Callie: Cinnamon Brioche

Back when we lived in Atlanta and got to shop at the Dekalb Farmers' Market, we always made time to stop by the bakery and taste the bread samples that were being featured that day. Once, we sampled a bit of brioche, and I have never forgotten its distinct eggy taste. So when we picked out this month's challenge ingredient, I decided to try my own hand at brioche.

My recipe comes from Peter Reinhart's cookbook, The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I love this book because it doesn't just tell you how to make bread; it also tells you why you do each step. As I prepared for this recipe, I learned that breads are classified based on their butter to flour ratio; brioche is classified as a "rich" bread because this ratio is more than 20%. (Basically, the eggs, milk, and butter mean that it's not very good for you!) Reinhart includes three brioche recipes, each with a different amount of butter. I chose the "middle class" recipe, hoping to find a middle ground between flavor and difficulty level.

Jordan loves cinnamon bread, so I wanted to find a way to flavor my bread. I thought about a cinnamon swirl (à la cinnamon raisin bread) but ultimately chickened out...it looked too complicated for my first attempt! So instead, I settled for a cinnamon-sugar topping, which tasted good, but meant that it only had cinnamon flavor on top.

Apparently, the traditional shape for a brioche is called brioche à tête, which requires a special mold that I do not own...so I went for the loaf shape instead. (And my personal favorite way to shape bread is to make a circular loaf in a pie pan.) This worked out just fine; the circular loaves had more surface area, thus more cinnamon flavoring.

One thing about baking bread from scratch: it's NOT for the impatient. In fact, it took two days to make this recipe! Each step is fairly simple; but then you have to wait...wait...wait...until it's time for the next step.

The bread has received a stamp of approval from my mom and from Jordan, both of whom tasted it and requested seconds! It does have that unexpected eggy-ness to it, but that is exactly how I remembered it, so I guess I did something right! Here's the recipe....I tried to simplify as much as possible, though, so it's not word-for-word.