Christmas milk buns

 This is a latin bread type called pan de leche or milk bread .It is a very rich and milky bread .Athough it sounds redundant, the simplest thing to accompany these Christmas milk buns is, precisely, a glass of milk or its vegan alternative to taste, but nothing prevents us from giving it more spark with cocoa powder or preparing a hot chocolate. They are also delicious dipped in morning coffee, or with a spicy infusion in the middle of the afternoon. As they are not excessively sweet, we can always encourage ourselves to spread them with jam.

After 48 hours they are already dry and lose quality, you can reheat them. If you are not going to eat all of them, it is best to freeze them freshly made, once they have cooled

They can be decorated after baked with a simple icing of icing sugar and water or milk, and sprinkle with nuts or decorate with edible Christmas decorations, or they can also be added to the dough before baking.

Total time ;1 hour

Cooking ;15 m minutes

 Resting ;2 h 30 minutes

Quantity ;10

Ingredients

 300 ml milk

1 Vanilla bean  or 1 tsp of vanilla extract

10 g Fresh baker's yeast or 1 tsp dry yeast

500 g of Plain flour

50 g sugar

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

 cardamom, 1/4 teaspoon

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon salt

2 Eggs

 60 g of  Butter

Preparation

Try to have all the ingredients at room temperature, especially the butter and the egg. Put the milk in a saucepan and heat with the . Once it starts to boil, turn off, cover and let it infuse while it cools. But it should be warm, so that it does not burn.

Strain the warm milk into a bowl and crumble the yeast on top; add two tablespoons of the  flour and mix. Leave 20-30 minutes, until the yeast begins to ferment. Meanwhile, mix the rest of the flour with the spices, salt and sugar in a large bowl or in the mixer. Form a hole in the center.

Pour the risen dough and one of the slightly beaten eggs into this hole. Begin to work the dough until everything is more or less integrated. Now add the softened butter, chopped, and continue working until smooth. Cover and rest for 30 minutes.

Now knead  until you have a smooth, elastic and homogeneous dough, wet but not excessively sticky. If we do it by machine, about 10 minutes will be enough; by hand it is better to take about 20 minutes. If it sticks too much, alternate short standing times and kneading.

Form a ball, place in a container lightly greased with neutral oil (sunflower) or butter, and cover. Let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about two hours. Prepare the molds, the rolling pin and two baking trays; lightly beat the other egg in a bowl.

Preheat the oven to 200ºC.  Roll the dough on the work surface, knead a little and cover; let it relax 5 minutes. Now, roll out to a thickness of 1 cm. Cut the portions with the cutters and distribute on the trays, leaving room for them to rise between them.

Knead again and make buns from the excess dough until it is finished. Brush the buns with the beaten egg and leave to rest for 20 minutes. Finally  baked, lowering the temperature to 180ºC for about 15 minutes, until they are golden brown . Let cool on a rack.