We’re now just 7 days away from Christmas – hasn’t it come around quickly this year!
whether or not you’re a Christmas fan, this brioche Christmas tree is easy, impressive and the perfect treat to make in the build up to Christmas, especially not hose cooler days while you have friends and family around you.
I love making bread, mostly because its such a lengthy process but its actually so simple, including only minimal steps and at the end you get a perfectly baked brioche – which is always welcome.
Anyway, let’s get started, shall we?
Ingredients:
500g strong white bread flour.
8g salt.
15g dried yeast.
125g butter.
50g sugar.
250g egg.
150ml whole milk.
200g milk chocolate chips
Decoration (optional):
Nutella.
Christmas sprinkles.
Method:
Before you get started on the recipe, you’ll want to do some prep work. Strat by weighing up all of your ingredients, getting any equipment you may need ready such as a stand mixer and when needed, preheat your oven to 200˚c/390˚f.
To start on the recipe, make the dough. Simply take a a large mixing bowl and place in your bread flour and salt – whisking the two together. At no point do you want the salt and yeast coming into direct contact with one another – it will inactivate the yeast and it won’t rise.
You can then add in the remaining ingredients, apart from the chocolate chips. Mix on a low speed to start for 2-3 minutes, the. a further 6-8 minutes on a medium-high speed, towards the end of the time, you’ll find the dough pulls away from the bowl.
Place the dough onto a lightly floured work surface and briefly knead until smooth and elastic, then place into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with coin film. Now leave it somewhere warm until its doubled in size – this takes about an hour.
Once doubled in size, you can knock the dough back – this is just to remove the gasses that have built up in the dough during the first proof. Using your hands, make it into a roughly square or rectangle shape and scatter over the chocolate chips, then bring the dough back into a ball shape, kneading it together. This is the ideal way to get the chocolate chips distributed throughout the dough.
immediately scale the dough – so for me, I took the weight of the dough and divided it by 11, which was around 115g per ball. Take the dough and round it off to get it as smooth and rounded as possible. I use my hand and the work surface to achieve the perfect result.
Place the dough balls onto a lined baking tray – make it look like a tree. Starting with one at the bottom for the trunk, then four, three, two and one to finish the top of the tree. Cover with clingfilm and allow to prove for a second time, until the are well risen and batched together.
Once risen, remove the cling film and egg wash them all over well. Then place into your preheated oven and bake for 12-15 minutes or until well coloured.
Allow to cool and enjoy but as an optional finishing you can drizzle over Nutella and scatter over Christmas sprinkles but its really up to you.
That’s all for today guys, I hope you enjoyed. If you did, don’t forget to share this recipe with your family and friends and enjoy it. I’ll be back soon with another blog post and YouTube video, so join me then. In the meanwhile, don’t forget to check out my other social’s – Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. The YouTube tutorial will be linked down below.
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