Polo bun topping comparison recipes

Rotiboy style

Coffee topping on ready-made bun with choc chip filling (makes 6): yoon noong: uses ready made bread and pipe on. Stuff choc chips in bread. Can't get topping recipe as text obscured.

Coffee topping on normal white bread slices (makes 2): Lenardy: 60g butter, 50g icing sugar, 1 egg, 2 tsp instant coffee powder mixed with ½ tsbp hot water and dissolved; 70g flour => pipe over 4 slices of bread

Mexican mocha Brioche bun in KA (makes 6): xiaochuniang. Bread flour brioche. Topping 1tsp instant coffee dissolve in 20ml warm water. Cream 60g butter, 50g icing sugar and pinch salt. Add coffee in several batches. Add 30g beaten egg. Fold in 70g cake flour and 5g cocoa. Pipe on the topping. Note smooth and rough sides, roll ⅓ dough into a ball then wrap ⅔ dough over the ball. This keeps the ball tall rather than flattening out when proofing.

Coffee bun by hand (makes 6): Delicious day Bread flour brioche. Uses 36g or 3tbsp butter, 36g sugar, pinch salt, 28g/half egg, 4tbsp/42g bread flour, 2g instant coffee, 1tbsp/6g warm water. Pipe on.

HK style

HK style by hand: Ali's kitchen Brioche Bread flour. Milk powder with plain flour to make cookie

HK polo bao in mixer (in cantonese) with butter inside: Anchor Sarah reel Brioche Bread flour. Need to keep the bun dough cold (below 28 deg C). Change from dough hook to scraper beater (because bowl is cold). Cookie dough topping has to be rolled out and pasted on top.

Soft milk bread using sponge method with bread flour (makes 9 buns) by Miki Food and she adds red bean filling topped up with what she calls souffle milk topping which is creaming sugar and butter but no flour added. Unfortunately the recipe is very brief and method isn't very clearly articulated so doesn't say to pipe on the topping or to roll it out (which is very difficult!)

All-in yoghurt banana muffins

Last week I tried tweaking my banana loaf by incorporating tea cake with banana bread. It was a sticky disaster that hardly rose, and it got more slimey by the day. (According to BK, that is. I didn't think it was slimey, to me, it was just what fruit did as it matured over time).

Today, I thought I'd try a yoghurt recipe because I had heard so much about the properties of yoghurt in creating an impossibly moist tender crumb. After checking out a few recipes, I settled on this one by Mom's Dinner because it didn't involve too much hard work like hauling out my stand mixer or even the weighing scale. It just used simple American cups. This recipe has been upsized for 16 to 17 muffins (depending on how full you fill each muffin cup), and some little changes eg reduced sugar and swapped half brown sugar and half white sugar

Ingredients

4 bananas, mashed

3 eggs

⅛ tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla extract

6 tbsp (85g) butter, softened at room temp

½ C brown sugar

½ C white sugar

½ C Greek yoghurt

2¼C flour

1½ tsp baking powder

1½ tsp baking soda

¼C raisins

¼C mini or chopped up choc chips (reserve a few wholes ones for deco)

¼C chopped walnuts (reserve a few whole ones for deco)

Method (makes 16 to 17 muffins)

1. Prepare the muffin tin either with home made muffin papers or cupcake liners.

2. In a bowl (I housed everything in my sifter), combine and sift in the flour, baking powder, and baking soda.

3. In another bowl, mash up the banana until no big chunks left. Add the salt.

4. In a third bowl, cream the butter and sugar by hand until pale using a wooden spoon. Add in the yogurt and mix. It will seem to curdle but do your best.

5. (Optional step: helps the ingredients 'suspend' in the batter rather than sinking to the bottom) In a fourth bowl, mix the choc chips, nuts, and raisins with 2 tbsp of flour and toss through.

6. Combine the wet ingredients: add the creamed mixture to the bananas and mix well. Fold through the floured nuts, raisins and choc chips.

7. Sift in the flour in several goes, folding only twice or three times each after each addition. After everything is done, it's ok to have some pockets of dry flour. Try not to overmix otherwise the batter becomes over-worked and you get a tough muffin.

8. Using a ½C ice cream or cookie dough scoop, scoop out into line muffin tins. Fill till about ⅔ full (17 muffins) for the muffins to rise up just till the top edge of the cupcake liner, or all the way if you want a peak overflowing dome (16 muffins).

9. Distribute the whole walnuts and choc chips and gently push them into the top of each muffin.

10. Bake at 175 deg C for 16 to 17 mins until golden brown on top. A skewer should come out dry except for a few crumbs (be careful not to stab a banana or choc chip).

11. Allow to cool in the tin for about 10 minutes then remove to a cooling rack. Best eaten 10 to 15 minutes out of the oven. If eaten when cool, it would be nice to reheated around 10s in the microwave, and even further lashings of butter!