Thoughts? Xmas tree bread attempt
The inspiration for this little experiment was a brochure of seasonal offerings from Boulangerie Au Pain Doré, Montréal. The tree on the right-hand side of the picture (from their website) was made, I believe, with baguette bread dough. The hard copy brochure show a little more of the breads. That's a candy cane on the left and a wreath at the top. The trunk of the tree is a bit longer than shown and looks about mini-baguette size in diameter.
I could only find examples of sweet yeast tree-shaped breads online. Planned to make a pain de campagne from James MacGuire this week anyway, so thought I'd give it a whirl. As you'll see, the results are only moderately successful. The branches don't have the same definition as the bread from Au Pain Doré.
What I did was to shape the dough and snip into it with scissors to create the branches. Hoped it would work the same as when you make epi rolls. It's a soft, somewhat sticky dough. Perhaps one really does need to use a baguette recipe?
Here's what the pain de campagne dough looks like when shaped round as per the original recipe.