Brioche, Two Ways

For my birthday this year, my loving husband gifted me with the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The authors loved homemade bread, but not the hours and hours it takes to prepare. So, they came up with a way to have artisan bread in five minutes.

There are several recipes for different breads and what to do with them. The husband was all gung ho about me making some, so I decided to start with brioche. I was enamoured with the Brioche filled with Chocolate Ganache, which purports to make your kitchen smell like a Parisian bakery. I decided to take it a step further and make Brioche stuffed with Crawfish.

I started to follow the recipe for brioche from Artisan Bread. I have made brioche once before many moons ago with a recipe from Baking with Julia, which is -- hands down -- my most favorite cookbook. I was somewhat concerned when my brioche dough from Artisan Bread looked nothing like the brioche dough I made with Julia.

Another flag was raised when Artisan Bread insinuated that brioche is only good for pastries and sweet breads. I started having second thoughts about my Brioche stuffed with Crawfish, so I consulted Julia and was relived to find Savory Brioche Pockets in her tome.

After making my dough and feeling that it would come out ok, I rolled the dough into a rectangle and spread the inside with crawfish etouffee. I then rolled the combination cinnamon roll style, folded the ends down and shaped it into a loaf. After some rising time, I placed it in the oven. In the future, I will have to adjust the baking time, as the middle came out doughy after the allotted cooking time.

The verdict was two thumbs up from everyone in the house. We devoured it in a day.

Being that we were deep in the middle of Carnival season, I decided to use some of the brioche dough to make a king cake. King cakes can be found in every store in south Louisiana and it's not uncommon for us to partake in the tradition almost every day. Types of king cakes vary, with some made in the cinnamon roll fashion and others made in the donut dough fashion. The best king cakes I have ever had are from Gambino's and Cannata's.

I rolled the dough out again as a rectangle. This time, instead of crawfish, I filled the middle with cream cheese and cinnamon. Then, yet again, the dough was rolled as you would when making cinnamon rolls but was shaped into a ring rather than a loaf.

As the king cake was baking, I made some colored sugar for the top of the cake. I was really surprised at how relatively easy it was to make green, gold and purple sugar to represent the traditional Mardi Gras colors.

When the king cake was done, I made a lemon juice/confectionery sugar glaze for the cake and then topped it with sugar. Though the filling didn't look like the filling that you would find in the mass produced cakes, the whole combination was delicious. This cake didn't sit long either.

Brioche is very versatile and can be used for your sweet treats or savory meals. I'm hoping to get to the Brioche filled with Chocolate Ganache, but it will be hard to beat the crawfish bread and king cake.