Almond + Cherry Couronne

Hi

Guess who had her first ever go at making bread? ooo me!  me!  
I'm sticking to my blog resolutions  to try and bake different things...so this week  I had a go at bread!! Its me so it was a sweet bread of course...I made a Couronne which was the week 6 technical challenge in GBBO.
I really wanted this to work for me I can't bear it if my time and ingredients  avail to nothing plus I hate wasting food. So I turned in to a right little Herminone and did my research.... youtubed  the masterclass-watched Paul do his magic plus read lots of posts about other bloggers having ago.

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So the how was the actual Couronne? It was delicious!....lovely soft sweet bread sandwiched with a delicious Almond+ Cherry filling. That filling was divine, lovley sweet almondyness... biting in those parts were by far the best bit. .
My first attempt at sweet bread was relativley straightforward....having said that it wasn't all a breeze. Just little issues like my dough not rising much after the first proving. My filling was rather wet so twisting the two ends of the dough got tricky and VERY messy. The rather wet filling resulted in my Couronne taking a lot longer to bake as bread  touching the filling got wet and took longer to actually bake properly. I have a thing about making sure things are baked all the way through. I didn't really relax until I was certain  all of the bread was baked all the way through....to achieve this I sliced the Couronne up to get better exposure for the middle layers and popped it back in the oven for about 10 mins.

 I used a Paul hollywood recipe for the Couronne and after scouring the net used this filling recipe by Cookies Cakes and Bakes.  All in all I was immensely pleased with my first attempt it was well yummy..the icing on the top made it even nicer....I'm still annoyed I forgot to buy apricot jam which meant I couldn't do the glaze on top and is was my lovely Couronne is lacking the usual shine. I'm certainly spurred on to try other sweet breads+ rolls...I see cinnamon rolls in future!  x

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