Recipe: Melon Bread

Ready for the oven.

Done! Looks like I already ate one.

Crap picture quality, because I was baking them at night... but when were my pictures ever of good quality?

For those who don't know, melon bread doesn't actually have melon inside of it. It's just some bread with a cookie dough on the top with a pattern cut into it which resembles the surface of a melon. Yeah.

I had originally planned to make it earlier, a few days earlier to be exact. In fact, I made the cookie dough on that day I originally planned to do it, but after finding out the scale we had sucked, I opted to wait until I could borrow my friend's scale instead. Sure, even though the measurements for the cookie dough is also given out in grams, I just searched up how much the weight of so and so equaled in cups.

I could've done the same for the bread, yes, but since it was my first time ever baking bread, I didn't want to take any chances. I at least wanted to achieve a texture similar to Chinese bakery bread: soft and light.

None of them actually turned out as golden or as melon-bread-like as I wanted. I think the former is due to our pale North American eggs compared to the bright orange yolks of Asia. The latter is due to not enough cookie dough and thus the pattern being destroyed during the second rise. Yup, I learned a lot, at least. Some other stuff I found out along the way was:

• There is a "keep warm" setting on my oven and it's very useful for rising.
• You really need to coat your finger in bread flour to check if it has risen enough, otherwise the dough would just stick to you.
• I mess up a lot if I don't check the recipe frequently.
• If your bread dough is too sticky even after kneading forever, adding in some more butter helps wonders.

Ehh, too lazy to paraphrase the recipe, so why don't you just check out the video yourself?

Planning to make more soon while I've still got my friend's scale. Hopefully it wouldn't have that salty tinge next time.