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Meet the most adorable bread design: bow tie buns! These are quite simple to make — a low-effort, high-reward shape to level up your bread.
I saw these buns trending on 下厨房 (xiachufang), a Chinese cooking website. People were making all kinds of bread in this shape: mantou, mochi-stuffed bread, and so on!
The design immediately stole my heart, and I decided to try it on my go-to (vegan) dough recipe. Needless to say, they turned out so heckin’ cute. :’)
I used pink pitaya powder from Suncore Foods (code: vegamelonSF15) to naturally color these buns. You may omit the coloring, or use something like matcha or blue spirulina — whatever your heart desires!
To see the steps of shaping these buns, simply scroll down to the recipe!
More colorful bread recipes, for inspo:
Cute & fluffy bow tie buns (vegan)
Ingredients
- 250 g bread flour | 2 cups; or all-purpose flour
- 3 g instant or quick-rise yeast | 1 tsp
- 25 g sugar | 2 tbsp; such as pure cane sugar
- 2 g sea salt | 1/4 tsp
- 28 g neutral oil | 2 tbsp; or melted vegan butter
- 125 g plant-based milk | 1/2 cup
- 12 g pink pitaya powder | 3 tsp*; optional, for color
Instructions
- Combine all the dough ingredients. Knead until a smooth and elastic dough forms, about 20-30 minutes by hand.
- Place the dough into a bowl, cover, and let rise for 1-2 hours.
- Once the dough doubled in volume, punch it down and divide into 8 equal pieces. Flatten each piece into a round disk.
- Make 2 close cuts from top to the center, and 1 cut from bottom to center, leaving some space intact at the center. Then, make 2 equally-spaced cuts each on the left and right, so that each side has 3 equally-spaced portions.
- Fold one side's center flap across the top, towards the opposite side.
- Push the outer flaps to the center, towards each other.
- Flip the center flap back to its original side, so that it now lies on top of the joined outer flaps.
- Repeat steps 5-7 for the other side.
- Finally, take the top strip and bring it down over the center.
- Wrap the strip over the back of the bow tie.
- Repeat the shaping process for remaining pieces, then place the buns onto a lined baking sheet and let rise for 45 minutes.
- Once they are puffy, dust the buns with flour and bake in a preheated oven at 350F / 180C for 25 minutes. Let cool and enjoy!
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