Thanksgiving rolls, and wort bread.

Today has been pretty full of dough, though so far not much baking. Instead, most of the dough will get a first rise, get rolled into little buns, and go straight into the freezer. Chocolate buns I made sometime this weekend, which is nice, one less thing to roll, so today was brioche, raisin (same dough as the brioche, so it sounds more impressive than it is. I just made a double batch and added raisins to half), pumpkin cranberry, and something that I hope will develop into a nice spent grain whole wheat wort bread. With molasses. (Wort is the liquid that you get after boiling your grains in beer production. I was after the cooked (or "spent") grains, but as the grains were acquired for this purpose, the wort was never going to be transformed into beer. So I poured it in my flour instead of water.) Right now it looks like a chocolatey blob in the mixer, but I don't want to add more flour til it gets a few minutes to rest. Flour has this funny habit of not fully absorbing all the water around it instantly, so occasionally I bounce between the extremes of dough is too wet, straight to dough is too dry. Also, five minutes to hydrate are nice for me too. Once I remember where I put my teacup. 

I also have some croissant dough taking a nice rest in the fridge - the next round for that is the final one, so I would rather give it a little extra time. For the gluten to relax, of course. And the butter to chill and cooperate, hopefully, instead of ripping holes in the dough and sticking to the table.

To relax after that, I think I shall make a nice chocolate flavoured cake. And some ice cream. 

This morning I managed to get very grumpy when I woke up too early, had breakfast and staggered back into bed, forgetting that I had put the strawberry syrup on the stove to reduce. Well, it did reduce. I found it happily boiling away hours later. Now it has a certain caramel-y flavour, it just tastes a little less like fresh strawberries. On the other hand, the pot survived without any burns, so overall, could have been worse. Not what I had in mind, but could still have potential. 

It looks like my wort/spent grain dough is slowly getting there, it wanted a little extra flour, but now it seems quite happy mixing away. (In the mixer, of course. If I had to do all of this by hand I couldn't have waited quite this long. "Last minute" would have been Sunday. )

The wort/spent grain dough is looking quite nice, it is a shiny dark lump of dough that I am quite happy with, but every time I walk into the pantry it takes me a moment to remember why it smells like beer. 

So, if you are bored, and have a half a can of pumpkin sitting around, want to make pumpkin rolls?

I found these on King Arthur flour, and have played around a little with the spices. Otherwise, just do as they say and chances are, everything will turn out delicious.

I put the ginger up to 1/2 a teaspoon and left out the cloves, and am currently out of crystallised ginger, having used my last on some pumpkin scones. Luckily that is a non-essential part of the rolls, and they turn out just fine without them.