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Children's Buns
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 6 cups sifted flour 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1 cup currants 1/2 teaspoonful salt THIS goody is a big favorite with the children. They love to find such a treat in their school lunch-box.
Dissolve the yeast and one tablespoonful sugar in lukewarm milk, and add to it three cups of flour to make an ordinary sponge. Beat well. Cover and set aside in a warm place to rise, for about an hour.
When light, add to it the butter and sugar creamed, egg well beaten, the currants, which have previously been floured, and the remainder of the flour, or sufficient to make a moderately soft dough, and salt with the last of the flour.
Knead lightly, or "throw and roll" as shown on page 15. Place in greased bowl, cover and set aside in a warm place, free from draught, to rise for about two to two and one-half hours. When well-risen, turn out on a kneading board and mould into rolls. Place in well-greased pans, cover and let rise again for about one hour, or until double in bulk.
Brush with egg diluted with milk. Bake in a hot oven for about fifteen or twenty minutes. Upon removing from oven, sprinkle with powdered sugar.
An enriched sponge dough with currants, made in a quantity that assumes a household baking for the whole week. Nothing about the method is difficult; the demands are on time and on bowl space.
- One cake of yeast to six cups of flourAbout two and a quarter teaspoons of active dry yeast, or one 7g sachet, for a very large sweet dough. That is a small amount by present-day habit, and it is why the second rise runs to two and a half hours. Resist adding more; the long rise is doing useful work.
- CurrantsNot fresh currants. These are dried Zante currants, the small dark ones sold beside the sultanas. Ordinary raisins will stand in, but they are heavier and sit lower in the crumb.
- Flouring the fruitTossing the currants in flour before they go in keeps them from clinging to each other and from sliding to the bottom of a soft dough. Take the flour from the six cups already measured rather than adding more.
- Throw and rollThe reference to page fifteen points at an illustration in the printed booklet that a reader online cannot see. It describes the company’s preferred kneading motion, and any ordinary kneading — by hand or in a mixer with a dough hook — does the same thing.
- ScaleSix cups of flour, a cup of currants and a cup of sugar is a batch sized for a family that ate bread at every meal. Halving everything works cleanly and the timings do not change.
- The oven and the finishA hot oven here means roughly 400°F (200°C). The egg-and-milk wash colours fast, so look at them at fifteen minutes. The powdered sugar goes on while the buns are still hot, which sets it rather than leaving it loose.
The pitch on this page is to a mother packing a lunch box, and that pitch is almost the only thing separating the recipe from several of its neighbours: take out the currants and it is the same enriched sponge dough that appears a few pages away under another name. The repetition is deliberate, and it is the booklet’s method. A yeast company sells yeast by giving a household many reasons to buy a cake of it, so one dough is presented as a dozen separate goods, each with a name of its own and a short paragraph of praise attached. The currant bun is far older than the firm and older than compressed yeast itself. What is new on this page is the lunch box.