Rainbow Bagels (GBBO Technical 3)

 

This technical challenge was so much fun. I've wanted to try making bagels for a while, and so I was so excited to finally try them, with the added twist of rainbow colors. The recipe is of course Paul Hollywood's and can be found here.

The dough itself was pretty easy to whip together, and then I weighed and separated it into five smooth balls. Then, the fun part. Dying it!

It took a lot more time and effort (and food coloring!) to get the dough to be these vibrant colors than I expected! I had to knead the food coloring into each one for 5-10 minutes. Gwen was very eager to hand me each bottle of food coloring as I needed it. By the end, I had some pretty colorful hands to show for it.

The real challenge of these was in the shaping. I had to roll each one into a rectangle, layer them on top of each other, cut them into even strips, twist them, roll them, and then fasten the two ends together to get the correct shape. 

At this point I could have trimmed the edges on these to make them all even in shape, but I didn't really want to waste any of the dough by trimming so I decided not to. Thus, mine are not all uniform in size, but what Paul Hollywood doesn't know won't kill him. 

After some gentle, careful shaping, I had six bagels ready to be boiled!

(Ignore the poor quality of this photo, as the steam made it pretty blurry. Actually all of my in-progress pictures for these posts are just basic iPhone snapshots because I haven't had the time to try to do anything better than that until the bake is finished). Anyway. For some reason, I always was a bit intimidated by the boiling part of bagels. I thought it would be difficult to get just right. However, it turned out to be incredibly simple. I had no reason to be so intimidated by it. 

Fresh from the oven! As you can see, the shaping of mine could be better, and they could definitely be more even in size, but none of them came apart and I'm proud of that! Also the two on the top turned out basically picture perfect. We let these cool and ate them toasted the next morning. 

They were delicious! A really good plain bagel, that looked so festive and fun for our anniversary and birthday week! I am definitely going to make them again, and if I ever have occasion to throw a brunch extravaganza party, these are definitely going on the menu. They were also a big hit with the girls.

Gwen has already asked me to make them again for her. Yum!