pretzels

I have been wanting to do pretzels, for a long time, after eating the cinnamon sugar coated lovelies from Aunt Anne. I have been searching around for a recipe closed to Aunt Anne's and I found this with numerous pages of good reviews from Imperial Kitchen. Those ladies there are wonder homebakers, so many can't be wrong.

The recipe calls for simple ingredients, readily available at home. It didnt take me long to prepare the dough and perhaps due to the large ratio of yeast used, the dough rised pretty fast. The most challenging part, which I initially thought, was dipping the twisted pretzels into the soda bath. I had imagine a gluey messy batch of shapeless dough but my surprise, it was almost effortless. I did it almost as swift as the workers from AA (hehe). The difficult part was actually shaping them, it wasn't easy, to me.

As for the taste, it is soft like AA but I think they didn't only use melted butter to coat the cinnamon sugar. I remember tasting caramel, maybe next time. I'm happy with these for breakfast today.

Pretzels

1 1/4 cup warm water (start with 1 cup for Singapore's climate)
1 tbsp + 1/4 tsp yeast
3 3/4 cup all purpose flour
3/4 cup + 2 tbsp powdered sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp vegetable oil

Bath

4 cups warm water
1/4 baking soda (or 4 tbsp)


1. Activate the yeast in 1 cup warm water
2. Mix all the ingredients and knead until you get a soft dough
3. Cover the dough with clingwrap and leave it prove until double its size
4. Divide the dough into 10 portions
5. Roll each dough into long strips and form into pretzels
6. Dip each pretzel into the soda bath, quickly dry it on a piece of kitchen towel
7. Place them on a greased baking sheet and bake for 8 - 10min at 220deg preheated oven
8. Brush the baked pretzels with melt butter and coat with cinnamon sugar