Ham & Cheese Bread Cup

Post-Christmas..I'm sure many of you would have left-over of turkey and ham. Well, we didn't have turkey but plenty of ham left. Beside having them with my favorite instant noodles, decided to bake ham & cheese bread. Munch Ministry site has been popping with a lot of similar bread but in cups. I bought some pretty cupcake liners from Taobao spree earlier and this is a good chance to put them at use.

I picked a recipe from this book and had my friend helped to translate it to English for me. This book uses tangzhong (a mixture of bread flour with liquid cooked over stove until it is 65C).

Adding tangzhong into bread helps to make it soft & fluffy! Apparently if you get the tz cooked right the bread remain soft for days.

Ham & Cheese bread in cup

Tangzhong

50g bread flour

250g milk/water or 50:50 water & milk

To prepare tangzhong, combine bread flour and milk into a saucepan and cook over low fire. Keep stirring until mixture thicken and trailing lines are formed. Temperature of the mixture should be 65c hence the name 65c tangzhong.

Dough

540g bread flour

86g sugar

8g salt

11g instant yeast

86g egg

59g dairy whipped cream

54g milk

9g milk powder

184g tangzhong

49g unsalted butter

How?
- Using your bread maker (you can still follow these steps if you are using a mixer or hand), add all wet ingredients first - milk, tangzhong,egg, whipped cream.
- Follow by all the dry ingredients - flour, milk powder, sugar, salt & yeast. It's very important to place both salt and yeast to be far apart.
- Knead until dough is form. Using the bread maker it'll take approximately 10 minutes. Add in butter and continue kneading.
- Your bread is ready for proofing when you have achieved the window-pane effect on the dough. Proof the dough for 60 minutes covered with a piece of damp cloth or clingwrap.
- At the end of proofing, your dough should be at least double in size. Punch out air from the dough and gv it a few quick knead.
- Divide the dough into small rounds of 50g - 60g depending on how big is the cupcake liner used. Alternatively, you can shape the dough any way you like, wrapped, twist or rolled.
- Place shaped dough in the cupcake liner and put any topping of your choice. For this, I used honey baked ham with cheese slices.
- Once done, let the shaped dough do its last proofing for 45 minutes.
- Preheat oven at 170C and bake bread for 25 minutes.
- Store in airtight container when bread has completely cooled down.

Baking in progress

Bread in loaf tin

Ham & Cheese bread