Impressive Vegan Pastries from One Dough

1. Introduction: Pastries are the number one biggest fear of beginner bakers and it's totally understandable. When you start talking about yeast and gluten structure and protein content, it's a lot to understand and it can be pretty intimidating, which is why I created this class because I want to help you feel more confident in the kitchen making yeast pastries. We're not going to do any of the laminating or craziness that you see in all those amazing videos on Instagram, we're going to take one really simple dough, master it, make three beautiful pastries out of it and you'll get to see how incredibly simple it is, just to get started. I'll walk you through an enriched dough step-by-step from how to prepare your yeast properly, how the proof it, how to mix it, and what to really look for, what are those little characteristics that you need to know after you knead the dough to make sure that it's correct and that's the biggest downfall I think that a lot of recipes, other classes and tutorials leave out. Once you mix the dough, what exactly does it need to look like? What does it need to feel like? What exactly does it need to be so that it can be successful for all levels of skill? If you want to start learning these techniques and making them in your own kitchen and really being able to adapt them to other fillings, frostings, all kinds of fun things, then please do stick around and I'll see you in the next lesson. 2. Agave Wash : An agave wash is really easy to make and critical for our pastries. Now, in traditional pastries, you would use an egg wash to get a really nice shine and a deep brown color on your pastries. That's really what makes them look so enticing. But we don't have eggs. What we can use is the caramelization process of sugar, so agave syrup is what I recommend. That really works the best. If you don't have agave syrup, you can also use maple syrup. Maple syrup, if you are using a dark maple syrup or something like that, it's going to give you more color, and also it's going to have a really intense flavor. If you can find a really light maple syrup with a very mild flavor, that would be best. Really, all we have to do is mix one part of the sugar syrup, the agave syrup, to one part of plant milk. Mix it well, and it's really simple. You can brush it right on top of your pastries, and it's going to give you that really beautiful golden brown color. I'm just going to show you really quickly how I put mine together, and then you can use it for all of your pastries in the course. I have some almond milk, you can use whatever plant milk that you have, and my organic agave syrup. I'll just have a couple of tablespoons of plant milk right here in a small bowl. I'm just going to add in an equal part of my agave syrup. Super-easy. Got a nice little pastry brush. I prefer these rubber pastry brushes for these delicate pastries just because it's more flexible, and it's not going to move our dough around a whole lot. But we can just go ahead and mix it up very quickly with our pastry brush. You want to make sure that it is mixed well. Perfect. That is our vegan pastry wash. 3. Simple Syrup: Now when our pastries come out of the oven, we want them to have a really nice professional looking finish. What we're going to do, is make a simple syrup. This is going to help lock moisture into our pastry, give them a longer shelf life, it's going to give them a really pretty shine, and it's just going to sweeten up that finished dough slightly and make it more of a sweet, baked, good. Simple syrup is incredibly easy, all we're going to do is take one part water, one part sugar, bring it up to a boil and let it go for 10 minutes. Then you can remove it from the heat, let it cool down, get it into your refrigerator, and it will be ready to go to finish off your pastries. You can make it the night before, you can make a days ahead of time. Because of the sugar content, you can store it for up to a month in the refrigerator. 4. Enriched Dough : In this lesson, we're going to talk about a basic enriched dough. This is the one dough that if you learn it and master it, you can make a lot of different pastries out of it. We're going to be making quite a few in this course out of this basic dough. What does enriched mean? There's a basic dough that all the other doughs are built off of. You have flour, water, and yeast, that's the simplest form of a dough. An enriched dough begins to add things like milk, eggs, butter. We start to add in fat to the dough, and then it becomes enriched. With this dough, we're going to be adding vegan butter and plant-based milk. It's going to give our dough more richness, more airiness, and it's just a nicer, sweet dough overall. This is my plant-based milk, and water, and the vegan butter. I recommend using a stick-type vegan butter for this, and you can use any plant-based milk that you like, preferably one that doesn't have a very strong flavor, so soy milk, almond milk, cashew milk. Coconut milk is going to give you flavor, oat milk is going to give you flavor, rice milk is also a good substitute. But we want to just get this onto low heat and bring it up to a warm room temperature. We do not want to simmer it, we definitely do not want to boil it. Yeast will start to die over 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Basically, if you can stick your finger in it and it's warm to the touch but not hot, you can go ahead and pull it off the heat, even if your butter isn't melted the hallway, that's okay, it will continue to break down in the dough. We just do not want to overheat this and add it to our yeast. If you have a thermometer, go ahead and use that. This warmed up really quickly. I can see here that it is at 94, 95. Some spots were a little over 100. I'm just going to give this a little swirl. My vegan butter hasn't even melted completely yet, that's totally fine, it will break down as I said. We just don't want to heat this up too much. Then in is going to go our yeast. I'm using an active dry yeast. If you're using a different type of yeast, you can refer to the yeast guide included with the course to let you know what substitutions and amounts you can be using in your dough. I'm just going to give this a swirl just to hydrate all that yeast, and this warm temperature is really going to activate it and make it come to life so that it is going to work wonderfully in our dough. We're just going to let this sit for 5-10 minutes, and then we can go ahead and get started on the rest of the dough. You'll know your yeast is ready when it starts to look very foamy, then you can go ahead and get started with the rest of your dough. If some of the east isn't activated, that's okay. Don't worry about it. You can still continue on. In this lesson, I'll be showing you how to mix it by hand in case you don't have a mixer with the dough hook. What you want to do is get your flour out onto a really clean work surface. Make sure you do have a clean work surface, your kitchen counter, or whatever you're using because anything that is on your counter will end up in your dough. We don't want that. But what we want to do is get our flour down and then we're going to take our salt and sugar. The salt and sugar, what you want to be aware of is where you're putting it in the flour. I like to sprinkle it just over the top like that. You could see, I have some pink sea salt in here and the sugar. I'm just going to basically mix it into the flour and then make my well. The reason that we're doing this is because we don't want the yeast to come into direct contact with very much of that salt. The salt slows down yeast growth, whereas the sugar feeds the yeast and speeds up the growth. We do want salt in our dough because it gives us flavor, and especially since these are going to be sweet pastries, we definitely want to balance out with a little bit of salt, but we just don't want to keep that salt in direct contact with our liquid ingredients. We're just going to make a well and then you can get your wet ingredients in there. You do want to be very careful that you made it deep enough, otherwise, this will run out everywhere, we don't want that. You can just start by getting your flour worked in there. If you get a little leak, just move it over. We're going to pull from the inside, mix using our fingertips until we get a paste. Once you get a paste, you can basically mix in the rest of your dry ingredients. It just helps to prevent the liquid from running out everywhere. You're going to want to have a bench scraper at bare minimum, this is really going to help keep the dough contained. Let's clean that off. It's good to see how to mix this by hand as well because when we bring this dough together, you're going to see that it is a very wet dough and that's totally fine. What we're going to do is we're going to work it, we're going to knead it. As we're doing that, we are building up our gluten structure so that our yeast can release gases, give us a nice fluffy end product. This is where you really want to have that bench scraper because you can see, it's starting to build up this really just thick paste and that's hard to get up once it gets down unless you have something to scrape it up. We'll get that into our dough. As you can see this is very, very sticky at this point and very, very shaggy. You see all these little indents and it looks like different types or different stages of the dough, that's what shaggy means. I'm just pulling over and pushing until it basically comes together. Then I'm going to take the palm of my hand, and we're just stretching those gluten strands out so they can fall in line and create a nice dough. This process takes a while until it starts to come together, but we want to work this just until it gets to the pickup stage. Basically, when your dough starts pulling away from the counter, it's not sticking as much. We're not going to take this to a full window pane. We're going to keep the dough a little bit softer, a little bit more tender. When you go for a windowpane, that's when you want a really firm, sturdy dough for something like a croissant, something that you're going to laminate, something that you're going to really work with a lot. We're doing very basic shapes with this dough, and we want something nice and soft as a result. Stop and get your dough off the counter every once in a while. Keep going. You'll start to notice that your dough is becoming more of a mass in and of itself, and you'll start to see it pulling away from the counter. It should be coming off of your hands a little bit easier. You just want to get it all off of your work surface. This is what we're looking for. We're looking for the dough to be nice and soft, it comes off. It's a little bit sticky still, we're definitely not at windowpane. The dough does stretch, but it still breaks. However, we've got a pretty decent amount of stretch out of it, so we've definitely developed a lot of that gluten. You can see, it unsticks itself. It's a little bit tacky on your fingers. You're starting to have dough on your fingers a little bit, but this is exactly what we're looking for. We just want to basically pull our edges into the center, just like this. You need to use that, your bench scraper or even pulling it in this fashion, works as well. We just want to get a nice tight dough ball. See how nice and smooth. That's a good developed dough. I have a well-oiled bowl. I just used some refined coconut oil, it's the coconut oil without the flavor. You can use canola, any type of mild flavored oil that you have. It's going to go right into our bowl. You can cover it up with a towel, let it proof at room temperature for 1-2 hours until it is double in size, and then it is ready to use. We can take a look at some different ways to use it in future lessons. 5. Forming the Cinnamon Rolls : Cinnamon rolls are a classic pastry. You see them in bakeshops and the kitchens all over the world. For a good reason, I mean butter, cinnamon, yeast, it's the perfect combination. In this course, we're going to be making them with a vegan cream cheese glaze, super delicious. But in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to make the filling for our cinnamon rolls and how to take our proofed enriched dough and basically forward into a rectangle, roll it up and get them ready to proof, and then bake. Let's get started. We want to pull our dough out of the refrigerator. It should be nice and chilled. This is really just going to help us form these rolls and help them hold their shape and be a little bit easier to work with. Now you do want to flour your work surface very liberally with all-purpose flour. You definitely want to make sure your dough doesn't stick. Because this is such a hydrated dough, we don't have to worry about adding too much flour to it, it will still be very nice and moist, and soft in the final product. Go ahead and get some flour down on your work surface, a really clean work surface. Get your dough down, put some flour on top of your dough, and then shape it into a basic rectangle just to make it a little bit easier to roll out, then you can go ahead and roll it out into a large rectangle. We're not measuring this rectangle, we're going to be measuring the final roll and cutting that way. But basically, you just want to roll it out into an even rectangle and stretch it out as needed. Once you have it rolled out, you can go ahead and just put together your filling. Now, you do want to make sure that your butter is room temperature, it's nice and soft, it's going to be easier to mix it. You can just go ahead and mix your sugar and your cinnamon right into it and make a paste. By the time you're done and making that and mixing it, your dough should be rested enough so that we can spread the paste on top. Just go ahead and use a spatula to spread it out evenly. You want to make sure that you get it all the way to the edges of the rectangle, on the sides, in the edge furthest away from you, but do leave about a quarter to a half an inch gap on the side closest to you. That is where we're going to attach our dough to keep our rolls nice and tight. Once you have that pastedown, you want to go ahead and start rolling up. Now, I always start on the side furthest away from me and I just curl that first edge over. Then I stick my fingers under the edge of the dough and my thumb on top and stretch it just gently as I'm rolling, this is going to give you a nice tight roll. You don't want to stretch it so much that you are pulling the dough and basically the filling is going to be a lot thinner. You just want to give it a nice little tug so that it stays nice and tight. We can continue to do that the whole way up until you get to that empty strip of dough and then you want to press down firmly to attach it to the rest of the roll and then roll the whole roll on to that seam and rock it a little bit to get it nice and sealed. Once you have that part done, then you can go ahead and get out a ruler, your roll, you want to shape it until it is 18 inches long. Each one of our cinnamon rolls is going to be one-and-a-half inches. I'm just very gently shaping the roll and elongating it to get it to that 18 inches. Then you can go ahead and start marking every one the whole way down the roll. Now you do want to use a very sharp serrated blade to cut your cinnamon rolls. If you use a chef's knife or something with a blunt edge, it's just going to smash them down and you'd lose that really beautiful rolled detail. I go with very light pressure, I'm barely putting any weight on the knife. I'm letting them knife do the majority of the work, I'm just moving it back and forth through the dough slowly and carefully, and that should give you really, really nice cuts. Once you have those cut, you can go ahead and put them on a lined cookie sheet. Now if you want to put these all together in a pan, then you can totally do that. You can use an eight-by-eight baking dish and get them in there nice and snug, they'll puff up and you'll have a kind of all-in-one pull-apart style cinnamon roll. I like to do mine individually like this because that way you get more glaze on each roll. You have the opportunity to coat the entire roll instead of just the top of it. So that is a bonus. But if you're going to do it this way, go ahead and spread them evenly out onto your cookie sheet and then just set them aside to proof for 1-2 hours until they are doubled in size. This is also a good time to go ahead and prepare your cream cheese glaze if you haven't already. 6. Cream Cheese Glaze : Cinnamon rolls are delicious, but they wouldn't be cinnamon rolls if they didn't have some glaze on top. That is really the key characteristic that brings the whole pastry together because the dough, well, it has great yeast flavor. It doesn't have a lot of sugar in it, and our filling has that high sugar content. However, it's just a lot of dough to a little bit of filling, so we want to add more sweetness and more flavor. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to make a very easy vegan cream cheese glaze. It's going to be really thick. It's going to coat the rolls, but it's still going to give you a really nice hefty glaze on your cinnamon rolls. Let's get to it. The key to making the cream cheese glaze is that you want to make sure that your vegan cream cheese is room temperature. Pull it out of the refrigerator and give a plenty of time about 1-2 hours to come up to room temp, and then you can go ahead and finish off your glaze. I'm using a vanilla bean paste for my glaze. If you don't have vanilla bean paste, you can go ahead and use a vanilla extract. You want to use a couple of teaspoons of that. I just mixed it in with the cream cheese first to loosen it up a little bit, but as you add in the sugar you will notice that it becomes more loose. Gradually start adding in the sugar. Now I'm mixing this by hand, which is totally fine. I will tell you that if you mix it by hand, it takes a little bit more effort to get it smooth and get all of the lumps out and it also helps if you use a whisk. I did get my sugar in there and switched over to a whisk so that I could get this really nice and smooth, and get any bits of that cream cheese broken down. If you want to you can use a stand mixer with paddle attachments, that will definitely speed up the process. But you can go ahead and put this glaze together ahead of time and keep it in the refrigerator in an airtight container, or you can put it together while your cinnamon rolls are in the oven. Regardless, you want to have it done and ready to go before the cinnamon rolls come out of the oven, so you can put it on while they are still hot. One last note, this glaze is pretty thick. If you want a thinner glaze that's going to just very thinly coat your cinnamon rolls, you can go ahead and add about a tablespoon of a plant milk. But I like the thick icing on mine, so I'll just leave mine like this. 7. Baking the Cinnamon Rolls : You've put in all of the work to get your rolls made and proofed, they should be nice and doubled in size. At this point, we're going to get them in to the oven. Now, there's nothing fancy with these cinnamon rolls as far as preparing them for the oven, they're just going to go right in as soon as they're proofed. Now because these rolls are smaller, they're going to bake for a lot less time, which means when they come out of the oven, they're going to be more pale. If you like darker pastries, you can go ahead and add your agave wash to the outside of them before you bake it. The reason that I don't is because we're going to glaze them in the end, so it's going to cover up basically any browning that would occur regardless. What you don't want to do is continue to bake them to try to brown them, because then they are going to dry out. The other option you do have is to make the cinnamon rolls larger or in a pan together, so that they grow into one large pull-apart style cinnamon roll. Once your cinnamon rolls come out of the oven, you want to immediately get your cream cheese glaze on the rolls. This cream cheese glaze is pretty thick, so you want the heat of the cinnamon rolls to work with you. It's also going to lock all the moisture into the cinnamon rolls, make them softer and give them a longer shelf life. Now some of your rolls break open, that's most likely because they either over proofed or the seal wasn't tight when you put it into the oven or when you formed it. That's totally okay, they're obviously still going to be delicious and they're still cinnamon rolls. But if you want to have really consistent products, you'll want to make sure that you're sealing that roll really well. This is also why for smaller rolls like this kind, these are pretty small cinnamon rolls, they typically are done in a baking dish all together. Again, and this is totally preference, you can go ahead and do them on a dish, but I like them this way because they're more rustic and you get more glaze. But anyways, let's move on to the glaze. Get it on the top and then as it starts to melt, you can go back just with a spoon it's totally fine, and move that melting glaze around until you coat the entire cinnamon roll and just work your way through while they're still hot. Then you can enjoy these right away, you can let them cool slightly and enjoy, that is entirely up to you. But because we locked in that moisture into the rolls, they could last well through the following day. 8. Raspberry Filling : We want to get started on our raspberry filling, and this is going to go in our raspberry knots. We're using whole raspberries, you can use fresh or frozen, but we're just going to be cooking them down into a more broken down raspberry filling, we're going to leave the seeds in it, you can remove them at the end if you so choose, but we're going thicken it up nicely so that when we add it to our dough, and it bakes in the oven, it's not going to all run out of our dough. Let's get started making the filling. The first thing you want to do is get your fruit into your saucepan, and then in a separate bowl we are just going whisk together our sugar and cornstarch, you want to make sure you are breaking up that cornstarch so that it will mix in nicely and we won't get any lumps of cornstarch in our raspberry filling. We're going to get that onto low heat and we just want to start it out low so that the raspberries have a chance to break down before our cornstarch starts to thicken up. We'll get those into the pan, get the raspberries coated with the sugar and cornstarch. We add a little bit of water in there, we need some extra moisture to turn it into a filling, so my raspberry filling is starting to bubble and what I'm looking for here is for it to really start to thicken up. You can see that it's leaving nice trails when I run the spatula through, so it's really going to give us a nice thick filling and if I stop stirring, you'll be able to see large bubbles forming. So when that happens basically we know that the cornstarch is at the correct heat. It's going to be able to do it full thickening abilities, so at that point we really only need to let it go about a minute, and then we can remove it from the heat and get it into another container, let it cool down at room temperature before you put it in the refrigerator, just for safe food handling purposes, and then you want to let it refrigerate to completely cool for at least two hours or overnight, whatever works best for you. I'm going to get this into another container, and get it cooled down completely. 9. Forming the Raspberry Knots : In this lesson, we're going to form our raspberry knots. We're going to be using our enriched dough and the raspberry filling that we made earlier in the course. Let's get started. You can just go ahead and prepare your enriched dough the same way. Give it a first proof. After that first proof is when you would form these knots. We've got our enriched dough. You can see it is nice and supple, beautiful. It has risen, doubled in size and still this is a very tender, soft pillowy dough. We want to generously, just our surface. We can pull this right up out. Oh, and I just love to check this because the longer it sits, the more that gluten just starts to really develop. Beautiful. Going to flower more because as soon as it hits our work surface, it's already starting to soak up that flour. I'm just loosely shaping it into a rectangle so that we can roll it out evenly and get nice, uniform pastries. You will make sure you have your baking sheet already ready to go. We're going to roll it out lengthwise, but we want more width with this one. I want to get at least eight inches wide and as even as we possibly can, always check under your dough. I'm just taking the time to stretch where it needs it to make sure that it just stays even. Check and see where we're at. Going for eight across, we're at seven. See how nice and stretchy this is. We can do our little test there, see where we're at, almost to 16. Beautiful. There we go. Eight by 16. We're going to let it sit here for a couple of minutes to allow the gluten to relax before we try to form it. Our dough is nice and rested. You can usually tell if you lift it up a little bit and it doesn't shrink back into itself. It's perfect, ready to go. We want to make two-inch marks on this. I'm just going to my ruler down, mark at every two inches that's why I like to have a ruler that is just for my kitchen so that they get marks on it. That's fine. Two more, beautiful. Then that gives us eight even sanctions, so we'll get eight pastries out of this. I'm just going to lay our ruler down, holding the dough down pretty firmly and go right across. Pizza cutter is just going to be really great for this because it's not going to drag our dough. It allows it to stay in place. If you feel more comfortable, also marking the opposite side of the dough and lining up the markings, go ahead and do that. There we are. If your end just shrinks back a little bit, we can just push it back out. No big deal. We going to grab our raspberry filling. You could see, this has thickened up beautifully. This is perfect. Let's remove some of these out of the way. I want to work on one at a time. I want to make sure that it is stretched out this way. What we're going to do is take that raspberry filling. We're going to put right down the center. You want to make sure that you're keeping it to right in the center and you want to leave at least a half-inch on each end. You can be fairly generous with it. Keep it even. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to take one side and we're going to pull it over, and we're stretching it to meet up with the other side. Once you have one part attached, you want to work fairly quickly. If it comes through it all, just wipe it off. Stretch our dough out if we need to. Just want to make sure that our dough is attaching that raspberry is encased inside and you'll see too that it starts to push out towards the edge, which is why we want to keep it back from the ends a little bit and we can just seal those as well. We go back over just really pinching on that edge, right on the very edge of it to make sure that it is nicely sealed. We're going to very gently lift up both ends, tap. Then we're going to take it and we're literally going to tie it in a knot. Now you could leave it just like that or tuck these under and leave it like that. But what we're going to do is we're going to take one of these ends, we're going to bring it up through. We're going to take the other end and just bring it over and attach, flip it over and that's going to give us our basic shape. Then we can very carefully just pick this up, transfer it right onto our cookie sheet just like that. Now if you wanted to just make a basic knot, what you can do, stretch it further this way. Here we go, give us a nice stretch. We're going to do the same thing. Raspberry right in the center. It's okay if you get a little bit on the edge, just clean it up. Pulling it over. You can just press down on this back edge here so that it's nice and sealed. We're actually not going to stretch it out this time. We're going to make sure that it's less long, and we're just going to tie a small knot out of that just like that. Those are our two-knot shapes. Once you finish forming all of your knots, you can go ahead and get them onto your baking sheet. All eight of them should fit if you need to stagger them slightly, go ahead and do that. You want to let them prove until they're double in size. It's going to be about 1-2 hours depending on your room temperature, and then we will discuss how to prepare them for baking. 10. Baking the Raspberry Knots : You can see these raspberry knots have proved they are doubled in size. If you press on them, they should feel very light and pillowy. Already preheated my oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. We want to get our wash on these, and also our almonds. Now, I'm using the Gabi wash and sliced almonds. The trick with getting the almonds onto your pastry, and getting them to stick is as soon as you get the wash on one pastry, you want to put your almonds onto it. Because if you allow the wash to dry, then the almonds will not stick to the pastry. We want them to stay on there. Then those are going to toast up nicely in the oven. This is a totally optional garnish. You don't have to put this on. But, I really love the combination of almond and raspberry, and it also gives a really nice texture, more complex flavor to the pastry itself. You can just go through these one by one, making sure you're getting all of your pastry nice and washed. I just like to pick up the ones that have fallen down on the tray, and stick them back on there. Here we go and I'll continue on with these. I'm going to get them into the preheated oven and set a timer for 15 minutes. Give them a check. They may need a couple more minutes, up to five more minutes. Soon as these come out of the oven, you want to get your simple syrup on to them while they are still hot. Then a lot more of that water is going to evaporate out and just leave a nice shiny, sticky, sugary coating on it. Now, I just made my simple syrup. So if you forget about it or make it last minute, that's okay, you can still get it on these hot. We just want to carefully get that simple syrup on here. It's just going to enhance the flavor, and the overall appearance of them. These were in the oven for exactly 19 minutes. They were done at 15, but I left them in for four more minutes because I just wanted to give them more color. I definitely wanted the almonds to toast a little bit more. I like a darker pastry that's totally up to you. I think it's just more appealing, but if you want a lighter finish, a lighter final bake, you can take them out at 15 and they'll still be done, totally up to you. I'm going to finish this up and let these cool little bit, so that we can take a look at the inside of these pastries. You can see what it looks like with that raspberry in there, and really see the texture of the dough itself. These have cooled enough that you can see now what these look like on the inside. These are incredibly soft. They should just peel right up, but you can see they're so soft, they just bend. They have a nice sticky, shiny glaze on the outside. They're beautiful. Some spots you can see the raspberry just waiting to come out of there. There we go. You can see that the dough itself is just really nice and soft. It's got some nice air pockets in there. Very, very spongy, beautiful pockets of that raspberry, got the toasted almonds. These are definitely something to try and they're so delicious, and you can try all different kinds of fillings in here. You can try any of the fruit fillings from this course. You can try different berries, different types of curves, you can do an almond filling, you could do chocolate in here. Possibilities are endless. So give these a try. 11. Orange Prep : In this lesson, we're going to process our oranges, and basically, we're making orange buns. We're going to use two oranges in three separate recipes, so we need to take the time to break our oranges down into parts. But the bonus of this is that we're going to use almost the entire fruit for this one recipe, which is so nice when you don't have any food waste. Let's get started. I'm going to show you how to break down the orange and how to separate it out, for all of our different components that we're going to be making later on. Let's get started. I've got two blood oranges here. You can use whatever types of oranges you have or prefer. I like blood oranges because they give it a really pretty color, and I like the flavor of the blood oranges. I just have two medium size ones. I have a little container here, we're going to set aside some parts of this, as well as a measuring cup. You also want to have a cutting board and a really sharp chef's knife. If you have a paring knife, that's totally fine, you just want to make sure that it is really, really sharp. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to take one of our oranges and we're going to very carefully, just cut the very outer orange part off of this. If you have a Microplane or a grater, you can go ahead and use those as well. I'm just a fan of only varying one piece of equipment, and I think that this is just as quick as anything else. We're really working to not get that white part because that part tends to be very bitter. That's good enough. If you don't get all of it, don't worry. The orange rind is very flavorful, so a little bit goes a long way. Then we're just going to chop this up very, very fine. Chop it up as fine as you can get it, and then we're going to take a 1/3 of it, we're going to put it in a little container. You can go ahead and set this container in your refrigerator, and save it for the following day when you make your dough. That'll go right into the dough and give it a nice orange flavor. The other 2/3, we're going to get into our measuring cup, and this going to go into our orange filling to give a really nice punchy orange flavor. Then we're going to take our orange that we have cut the skin off of, give it a little smoosh and we're going to juice this. Look at that beautiful blood orange, is going to go right into our measuring cup here. Try to catch the seeds, if you can. It helps to rock it on your cutting board before you cut it open, just loosens up the pulp, makes easier to juice it by hand. Let's see. We're shooting for about a 1/4 of a cup, so we should be able to get it out of 1.5 oranges. I'm almost at a 1/4 cup, so I'm just going to cut off part of my blood orange here. That gave me exactly a 1/4 cup, great. Then with the other 1/2 of my blood orange, I'm going to cut it very thinly, about 1/16th of an inch thick. You can take your time with this. Go slow, get really nice slices and you're going to get as many slices out of this remaining orange as you can. Because what we're going to do is we're going to candy these orange slices so they're going to be a nice garnish on our orange buns, and we're going to use that orange syrup that's leftover from canning to make our orange glaze. So many, many purposes here. If you want, if you have a garden or anything like that, you can just soak these leftover pieces, chop them up, soak them in water and put them out in the dirt in your plants. There we go, that's good. So that's processing our oranges; we've got nice slices for canning, we've got juice for our filling, and we've got some zest for our dough. 12. Candied Oranges : We have thinly sliced our oranges and now we're going to candy them. You can do this with any type of citrus, especially the more bitter citrus fruits, like blood orange or grapefruit. It's a really nice technique to take off that bitter edge and you can use the whole fruit. It's beautiful as a garnish. You can even add it as thin layers into deserts. You've got a few options here, but it's really a nice basic technique to learn. You want to start out by doing a two parts sugar to one part water ratios. Basically, we're making a simple syrup. Now because we only have a few slices, about one cup of sugar to half a cup of water should be plenty, but if you want to have more candy fruit on hand, you can definitely do a larger batch, as you can see here, I'm doing a larger batch because I just like to have these around. They're actually really nice to snack on even. You want to get it into a pot where you have enough room. If you're doing a large batch like this, you can have a big large skillet like I have, if you're only doing a few slices, the smaller saucepan will do, you just want to make sure that they have enough room to candy evenly. Otherwise, you'll just need to make sure that you're staying with it and mixing it around a bit. You want to bring your sugar and water up to a simmer on low heat. You don't want to heat it too quickly and caramelize the sugar at all. Plus we want to keep this at a simmer for a long period of time so we're not caramelizing our sugar whatsoever. Just going on low heat and let it take its time to come up to temp heat summer and then you can get your fruits slices in there. Once you get it to this point, it's going to be about 20-30 minutes depending on the thickness of your fruit and how long it takes to candy them, but what you're looking for is for them to be completely translucent. If the look of the peel or the rind changes and it's more glossy and you can start to see through it a little bit, then it's ready to go. You want that to be evenly throughout all of the slices, then you can get them off the heat. Carefully remove your slices onto a sheet tray. Make sure it's lined with something, you can just line with parchment paper or a plastic wrap, that's totally fine. Then if some of the pulp in the fruit has broken apart, you can just gently push it back together, rearrange it so that it's a nice slice of fruit. Once the sugar syrup cools down and starts to set a little bit, it'll hold that pulp intact. Go ahead and do that and then let them cool completely and set for a couple of hours. You can do this the night before and just leave them out on the counter and then they'll be ready to go the next day when you make your orange bands and you can use them as a garnish. If you're going to store these for a longer period of time, you can keep them in the refrigerator just in an airtight container for a couple of weeks. You do want to make sure that you save your syrup as well because you're going to use that to make the glaze for the bands later on. Just let that cool down to room temperature, then you can get it into an airtight container, pop it in the fridge overnight, and it should be good to go the next day when we're ready to make that simple glaze. 13. Orange Filling : Now we're going to get started on our orange filling for the orange buns, this is really easy to put together. It's going to be thickened with cornstarch, which is what we're primarily using in this course. It's going to be nice and thick so that it can be incorporated into the dough. You can see I've put them all in my measuring cup here. The citrus curdles the almond milk but don't worry, once we cook this, it will be fine, it'll smooth out. It just looks a little odd when you first do it. You can get them into a sauce pan and then in another medium bowl, we're going to get our sugar in there and our cornstarch, we just want to mix these together first to ensure that our cornstarch gets evenly mixed into our juice and milk mixture. As soon as I can see that there's no lumps of cornstarch in here, we're just going to add it right in here. Let's get together, you can set this bowl aside. Once this is cooked, we'll put it back in there and we're going to get this on to medium heat, whisking constantly until it begins to thicken. This orange cream is starting to bubble as you can see and this is when you really want to keep an eye on it, this is when it will begin to thicken. You can see it's really thickening there, so you want to make sure you're getting your whisk in around the edges of the pot so that nothing is burning and also run it through the center, scraping along the bottom. As soon as it thickens, go ahead and remove it from the heat and get it into another container and let it cool down. As you can see, this has become very thick, right off the heat, which is perfect. It will thicken up a lot more as it cools. What we want to do is just get a piece of plastic wrap and push it down so that it's touching the surface of the cream, otherwise it will form a skin, and you can get it into the refrigerator and let it cool completely. I like to make it the night before, if you're making these orange buns, you can go ahead and candy your fruits, cool your syrup, make this cream the night before, and then finish the dough and the rolls the following morning. We're going to get this into the fridge with some plastic wrap to chill over night. 14. Forming the Orange Buns : In this lesson, we'll take a look at how to form the orange buns. I really like these because they're a different style. We're going to use a twelve cavity, a standard cupcake tin. When you prepare your enriched dough you will be using a basic enriched dough. Remember that orange zest we save from the processing the oranges lesson? You want to add that into your dough and just work it in. You can infuse it into the milk and water before you add in your yeast, it's going to give you a more intense flavor to the dough, or you can just add it in when you're mixing all of your dough together, entirely up to you. But you do want to prepare that and get the first proof on it. Once that first proof is done you can go ahead and get into this lesson. Now, I'm going to use an oil. You want to use a flavorless oil to help them come out of the pan when it's all done. We want to use a generous amount. We do not want these to stick. My room temperature is very warm here. If you're going to use coconut oil, you're going to want to make sure that you melt it down. I'm just going to use my hand for this. We can take any extra. You just want to really work it in there. Make sure you are getting the bottoms all the sides. We're also going to get the top, because our buns are going to bake up out of the pan. This pan is prepared. You can set it aside and get your dough out with your rolling pin, your ruler, a pizza cutter, and some flour, all-purpose flour. We've got more dough. This is my orange dough. It's been proofing for a little bit longer just because I had some other things going on, but if that happens that's okay. What I love about dough is it takes a long time. Put all that time in just waiting and it can be a little bit flexible at this stage. We want to do a nice dose of flour right on our work surface. Get this guy out and into a rectangle. Make sure we're not going to have him sticking whatsoever. Here we are. We're shooting for 12 rolls. We're actually going to make this a little bit longer. Can see some of that orange zest dotted in there. Let's see where we're at lengthwise. Our strips are going to be 1 1/2 inches wide so we're looking for 18 inches long. There we go. It's a little bit longer than 18 inches. Just shore up our dough, make sure we're stretching it evenly out to the corners. Let's check our width. Almost to eight. If your dough is getting difficult to stretch you can always roll from the center out towards the corners, and that will get it to stretch in all directions. There's eight. Now we're just going to let this dough rest for about two minutes so that the gluten can relax and when we cut it it's not all going to spring back. The dough has been resting for a couple minutes and it is time to get our orange filling on there. The orange cream is what we're going to be using to fill this. If your orange cream separates in the refrigerator at all, you just want to drain off that liquid and then stir it to reincorporate. The less moisture that it has in it the better. This is a little bit different. What we're actually going to do is, we're going to get our cream onto the dough first. Using an offset spatula, we're going to spread it evenly across the dough. You want to get it as even as possible and you definitely want to get it all the way out to the edges. Here we are. Get as much of that on there as possible. Now we're going to mark our dough. We're just going to lay our ruler down and we're going to mark it every 1 1/2 inches. Just like that. Then very carefully cut straight across, straight as you can. Then what we're going to do is we're going to take each one of these rolls. Wear pieces of dough and you're going to very lightly roll it up. This can be a little bit messy. It's good to work quickly at this point. For these end pieces you want the not so pretty side down, because the side facing up is what we're going to see on the final bun. Try to get them in there standing up as best you can as well. There we are. Now these are going to proof for 1-2 hours until they are doubled in size and then they will be ready to bake. 15. Orange Glaze : We're going to be using that orange simple syrup that we've saved from our candied oranges, adding some powdered sugar to it and creating a glaze for the top of our orange bands. Now we want to make sure that this is ready to go before our orange bans come out of the oven because we're going to put it on the bans while they're still hot so it melts down and glazes the bans. But because we're doing that, we want to make a very thick glaze. Let's get started. This is pretty simple. It's basically equal parts of the sugar syrup to powdered sugar. Now if your sugar syrup boiled longer, it's going to be a bit thicker and it's going to have a lower water concentration, whereas if it boiled for less, you're going to have a higher water concentration. I recommend starting with a little bit less syrup, mixing it and then adding more if you need it, maybe start out with something like 75 percent and then work your way up just to make sure that you're not putting too much syrup in there and then you'd have to add a lot more sugar. I did not sift my powdered sugar at all and that's because this is a thick glaze, which is really nice. Just mixing it will knock out any clumps of sugar that might be left in there. Just going to mix it really well. You can use a whisk, but this is pretty thick, so I'm just using a spatula. Here we go. That looks great, nice and smooth, super easy. Now if you want to make this ahead of time, a day or two ahead, you can, you'll just want to mix it back up because it'll probably separate in the refrigerator. But this is ready to go right onto our orange bans. 16. Baking the Orange Buns : Once the orange buns have proofed they are ready to go into the oven. We're not going to put an agave wash on them. They're just going to go straight in, and we're going to set a timer for 15 minutes. This is what they should look like. They are doubled in size, they look amazing. You can see that blood orange cream peaking up out of there. Get these in some set a timer for 15 minutes, and in the meantime, you can go ahead and prepare your glaze. This is what we can expect from the orange buns when they come out of the oven. They have a really a nice even brown top, they puffed up a little bit, and you can really smell that fragrant orange. You want to very carefully get these out. I like to use a spoon. You just want to make sure you get down to the center and detach them. Otherwise, those centers like to stick, but you get this really beautiful bun. Can't stand them all up. Soon as they come out and you get them all out of the pan, what we want to do is get that glaze on there while they're still warm. I like to try to spread it around to all the parts. Got our candied oranges. I'm just going to give these a little cut. These oranges will fit beautifully right around the edge, and there's this gorgeous orange bun. It pulls apart so nicely. You can see that custard in there is all melted and soaks into the dough. These are so, so good. 17. Thank You : Thank you so much for hanging out in this class. I sure did have a lot of fun teaching it, and I hope that you did enjoy and found a lot of value out of it. Don't forget to post a project. Pick something from the class, try it out in your own kitchen, take some photos, post it on the platform. I would love to see what you're working on. I'm also available if you have any questions or just want some feedback, you need to troubleshoot whatever. I'm here for you. I'm checking in every day, so just let me know and also get those recipes over on the Projects and Resources page, they're available for you to download print. They are PDF attachments, perfect, ready for you so that you can get going in your own kitchen. I hope you enjoyed and I hope you have a lot of fun. Take care.