Happy Chinese New Year!

Hello everyone,

As most of you know, Chinese New Year is February 19 this year and to celebrate the Year of the Goat, I baked one at my bakery I work part-time at. The quality is a little shoddy on my cellphone camera but I'm still really proud of it considering it's my 3rd decorated bread I've done at work!

Originally, the head baker was going to shape the bread, but he forgot about the spare dough until just before his shift ended. So he entrusted the dough with me and this is what I did:

Firstly if any of you are interested, the leftover dough used was an enriched-yeast dough used for savoury meat rolls. I rolled it into one big oblong rectangle first and stretched one end to form the head, using a sharp pizza-cutter to shape out the neck. The scrap dough from the neck was rested for a while to relax the gluten while I worked trimming off the body of the goat and shaping the tail. When relaxed, I rolled two pieces of scrap dough as though I were shaping a baguette and flattened them slightly with a rolling pin to make the horns. Scrap pieces were lined on the horns to make them look curvy but I think next time I'll try to roll them thinner to make it look more attractive. The curves on a real horn are more like imprints right? but the curves I made stuck out a little like a sore thumb.

The rest of the scraps were shaped roughly into rectangles for the feet and trimmed into shape with the pizza cutter. The scraps from that were rolled again into a tapered cylinder and folded in half to make the hooves. The last tidbits I had left were amalgamated and used to make the numbers "2015", but I guess I worked too quickly and they came out a little unreadable after baking. 

A quick slash with the pizza cutter gave way to the mouth of the goat and the big round end of a piping tip was pressed into the eye spots to make a cavity for the raisins. Little snips of kitchen scissors were judiciously used to give the goat a little shaggy texture which disappeared a bit after the dough was proofed in a commercial proofer for around 30 minutes. After drying a bit, I eggwashed the dough, pressed the raisins in a little further into the eye cavity to make sure they didn't pop right off while baking and put the pan in the deck oven for 20 minutes at 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

In total, I probably spent an hour from start to finish. My boss was pretty satisfied with the end result and so was the head baker who congratulated me the week later while we were sipping some coffee together. It was a great experience to get creative using bread as a medium, and I highly recommend you to try it some time whenever you have a little extra dough kicking around. 

Cheers,

Justin C