knead to bake

this is about breaking bread with people, and it's lovely.
oh my god i just finished baking the cinnamon buns. you'll find that there are a few lapses in my photos. at those moments where photos are lacking, it's because my hands were really not fit to take photos.

first is the kneading. from the moment i added the liquids into the flour mixture and put my hands in to knead, i could no longer hold a camera, because the mixture was a disgusting sticky sludge. and who knew it would be an hour before i finally managed to knead the whole mess into a decent looking dough. yes, one hour - manual kneading.

bertinet chooses to call this 'working the dough', because french technique differs from the british/american technique. it's all about getting air and life into the dough. anyhow, the inital dough was so sticky i didn't know how to knead it the way my american book teaches. so i did the way that bertinet decribes. (he doesn't recommend the way the american book teaches sobs.) however, he says the kneading will take five minutes, but i really took one hour before i could get the dough into the right texture!
after that i left it for rising, during which it really puffed up. and the metal bowl i put the dough in felt so warm! i think the yeast produces heat as it feeds on the sugars.
i conjured up a nice cinnamon-butter mixture to spread onto the rolled-out dough. then came the big screw-up. i used a knife to cut the dough, and it went all ugly and unrolling. cinnamon butter was squeezing out onto the table. omg then i got even more flustered and in the end the buns just looked like a mess. that's why i couldn't take photos of the cutting process too.
i only managed to make one tin with decent-looking buns, but even then those swelled so big during the baking process. never mind, 姑姑 will take them and eat them.

but once again, after everything messed up, then i realised what i should have done! i should have used my bench scraper to cut the roll, not the knife =(
ok, so the oven was a little too hot, and the top was slightly scorched; i'm unfamiliar with such high temperatures required to bake this bread - my oven is not calibrated by temperature nor gas mark!

anyhow, i took them out, believing, rather than knowing, that the insides were baked completely. *prays hard* then i broke into some of the bread, which turned out to be wonderfully baked, except that the deepest parts were still slightly moist, and those parts had a doughy taste - basically, they were still dough. well, i took the risk and ate some, so that if anything should happen by next morning, i'll not give out the buns. i've also received confirmation that yeast dies at a much lower temperature than my oven's. so there's no chance of eating live yeast.
overall i'm very satisfied with the dough-making! as nigella says, it is that warm feeling of homespun achievement, and you really need to work the dough yourself to feel this. although nigella says you could use the machine to do the hardest part of the kneading, and then proceed to do the last few minutes of therapeutic kneading by hand, i feel that doing everything entirely by hand represents the most sincerest effort at bringing your loved ones a hand-made loaf. it's like really making the dough come alive in your hands!

this recipe will be tried again, with much greater care on aesthetics.