Sticky Rolls

Oh my.  Why did I decide to try my hand at artisan break making (it's a book, I'm not just being facetious) while in another country?  Spoiler alert:  they turned out great.  But getting there was a whole other story...that I'm about to tell you.  

 Here we are starting with the dough.  Pretty simple, other than finding my way around their kitchen.

 Let it rise for a couple of hours with my version of a lidded bowl.  Then I put it in the fridge (because you can with this for up to 5 days) so as not to bake in the afternoon.  100 degrees + no AC= I will follow the old-school rule of only baking in the mornings during summer.  (Thank you, Gram!)  Easy peasy so far.  But then it gets tricky...

 I had halved the recipe because I didn't need 4 pounds of Challah bread, plus the bowl wouldn't have been big enough.  The recipe for these sticky rolls called for 1.5 pounds of dough annnnd I didn't want to figure out how much that was.  So I decided to use 2.  Plus I didn't have a round cake pan, just this square one.  So what does that mean?  You have to pretty much "make up" the rest of the recipe, using it only as a guide.  And that I did.  On top of that, the butter came is this giant cube that wasn't marked, so I was literally guessing what 6 tbsp. of butter looked like plus a little more.  Finally I just abandoned my guessing and tried to base it on taste.  We also had pecans that had been brought over from the states, which are Ashleys' fave.

 This looks like it was all fun and games but this also represents me making up more of the filling (using actual fresh ground nutmeg...never done that before but it was all they had.  Yum!)  Then I had to re-roll this about 4 times because it kept sticking to the counter.  Darn it.  I have made bread a number of times but never this kind, so it was a little hard to tell what consistency I was supposed to go for.  But nonetheless, got it to this log stage.

 Got them into the pan and let them rise another hour.  And then the tricky part...figuring out the oven.  I did my best guesswork with the pictures on the oven plus knowing it had to be at 175 degrees Celsius and popped them in for a supposed 40 minutes, knowing I would have to check and turn them because their oven is tricky.  10 minutes later...they are smoking.  I scream and take them out and wonder, "Ok, now what?  The tops are already pretty brown."  But they weren't done.  Finally realized it was smoking from the filling pouring over onto the pan below (dare I say I made too much caramel topping?? Never...)  And then 25 minutes later...

 They were done, and inverted onto a lovely pan.  I'm really not sure HOW these turned out pretty much exactly the way they were supposed to, but they did.  And we were thankful...especially after all that work.

Here is Ashley enjoying her half birthday pecan sticky roll.  (I had one too...for breakfast and lunch.  I forgot to eat while I was baking, that happens a lot.)