Individual choc chip brioche

My kids love pain au chocolat for breakfast but my baking skills haven’t quite reached that level yet. So instead I came up with individual choc chip brioches. They’re about the same size as pain au chocolat but made with spelt flour and so keep the teens going longer. They’re also not that difficult to make although you do have to get quite physical with the dough.

 

Ingredients:

250 gms white spelt flour

2 tsp dry yeast

1 tsp sugar

1 tsp Vitamin C

3 tbsps warm water

2 eggs

75 gms unsalted butter

75 dark choc chips or dark chocolate, chopped

1. Activate the dry yeast. Add the yeast and sugar to the warm water and cover. Leave for about fifteen minutes until it is frothy and then stir.
2. Mix the flour and Vitamin C in a large bowl. (Add quick yeast at this point if you are using that instead of dry yeast.)
3. Add the yeast mixture and the eggs. Mix and knead into a smooth and pliable dough. This is messy but nothing to what’s coming!
4. Roll the dough into a ball, cover the bowl with a cloth and leave in a draft-free place for an hour or until it has doubled in volume.
5. Cut the butter into small cubes and add this and the choc chips to the dough.
6. Work the butter and chips into the dough, squeezing and kneading to incorporate the butter.
7. This is the fun bit! Pick up the ball of dough and throw it back into the bowl. 200 times! Don’t worry, once you’ve done it a few times your arm won’t ache so much. The dough will go from being moderately sticky to really sticky by the time you’ve finished, and that’s just what you want.
8. Oil the brioche tins. (I actually use silicon brioche trays as they are flexible and you can pop the brioche out by pushing from underneath.)
9. With floured hands, break off chunks of dough big enough to half fill a mould, roll into balls and place in the moulds.
10. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave in a warm place to rise. This will take about an hour. After about half an hour switch on the oven to 180 degrees fan, 200 conventional. It's important that the oven is good and hot so that it doesn't cool down too much when you pop the brioche in.
11. Gently brush the surface of each brioche with milk (or egg if you’re feeling extravagant).
12. Bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes.

Some kids might find these are not quite sweet enough, what with the lack of sugar in the dough and the dark chocolate. If that’s so, add a little sugar to the flour before the first knead and see how they like it then. In our family we like them just as they are. They keep for a few days and spruce up nicely if blasted in the microwave for 20 seconds per bun. That’s just enough to melt the chocolate a little and let its flavours suffuse the dough. Is your mouth watering yet?