Tea with Jane Austen: Bath Buns

During her travels to London and Paris, my wonderful, dear friend brought me back the cutest souvenir. A little recipe book called Tea with Jane Austen: Recipes inspired by her novels and letters by Pen Vogler. Even though I am unable to eat the recipes myself, I thought I'd try to bake my way through the book, like in the movie Julie & Julia, although hopefully these will not be quite as complicated.
      I've already attempted the first recipe in the book: Bath Buns! This semi-sweet pastry is wonderful for breakfast or afternoon tea! I'm not quite sure what size they are supposed to be...the recipe says it makes 12, but I think I ended up with 11. Oh well.
      You'd think the time consuming part would be in the baking. No. Nope. This is old fashioned bread making. After mixing all the ingredients, you let the dough rise for 2-3 hours, and, the fun part, you get to punch the air out of the dough! I felt like a real baker for the first time in my life. Also, once you have your buns formed, you let the dough rise for another hour. So all in all, just the prep took about 4.5 hours. But it only bakes for about 15 minutes. No time at all.
This is definitely not a slapdash pastry. You need to take time, read the instructions fully, measure things out. As my friend Kylee likes to tell me, baking is a precise art. And I am not a precise person. But I tried to do pretty good with these.


Well, mom said they're pretty good! I might get myself a few other opinions. She's biased!
Tune in to see what recipe is on the next page!

From the mouth of the chef,
     HER