Sweetened Condensed Milk Bread

I stumbled upon a dilemma. I had an almost full can on sweetened condensed milk (from a dinner experiment) and no way to use it. I scoured the Internet trying to find a recipe that used quite a bit of sweetened condensed milk because wasting it, to me, was out of the question. So I found a recipe on Pinterest which looked super good (http://www.sbar.com.cn/caipu/99257). There was only one problem: all the directions were in Chinese and although I technically went to Chinese school for 3 years all of these characters flew over my head. So what does one do in such a situation? You bother all your friends who in turn bother their parents. Thank you to my friends' parents for translating this for me.

I realized while making this that I actually kinda suck at making bread *flashback to when I tried to make onion pancakes and hoddeok* Even though my bread didn't turn out as bomb as the recipe I found, it was good enough for me to post about!

Okay without further ado, let's get started with the ingredients and directions!

Ingredients

Set One

280 g Bread Flour
168 g Water
4.5 g Instant Dry Yeast

Set 2

120 g Bread Flour
32 g Granulated Sugar
80 g Sweetened Condensed Milk
5 g Salt
40 g Egg (I just added the whole egg so I don't think this one needs to be 40 g necessarily)
32 g Butter
All Purpose Flour to create a good bread texture (no exact amount since it depends on the size of your egg + how wet your dough ends up being)

Directions
1. Mix the ingredients of Set 1 together. First whisk together the bread flour and yeast together. Then add in the water. Don't use the whisk when you add in the water like I did because that was a mess.

2. Once the dough using Set 1 ingredients has come together, cover it with plastic wrap and let it sit for about an hour or until doubled in size.

3. After it has proofed, punch the dough to deflate it.
4. Start adding the Set 2 ingredients into the dough, except for the butter. You may need to knead it a lot.

5. At this point your dough might be extremely sticky. Never fear! This is where the all purpose flour comes in. Knead in a tablespoon of flour at a time into the sticky dough until it has become noticeably less sticky and easier to work with.

6. Continue kneading for around 10 minutes or until the dough is smooth and elastic.
7. Put the butter into the dough and knead it. At first it'll seem like the butter will never absorb, but just continue kneading. Don't stress.
8. Shape the dough into a ball and let it proof covered by the plastic wrap again for 30 minutes.

9. Once the dough has proofed, split it into 4-6 dough balls.

10. Let the dough balls proof again covered for 15 minutes.
11. At this point, while the balls are proofing, preheat the oven to 350 F.
12. Take off the cover and put the dough rolls into the oven.
13. Bake for 30 minutes or until the tops are golden brown.

Brownie Cookies

I now realize what one is supposed to do on a blog. Basically rant about life in a deep way. Every other friday I basically cry about chemistry (or math) and lament about my problems to my dog. The bane of my existence. Honestly I wanted to make cream puffs but the recipe I tried was screwed up and they came out as butter cardboard disks. Not fun times. So to make myself feel better, as redemption, I made these cookies because they taste good and you literally cannot screw these up intentionally. I wish i could have this redemption in my educational system. Can I just go to school in Finland? Enjoy baking!

Recipe:

Ingredients: 

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp baking powder 

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

3/4 cup sugar 

1 egg

1/2 cup cocoa powder

Directions: 

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. 

2. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl.

3. In a stand mixer (or hand mixer) cream together the butter and sugar. Then add the egg, vanilla extract, and cocoa powder. Mix until well combined.

4. Slowly add in your flour mixture and your batter should look like the picture above.

5. Roll out cookie dough (in my opinion chilling the dough isnt worth the time) into 1/4 inch thickness. Cut out your cookies. 

6. Place the cookies on a parchment lined baking tray and bake for 8-10 minutes or until the edges are firm and the middle is slightly soft. 

7. Place on cooling rack for a couple minutes before enjoying 1 or 2 or 5 of these delicious cookie-brownie hybrids.