You know how you can buy frozen pastries and bake them. For some reason I thought that commercial stuff must have some mystery ingredient which allows this to happen. Surely any dough I made at home would not survive being frozen?  So up to now I have never tried.  A few weeks back I made a big quantity of a sweet enriched dough, and froze two portions of it wrapped up tightly in clingfilm.

I came across it on Friday evening and took one lot out of the freezer, put it in the fridge to defrost (as advised by Susieq on Dan’s forum)  and then forgot it till Sunday night (not as advised but I’m very forgetful).

Feeling guilty I moved it into the kitchen while we had supper to come up to room temperature, thinking all the while this is going to be hopeless.  So after supper, I rolled it out, part of the dough had gone a little bit hard, but I sort of ignored that, like you do. Then I brushed the dough with melted butter, sprinkled on a mixture of old cake crumbs (slices of cake, baked, and whizzed and frozen), vanilla sugar, cinammon, patted some sultanas on top. Rolled it up into a log. Sliced it into chunks, flattened them into 10 cms rounds, left them to rise (they didn’t rise much) for an hour, sprinkled a bit more sugar over the top and baked them at 180 Fan for 18 minutes and this was the result.  It works! Yummy!  And the dough takes up a lot less space in the freezer than bags of frozen buns…..

Sultana Buns from previously frozen dough

A Quick Edit to this post in September 2010:

Happiness is a well risen loaf of bread!

I have also very successfully frozen pizza dough and used it for pizza three weeks later and last weekend I used a ball of frozen pizza dough as the paté fermentée element in this delicious five grain bread I made for Mellow Bakers.