Parcels of Delight

I really, really enjoy baking bread; I feel like it calms my soul. Everything from plain sandwich/toast loaves to crumpets to special filled loaves, it all gets me excited (and hungry). I love the versatility of a good basic dough recipe, and I often do most of my creating from this foundation.
It was my turn to bake for a meeting this week, and I decided to bring out an old tried-and-true classic. A colleague asked me what they were called and I decided on 'parcels of delight'. Homemade bread rolls stuffed with blue cheese and homemade spicy pear chutney. Are your tastebuds tingling yet? They should be...

For this recipe, I use my basic white dough. The rest is really very easy:

1. Seperate the dough into 12 pieces, and shape into balls.

2. Flatten out a ball on your hand, and place a little bit of filling (I used blue cheese and pear chutney this time) in the middle.

3. Bring the edges of the flattened dough up to meet, pinch together to seal, and gently reform into a ball.

4. Place each filled roll seam-side down into a pre-greased muffin tin. Repeat steps with remaining 11 balls.

5. Spray with water and sprinkle with topping of choice (I used sesame seeds this time). Leave to rise as the oven heats up.

6. Bake at 180 degrees ish until golden brown and sound hollow to tap on their bums.

Serve warm from the oven, while the filling is still melty and delicious.

The fillings can be whatever you want them to be, just don't put too much in! So far I have made them with chocolate and jam, blue cheese and pear chutney, and cheddar cheese and tomato chutney, but really the sky is the limit. I don't bother to change the dough for sweet versus savory, but make sure you sprinkle something on top to identify which flavour is which!

Here is another delicious variation to my standard dough, for which the recipe is here.
For this loaf I modified the recipe to 1.5 cups white flour, and the remaining wholemeal flour. To the dough I added a good handful of rolled oats, around 1/4 cup sunflower seeds, and a tablespoon or so each of linseed (flaxseed) and sesame seeds. As the dough came together I added a little extra water to get it to the consistency I wanted. It turned out absolutely perfectly, and looks scarily similar to store-bought Molenberg, but tastes a whole lot better!