Strawberry rolls with vanilla bean glaze

It’s been raining heavily here for the past few days and doesn’t look like letting up any time soon.  Does anybody else feel down in rainy weather?  Rain’s lovely, for a night or so, drumming on the roof in that comforting way while I’m reading and listening to music, but goes on for too long and it makes everything a bit flat and gray.

Anyway.  Enough feeling sorry for myself, nobody likes a crybaby!  I pulled my socks up (metaphorically anyway) and decided to do some baking.  I thought initially of blueberry and maple rolls but didn’t have blueberries so used the frozen pack of strawberries I had in the freezer instead.

I used a previous recipe for the rolls and made a sweet, sticky strawberry sauce for the filling.  A vanilla fragrant, sweet drizzle icing topped it off nicely.  These are quite a hearty roll, they would be great for breakfast or brunch with a cup of coffee.

 Recipe for strawberry rolls:

Dough:

1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup unsalted butter or baking margarine (skip the salt if you use margarine)
1/2 cup water
1 1/2 tspns active dry yeast
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
3 cups plain flour

Filling:

300g frozen, small strawberries
1 tspn good vanilla essence
1/3 cup raw caster sugar
2 x 15ml tblspns cornflour or cornstarch mixed in with 2 x 15ml tblspns water until smooth and runny consistency

Icing:

1 cup icing sugar
1/2 tspn vanilla bean paste
1-2 tblspns milk

Filling:

Place strawberries, sugar and vanilla essence in small pan, bring to high heat; as soon as sauce starts to become more fluid, add cornflour mixed with water and stir quickly to avoid lumps.  Turn down and simmer on low to medium heat until strawberries are soft and sauce is stickyish – this takes around 3 minutes.  Allow to cool completely before using.

Dough:

Warm the milk in a small saucepan until it comes to a boil then remove from heat.  Stir in butter until melted then add water and set aside.

In a large bowl, combine the milk mixture, yeast, sugar, salt, egg and 1 cup flour and whisk to combine.  Use a wooden spoon to stir in the remaining flour, 1/2 cup at a time, beating well after each addition.  When the dough has come together, turn it out onto a clean, lightly floured board and knead until smooth, elastic and dough springs back when pressed, about 10 minutes.

Roll dough into a 30x23cm rectangle.  Spread roll with strawberry filling.  Roll up dough, using a little water to seal the seam.

Grease and line a 20x30cm baking pan.

Cut roll into 8 slices using a very sharp knife.  Place rolls into baking pan.  Cover with greased cling wrap and a damp tea towel loosely and let rise in a warm, still place, about 1 hour (because of the strawberries, I didn’t want to leave them longer in case they got soggy).  I found they didn’t rise a huge amount, probably because of the filling, however rose in the oven very nicely.

Meanwhile, preheat oven to 190 degrees C.

Bake rolls in preheated oven for 25 minutes, or until golden brown.

Allow to cool in the tin for 20 minutes then drizzle with vanilla icing.  The idea is that the rolls still be warm but not so hot that the icing is absorbed too much.  The icing will harden after 20 minutes or so.

Icing:

Sift icing sugar into medium sized bowl.  Add vanilla paste to milk then add to icing sugar and mix until of drizzling consistency.  Make immediately before using.

Makes: 8 rolls, best eaten quite soon after icing.  If you really need to store them for future use, I would wrap them in cling wrap and freeze them after they’ve cooled completely