My friend, Norma again inspired me to pursue more baking with yeast. She showed me a video of Martha Stewart making Kouign Amann, which is layered yeast dough. It looked like a lot of fun, but a challenge. This would be great to do on a cold snowy day. You need to appreciate all the phases to get to the wonderful end result, dense sweet rolls that are delicious and worth the effort. You can also make other pastries from this dough such as poppy seed snails and cinnamon sugar knots. We added a little apricot jam in the middle on the Kouign Amann—delicious!!
Rolling the dough with the sugar.
Pinching of the dough. You can see all the layers!!!
These are a few that were done with the muffin pan.
We tried both the muffin pan and the rings.
We used the recipe from Martha Stewart. She has a great video on line that we thought was very helpful. It was sometimes a bit challenging to find it but if we could locate it on youtube under layered yeast dough or Kouign Amann.
We thought it was successful but I think the next time I would try wet yeast instead of the powder just to see the difference. I also thought the rings worked wonderfully for this because the dough could flatten out and got crispier than the muffin shape. I also thought the apricot jam really added to the flavor.
We ended this post with the selected focus version because we liked it too. We thought the all sharp version made the Kouign Amann look crispier.