Iced Fingers

This is the penultimate technical bake, the last challenge before the final, very tense and exciting stuff.  This week's challenge was iced buns, something which I have never been that fussed about, I have always found them to be rather boring and they would be my last choice if I was in a bakery.  I hoped that doing this challenge would change my mind about iced buns and that I would come out loving them like I did with the tarte au citron, unfortunately this was not the case.

Bread is not my strong suit and, though iced buns are not exactly bread, the mixture is more of a bread than anything else.  I did find it very strange making them, the mix was a sort of cross between bread and cake mix, using both yeast and eggs and flour.  I did everything the recipe said but found it fairly difficult; the dough was very wet and subsequently hard to knead, then it did not rise well when I left it - altogether a very bad start.  After I had left it to rise (or not) I attempted to make it into finger shapes, this also failed - my bread shaping ability is absolutely appalling and these fingers would have been considered bad even against a short, fat, arthritic hand.  Anyway I stuck with them and this is what they looked like when they had proven and been cooked in the oven.

I give myself one thing, they did smell very nice when they came out and, though not quite perfectly shaped, to say the least, they looked OK.  I thought that perhaps, once they had been finished up with jam, cream and icing they would look much better and taste alright so I made up three, one each for my parents and myself.

I don't know if my taste was influenced by the excessively large meal I had just eaten or by my longstanding dislike of iced fingers, but I did not like them, I thought they were much too big, dry, boring and, what is much worse, I think they were not baked fully.  They had that horrible doughy taste about them which you get when bread is not baked to perfection.  My mum agreed with me that they were underbaked though my dad liked them, so at least I had one happy customer.  Anyway, this is a picture of the final product, I did not do them all up together to avoid a lot of waste so I'm afraid you cannot judge me on the full dozen.

Yes my icing was a little too thin and that is why it dribbled, so sorry Paul Hollywood, though to be honest, I thought that your iced buns looked quite messy with the method of icing that you used, I'm not saying that mine are better, just that they could have been a little neater.

Well, I haven't exactly sold these iced buns but, if you are good at baking bread and you like iced buns then here is the link to the recipe so you can try for yourself, I hope you do better than I did.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/iced_fingers_34133