Bread week. I hate bread week because I have an apparent inability to successfully prove bread. Every time I have ever made bread in the past the ‘wait until it has doubled in size’ thing has just never worked. It’s either exactly the same as when I made it, or marginally bigger with no sign of improving.

But I give it a go every year anyway because that’s what the bake along is all about. (I missed last week though as we were on holiday – apologies!)

This week the bakers had to make a chocolate based signature bread, dampfnudel and a savoury plaited centrepiece showstopper.

Knowing how useless I usually am at bread, the idea of plaiting it is quite frankly terrifying so I wrote that idea off straight away. I actually quite fancied trying the steamed dampfnudel but I don’t own the correct type of pan and buying a whole new pan for the week would have somewhat blown my budget. So chocolate bread it was.

Chocolate Bread With Salted Caramel

Ingredients:

• 100g Plain Chocolate (70% cocoa)
• 100g White Chocolate
• 25g Dr Oetker Salted Caramel Crunch
• 25g Unsalted Butter
• 350g Very Strong White Bread Flour
• 50g Light Brown Sugar
• 1tsp Salt
• 2tbsp Cocoa Powder
• 1 sachet of Easy Bake Yeast
• 250ml Warm Water

Method:

1. Melt 75g of the dark chocolate with the butter in a bowl over a pan of hot water.
2. Put the flour, sugar, salt, cocoa powder, yeast and warm water into a mixer with a dough hook attachment.
3. Add the melted chocolate and butter mixture then knead for five minutes.
4. Chop the remaining chocolate into smallish chunks.
5. Knead the chocolate chunks and salted caramel crunch pieces into the dough by hand.
6. Shape the dough into a sausage and put it into a greased bundt tin.
7. Leave to prove until double in size (approx. 45 minutes)
8. Preheat oven to 170°C (Fan)
9. Bake for 30 minutes
10. Decorate with grated white chocolate.
11. Enjoy!

It actually did the doubling in size thing!! I made bread that wasn’t a pancake!!!

The salted caramel pieces add a bit of texture and a subtle savoury note against the sweet chocolate and it tastes lovely with proper butter spread nice and thickly over it.

This has taken away some of my fear of bread – a small taste of success that has left me wondering if maybe I’ve just been doing it wrong in the past. I can do it after all!

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The Great Bloggers Bake Off 2016 is hosted by Jenny at Mummy Mishaps and is sponsored by Tesco.

If you want to see what bready delights all the other GBBO Bloggers have been baking this week then CLICK HERE to see them.