Hoddeok: my almost authentic Korean pancakes

On the corner of Wellesly and Lorne in Auckland's CBD,  tucked under the "pagoda" building is a little shop, a stall really, selling Korean pancakes.  The queue there is always snaking along the footpath around the corner.  A queue which balloons into a crowd around lunchtime.  I've walked past this stall for years, but for some reason never tried it out.  Until the other day, while running an errand for the boss, I thought why not have Korean pancakes for lunch?

Give us this day our daily cinnamon buns

It all started with the brioche. And now I'm hooked on baking bread.  I don't know how I lived before.
There is something truly satisfying about that moment when you lift up the tea towel to see that your little ball of dough has miraculously transformed into a softly swelling mound.  I love getting my hands in there, feeling it sigh as you punch it down and then pulling and rolling it until it's soft and squidgy and silky.  And then there's the smell as it's baking. Bliss.

My fiance raved about the cinnamon scrolls I made a couple of posts ago and I was keen to see if I couldn't improve on it with a yeasted version.  I mean as much as I love scones, seriously, who can resist fluffy bready cinnamony buns?  So the very next week after attempting my first yeasted recipe, I decided to try Pioneer Woman's cinnamon rolls recipe.  And boy oh boy am I glad I did.

Let them eat brioche, manatee brioche

Manatee brioche: ugly but tasty

On hearing that peasants in her empire didn't even have bread to eat, legend has it that Marie Antoinette responded:

"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!"

This is usually translated to "let them eat cake!" but what Mademoiselle Antoinette was actually referring to was the decadent sweet buttery rich bread brioche.

Ooo la la, brioche! Amazing on its own, heated with a little bit of jam or dunked in egg and fried as pain perdue (aka the ultimate french toast) brioche is a wonder of baking - rich from lashings of butter and egg yolks but also feathery light from multiple risings.  The french really know how to make their pastries, non?

Now before I go any further, I have a confession to make.  I might bake a lot.  I might even have the word baking in the title of my blog, but until this brioche I had never baked with yeast before.  There it is - my dirty little secret.  Quelle horreur!