Playing with Bread for the Royal Wedding Buffet

An idea I had for the Kids Royal Buffet was to make a giant Lancashire cheese and Ham toastie.
First I had to make the bread its self. I uses an old recipe I have used for a long time which I think works great for this kind of loaf.
You would never know by looking at the picture above, but for the first time in my catering life, I added food colouring to my bread dough. Playing with food is what I am all about and will admit, it does not always work out as planned, as you can see the colour has gone from the surface of the bread !

My Bread recipe is-

• 2800g Bread flour
• 1680ml Warm milk
• 58g Butter
• 50g Salt
• 28g dry yeast
• 20g sugar

This recipe gives quite a large amount of bread dough, in this case I needed lots.

After the dough had risen I split the dough in to half and rolled out one half onto a large floured bread tray.

The second half was split into two and I added red colouring to one and blue to the other, lots of kneading was required for this.

I simply used the coloured doughs to make the shapes for the Union Jack, I rolled out then cut these to shape and placed them on top of the plain dough using a little water to stick them down.

As you can see, the colours look quite bright at the moment don't they!

I left the dough to prove a little more until it doubled in size, then baked it in the oven for about 40 minutes.

Garlic bread

While waiting I had a play with the left over dough and made a Union Jack Garlic Bread. I simply brushed over some home made garlic butter after it came out of the oven.

The final Bread result, Colour Gone!!!!

Red  and White bread

As a result of the baking, the colour seem to vanish, but I was still quite happy with the result. To finish of my giant toastie I trimmed of all the edges and sliced through the middle to add the filling grilling each layer. Surprisingly after slicing the bread I realised that the colour was in fact still in the dough .

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