Recipe: milk bread buns with marmalade cream and chocolate hazelnut crema

Fluffy, cloud-like buns filled with velvety cream and chocolate hazelnut cream

Milk bread will forever be one of my favourite things to bake. The dough is always such a soft, cloud-like dream to work with and the finished result of buns with their golden, glistening tops and core of milky white are the most joyous thing to both look at and eat. Satisfying in more ways than one, they are incredibly versatile in terms of what you do with them. My prefered way to eat them is fresh from the oven, still warm, and eaten simply as they are, pulling thick threads of the creamy baked dough off one by one. I have made iced buns with them, grilled cheese, toasted them and eaten them with jam–they are delicious in both savoury and sweet contexts. This particular recipe sees the buns sandwiched with a thick layer of whipped cream that is spiked with spoonfuls of orange marmalade–a comforting and nostalgic flavour for me. This cream creates a little moat for a small but delicious puddle of chocolate hazelnut crema that works so beautifully with the subtle bittersweet bite of the marmalade.

As with most milk bread recipes, this one uses a tangzhong. This helps to create the pillowy soft texture that milk bread is known for, and also keeps the bread softer for longer.

I also went on to make tiny little french toasts with some of the buns which I would highly recommend doing should you have any leftovers from this recipe. My tip is to use heavy creamy instead of milk for the mixture that you dredge the bread in, and instead of adding sugar to the eggy mixture, I sprinkle the toasts with light brown sugar as they toast in butter (always butter!) in the pan. It creates a very subtle crunch on the outside and caramelises slightly when toasted in the butter.