Sweet Bread Dough:
2 Cups Milk
2 Tbs Dry Yeast
½ to 1 cup Sugar (depending on the size of your sweet tooth)
2 large eggs
¼ cup of soft butter
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp of salt
5-6 cups of King Arthur White Flour (I dont recommend bread flour for coffeecake)
1 can of Poppy Seed (just kidding Terry will need 6 cans but 4 is probably one too many for most people)
Warm 2 cups of milk to no more than 85ºF (higher will kill the yeast). Put in a large mixing bowl and sprinkle the yeast over it. Cover it and place it in the microwave for 10 minutes.
Add the sugar and 2 cups of flour to the yeast and milk. Stir to a smooth consistency. Cover and place in a warm place for 20 to 30 minutes until quite bubbly.
Mix in eggs, butter, baking soda, and salt. Add 3 cups of flour all at once and, with dough hooks, mix briefly. This is the tricky part about having the experience to know if you need to add more flour. It depends on the water consistency of the milk, the weather conditions and maybe even the power of your mixer but you dont want the dough so sticky that you cant work with it or so full of flour that it is stiff and dry. Less flour is better than more. You can chill the dough before rolling it out to make a sticky dough easier to work with. Anyway: back to the tricky part: if after the brief mixing of the flour the batter is pulled away from the sides, well, somehow youve got too much flour already and probably should add a little milk. But, most likely it is starting to clump up in sticky lumps. At low speed add flour a few Tbs at a time until it pulls away from the side of the bowl. Stop adding flour and turn the mixer speed to knead and put a timer on to knead your dough for 3 5 minutes. It is important to time it because you are stretching the gluten fibers and the amount of time will relate to your personal preferences. Three minutes will create shorter fibers and give the bread a more cake-like texture while five minutes will create longer fibers and be more bread-like. Be careful not to go over five minutes as your resultant bread will be dry.
At this point you can remove the dough hooks and place the dough into the frig while you open cans of poppy seed and flour up a pastry cloth, wooden board or wherever you plan to roll out the dough. I also put a small bowl of water into the microwave and boil it so that I have a warm, steamy environment for the final rise. Its a little early at this point to turn on the oven , but you will need it to be at 400ºF in 30 to 60 minutes.
Either grease your pans or, better, is to fit them with non-stick foil or parchment paper.
This amount of dough should make four large Poppy Seed loaves or lots of little one. You could also make two large rings or use a variety of pans which is why I wouldnt open all the cans at the beginning. Doughs have variability to them and never seem to be the exact same size so one day you might make five loaves and another four. But, put all the dough on a floured surface and cut it into the number of pieces relating to your pans. Working on one at a time, roll it out without too much stretching of the dough. For a large loaf pan, I would try to make a rectangle of at least four times the width by slightly larger than the length of the pan. The dough should not be too thin or youll have volcanic eruptions of poppy seed which really makes a nasty mess of your oven. ¼ thick is about a minimum thickness. Spread it with poppy seed (as much as you want or dare) but try to leave an inch at the end for an overlap seal. Flour your hands and start to roll the dough. Try very hard NOT to pull or stretch during this process as it will make the end result sink and look unattractive. After youve rolled a log, try to pinch the sides closed and the overlap closed. Good luck. Then, since your log is now probably a little longer than the pan, carefully fold the sides under and lift the whole thing into the pan with the overlap flap on the bottom. Set into the warm place to rise which will take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour depending on environmental factors and the vitality of the yeast.
After the bread rises significantly (which again is a judgment call) to approximately double in size, place into the oven for 18 to 30 minutes (lesser for smaller pans, more for larger ones.) Since you initially may not know how many minutes and your oven may be inconsistent, you might have to try a few batches until you come up with the right number of minutes. NOTE: all the rising of the bread in the oven happens in the first ten minutes so do NOT open your oven to check the bread until after that time period. If you do check a large loaf, for example, at 23 minutes and it looks golden brown, you might be fine to remove it. Id cook it at least 25 minutes or, next time, Id drop my oven temperature to 385ºF and cook it for 25 minutes. Remove, and Terry, do not eat right away you will burn your mouth and the coffeecake will not have the additional 15 to 30 minutes it needs to finish cooking in the middle. After 30 minutes, you can go ahead and eat it, or let it cool completely and frost it with a thin butter cream icing.
Number of servings: one for Terry, two for Sharon, several for most people, infinity for Mother
Number of calories: none of us want to know.
Storage: not applicable for Terry. Never refrigerate but it does store well in the freezer.