Toronto Blackberry Buns

One thing about working the 1330-2130 shift, it's giving me a chance to try some recipes I normally wouldn't do during the week -- mostly yeast recipes that are take a lot of time and are best eaten the day they are made -- like these little buns.

Yeast dough made into circles, filled with a blackberry (the book -- Marcy Goldman's Passion for Baking -- called for fresh blueberries, but I had frozen blackberries) filling, folded in half and baked. They looked fantastic in the book. Mine didn't look fantastic at all -- there was exactly one that looked good (see pic above) and I have a hunch it doesn't have enough filling in it. In fact, mine were pretty much a disaster across the board.

I think part of the problem was that my blackberry sauce was too runny. Maybe because I used frozen instead of fresh? Maybe because blackberries have more juice than blueberries? Either way, it was too runny. After the first set, I actually switched to some blackberry jam I had in the fridge and that seemed to work a bit better.

The second problem was that I don't think I got the dough thin enough, and of course it kept springing back which made it difficult to get thin enough. So, while the buns were in the oven, the edges peeled back even more, leaving even more room for the blackberry filling to ooze out all over everything.



The one I tasted was really bready with a little bit of blackberry filling. The middle also didn't taste quite done, despite the fact that the bottom was pretty much burned. bleh. Can't win them all I suppose.

I will likely try this recipe again, simply because the idea sounds so nice, but I think I will wait until fresh blueberries are in season before attempting this mess again.