Breakfast Buns

Bread baking has been on the back burner lately, but I noticed that some mornings I would love to have just a little something to go with the morning cup of coffee and fresh fruit. I decided to put together a breakfast bun that would work, and to put in some healthy ingredients, too. Most of all, it has to be yummy because when you can only have a small amount of bread, it should be delicious bread, right?

For starters I cooked up some oatmeal...1/2 cup rolled oats and twice that amount of water...and set it to cool. I also mixed some yeast, water, a tiny bit of sugar and some flour to make a poolish. It all sat out on the counter while I went to the gym, collecting wild yeast if I was lucky.

Later in the day I mixed the cooked oatmeal, the poolish, some milk, and egg and some more water together. In a bowl I mixed all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, salt, a little more yeast (in case no wild yeast were around that were strong enough), and a touch of cinnamon and added those to the liquid mix to make a nice dough.

After the dough had time to rise, I turned it out onto a flour board and kneaded in dried cranberries, chopped pecans and golden raisins. Those were stretched into a large rectangle, most of the rectangle was given a light coat of butter, a sprinkle with brown sugar, and also with cinnamon. I rolled it up, jelly-roll fashion, and cut it into buns.

The buns went into a 9 x 13 pan and lightly covered. They rose over time and then were baked in a 350 degree F oven until golden brown.

So now I had a dozen breakfast buns. There is about 1/6 of the usual amount of oatmeal one might eat at breakfast, whole grain, cinnamon for antioxidant and flavor value, dried fruits and nuts, milk and egg and only about 1/3 tablespoon of butter per bun, with even less sugar. Fairly healthy as buns go and very tasty. For one of the buns I added a small amount of an icing of confectioners sugar mixed with hot water. That made it a little too sweet, so I think in the future I'll stick with the 'plain' buns. Each bun went into it's own bag, then into the freezer for future enjoyment on those days when they will be the perfect thing to go with coffee and fruit.

You might think that I would want one every day, but today I had coffee, fruit and some plain yogurt and it was just enough breakfast. Normally I'd give you the recipe, but I didn't really measure a lot of the ingredients, so I'll have to see if I can figure it out and post it later.