Time: 4:30 with 2.5 hours of inactive time
Ingredients for Bread
575 g Bread Flour
60 g Cake flour
102 g sugar
6 g salt
8 g quick active yeast
32 g whole powdered milk
2 eggs and water to equal 409 g of liquid
64 g of butter at room temp.
Milk Strussel Ingredients
2 sticks of butter (225 g) at room temp.
170 g of powdered sugar
3 g of grated Parmesan cheese and a pinch of salt
42 g of egg (use one egg and set aside the some of the white)
210 g whole milk powder
To make the Dough:
1. Mix the dry ingredients together in the kitchen aid mixer bowl. Make a well in the middle of the ingredients and pour the egg and water mixture.
2. Use a dough hook and pix the ingredients together on setting 1 for 4 minutes.
3. Add the butter to the mixture and then mix the ingredients together on setting 2 for about 15 minutes.
4. Take a marble sized piece of dough and see if you can stretch it paper thin. If it breaks easily, mix it for another minute or two. It will be sticky, don't worry. That will make the bread nice and soft.
6. Place the ball in an oiled bowl and set it on a trivet in the instant pot set on the low yogurt function. You can also do this in the oven with the light turned on. This step is to ferment or poof the dough) Allow the dough to rise for about an hour or until it doubles in size.
7. Place the risen dough onto a lightly floured silpat mat and cut the dough into 60 gram chunks. Tuck the edges in to the bottom to form a smooth ball. Place each ball on a parchment or silpat lined baking sheet. Let the balls rise for about 15 minutes.
8. Meanwhile, make the filling by putting in all the ingredients for the filling into a mixing bowl and stirring until it resembles cookie dough.
9. Take one of the balls of dough and flatten it a bit to make it the diameter of about 8 centimeters. Using a scale, place the bowl of filling onto it, tare it, and scoop out about 30 grams of the filling. Wrap the dough around the filling, making sure the filling is completely sealed inside. Check out the pictures below for one way to do it.
11. Take the trays out and pre-heat the oven to 355 degrees F. In the meantime, take the rest of the egg white, add a splash of water and make an egg wash. Brush the tops of the bread with the egg wash and optional, sprinkle some fine desiccated coconut on top.
13. When cooled, store in airtight bags or containers. These also freeze fairly well. So good and so soft!
I also made a few changes to her recipe by replacing the salt in the filling with grated Parmesan cheese. Trust me, this is a good substitute from another recipe that I tried a long time ago. I also increased the amount of filling because it seemed like we ran out of filling for the first 2 batches. I ended up with an extra Tablespoon of filling, which is fine because it's quite tasty on toast.
The total process took about 4.5 hours from start to finish, but you can easily do other things while you are waiting for the dough to rise in the oven.