush on some egg wash and then bake in a 350°F oven until golden brown, about 30-40 minutes.
Remove the loaves once they have baked and brush on some apple jelly that has been heated in the microwave. The apple jelly gives it a lovely shiny glaze, but you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. Allow the breads to cool completely before slicing.
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