SMS: Bee Stings!

This week’s Sweet Melissa Sunday treat was Bee Stings, which Melissa says in the recipe notes were created out of her love for doughnuts, only in a brioche dough form. This is certainly one of the most eye-catching recipes (with a rare photo, to boot) in the book and I was delighted it was chosen only two months into our group’s adventure. In addition to being one the most intriguing recipes, I think it’s safe to say it’s also one of the more time-consuming ones in the book, as thus far, every other one has been fairly easy. I intended to start my dough on Friday evening so we could have the buns for breakfast on Saturday, but that didn’t happen. I then spent most of Saturday doing practical things like cleaning my house and exercising, so I didn’t start the dough until Saturday night at 9:45 PM.



The good news about starting this project so late was that I was able to benefit from the other bakers’ experiences by reading the Problems and Questions section of the Sweet Melissa site, which was definitely helpful, as I’m a novice when it comes to yeast breads. I knew going in that I would need to add extra flour (I ended up adding about two and a half extra tablespoons to my third of a recipe) to the dough and not bake the buns as long as the recipe specified (twenty minutes was perfect). The recipe said that the dough should form into a ball within ten to fifteen minutes; mine took twenty-five. Since I started so late, I used rapid-rise yeast and let them rise for about an hour, though I probably could have gotten away with a little less time. When I did the second rise this morning, I had to add a second round of warm water to the oven and it took about an hour for them to rise. Luckily I had no trouble with the vanilla pastry cream filling – yummy – or the honey caramel glaze – also yummy! Oh, a did have a little trouble getting the pastry cream into the buns; I was scared I would overdo it and they'd ooze, but I ended up not filling them enough.


I think my expectations were a little bit too high. I thought these buns were pretty good, but probably not something I would make again. I am always happy when a SMS or TWD recipe gets me to try new things, though, and I’m glad I got a little more experience working with yeast bread. The honey caramel glaze was delicious and super-simple, so I will definitely be topping other treats with it! I gave this recipe a 7.5 for Deliciousness and a 5 for Effort, giving it an EDR of 1.5. Many thanks to Jaime of Good Eats 'n Sweet Treats for selecting one of my bookmarked recipes. You can find the recipe for Bee Stings on Jaime’s site and see how the other bakers fared via the SMS blogroll.