Kamala of Mom’s Recipes  had sent me Cinnamon for the Arusuvai Friendship Chain.  Thank you very much for including me in this chain and for sending me my favorite chocolates too.  When I sent her a mail after receiving the ingredient she replied back that she chose cinnamon because she thought that since I bake a lot I would be using it quite often.  So thoughtful of you Kamala.  Since this is such a special ingredient, I wanted to try something special and interesting.

I was going through a couple of books I have and found this recipe in the Baking for Dummies book, by Emily Nolan.  This was the first book I bought to learn to bake.  It has all the basic information on principles of baking, tools and techniques, a number of recipes, troubleshooting tips and lot more.

This bread is also called pull apart bread because it has to be pulled apart with your hands, instead of cutting it.

Ingredients:

First I will write down the ingredients as it is in the original recipe.  Later I will mention the changes I made.

Part 1:
All Purpose Flour 2 cups
Sugar 1/2 cup
Baking Powder 1 tablespoon
Salt 1/2 teaspoon
Cold Butter 5 tablespoons cut into 5 pieces.

Part 2:
Semisweet chocolate chips 1 cup
Milk 2/3 milk

Part 3:
Sugar 1/4 cup
Ground Cinnamon 1.5 teaspoons
Butter 3 tablespoons melted

Procedure:
1.  Preheat the oven to 350F.  Grease an 8-inch square baking pan.
2.  In a mixing bowl sift and combine all the ingredients mentioned in Part 1 except butter.
3.  Using a pastry blender or a few pulses of a food processor, cut the cold butter into the flour mixture until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

4.  Stir in the Part 2 ingredients and combine to form a dough.

5.  The final dough would look like this.

6.  Divide the dough into 16 balls and place in the prepared baking pan.  The balls will touch.

7.  Drizzle the balls with the melted butter. 

7.  Combine the remaining 1/4 cup sugar and the cinnamon.  Sprinkle them with the cinnamon-sugar mixture.

8.  Bake for 30 minutes, until light brown.  Cool in the pan set on a wire rack before removing from the pan.

My Notes:
1.  For this recipe the butter has to be used straight from the refrigerator. 

2.  If you don’t have a food processor or a pastry blender you can use 2 knives or 2 forks to cut in the fat.  To use a pastry blender, mix the ingredients while cutting into the fats with the blender using a rocking, up and down bouncing motion.

3.  To divide the dough into 16 balls you can follow my method.  First divide the entire dough into 2 equal parts.  Roll the 2 parts into 2 separate logs.  Cut each log into 8 pieces.  While doing this, flour the surface generously.  I also sprayed both my hands with non stick oil spray, so handling the dough was easy.

4.  Similarly for greasing the baking pan, use the butter wrapper.

5.  I pretty much followed the recipe, but for the 6th step.  I melted the 3 tablespoons of butter in the microwave oven and that was really a lot of butter.  My husband was having “are you crazy to pour so much butter and sugar” look in his face.  So instead of using the entire butter and sugar as mentioned in the recipe, I followed his advice of just brushing the dough with little butter,  sprinkled very little sugar, but took another 1.5 teaspoons of cinnamon, little cocoa and sprinkled over the balls of dough.

6.  I baked the bread for 32 minutes.  I would advice to cool it in the pan for atleast an hour before taking it out.  I tried to remove the bread after 30 minutes and the bread started to fall apart and crumble.  Anyway I managed to get 10-12 good pieces.  The bread was very moist inside, but a little bit dry on the tops.  I guess it was because I did not use the entire 3 tablespoons of butter as mentioned in the original recipe.  But the taste was phenomenal, with the melted chocolate chips, a hint of sweetness and the aroma of freshly ground cinnamon.