White chocolate club med (Darwin) bread

This week the Alpha Baker project is the rather puzzling White Chocolate Club Med Bread. It's puzzling because it references a family holiday resort company, and also because it's bread with white chocolate so it's not immediately obvious on which occasions you might wheel this out. According to Rose, they give out this bread to guests at Club Med, but I think that only increases the puzzlement rather than clearing anything up. Anyway it turns out that it's not difficult to make and it is definitely delicious, in a dessert kind of way.

I was wondering when I would really make this bread but then I realised that if I ever open Club Med Darwin, I'll already have the bread-making part of running a resort down pat. The rest I'll have to wing.

I'm thinking the bread could be handed out to guests by a friendly local (crocodile). What do you think?

Meet Burt, he's a charming fellow from Crocosaurus Cove. Look at that big welcoming smile.

I'd popped into the laundry on Saturday when I was making this bread, when I heard a loud, catastrophic-sounding crash from the kitchen. I rushed in to find the stand-mixer on the floor, having worked itself off the bench while it was kneading the dough. Luckily the dough was still in the bowl and when I tried the mixer again, it still seemed to work. 

The business letter fold is my favourite because you get to handle the dough and it increases the lovely puffiness as you fold. My dough wasn't too sticky and was pretty easy to handle.

Despite the truly awful rainbow of colour and shadow in the photos, you can see the process of wrapping the white chocolate encrusted dough in another plain envelope of dough to avoid burning chocolate on the outside crust. It was a bit finicky but I could see the reason for it. I'm unusually zen about the finickiness required for this recipe because I can only see myself making this on special occasions. (I once, following a Christmas biscuit recipe*, cut the heads off cloves and ground them, so the amount of effort I'm willing to go to depends on the occasion)

*Strange that the clove beheading instruction isn't in the biscuit recipe version available on the web.

The loaf came out quite nicely although I could have let it bake for a bit longer. I broke the rules as usual and cut the delicious hot crust off after 15 minutes; okay maybe it was only 10 minutes. It made the loaf slightly spread-footed but it was worth it. This bread was (not too) sweet and moreish and I think best eaten without any adornment, hot or cold. 

So if you're the kind of person who will happily scarf down bread/cake/pastry at any time for no good reason (I'm looking at you, phylliscaroline) then this is the bread for you.

Next week we're making Cookie Strudel.