Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 20: Aperture Laboratories Bleeding Summer Strawberry Lemon Bread

Here At Aperture Labs, we understand some of you do not believe in making a delicious summer beverage when life gives you lemons. Some of you have even gone so far as to threaten violence when confronted with innocent citrus fruit.

We want to give you a demonstration of what our scientists would do if you broke our window with the gift of a combustible lemon.

Begin demonstration.

Bread:

1 cup warm water
1 tbsp yeast
½ cup sugar
1 tsp kosher salt
2 eggs
4 cups bread flour
zest of 1 lemon
juice of 2 lemons

Filling:

1 pint strawberries
½ cup sugar
2 tbsp cornstarch

Glaze:

Juice of 2 lemons
1 cup powdered sugar

Please imagine the dough is your flesh. You should really spend more time in the sun. Alternately, I have a new UV radiation gun that will either give you an impressive tan or melt all the flesh off your bones. I need volunteers.

To make the dough, first mix the yeast and warm water. Allow the yeast to resuscitate from its hibernation for ten minutes before adding the sugar, salt and eggs.

Just like an explosion integrates your combustible lemon with the flesh of laboratory assistants, the juice of two lemons and zest of one should be integrated with our demonstration dough. Enjoy the calming scent. Mix everything, then attach a dough hook to a stand mixer on speed 2 and let it slowly rip and reassemble the flesh substitute. Alternately, you can knead it by hand for 10 minutes.

Cover the dough and allow it to rise for an hour.

While the dough rises, you need to create your filling. A human body is filled with thick, viscous blood. To complete this demonstration, we will transform strawberries into a thickened blood substitute.

Cut the stems off one pint of strawberries. Put the strawberries in a blender and pulse until they become a paste. Add the sugar and cornstarch. Blend for a minute, or until the slurry becomes a thick liquid.

Pour the liquid into a nonstick frying pan. You want a great deal of surface area. Heat it to medium and let some of the moisture cook out. Stir frequently so your blood substitute does not become a scab substitute. After ten minutes, take it off the heat. Continue to stir occasionally. You should have transformed fresh summer fruit into a thick paste the consistency of jelly.

Once your bread has fully risen, punch it down. Dust a clean surface with flour and roll the bread out into a large rectangle. It should look like you’ve stretched a sheet of skin across a scaffold.

Cover the bread with a thin layer of strawberry mix.

Roll it up tight. Now, you can either make it into a loaf, which might look like a bloody arm after a lemon grenade attack, or you can cut it into neat slices, which will look much more like festering wounds.

Heat your oven to 350F. Bake the loaf for 25 – 30 minutes or the rolls for 12-14 minutes, until the tops are the rich golden brown of a four day old burn.

Mix the juice of 2 more lemons with powdered sugar. Drizzle the glaze over your loaf or rolls.

According to my records, the combination of flavors smells and tastes like your childhood memories of summer yet looks like the result of a combustible lemon grenade attack. Look closely. Perhaps you are delusional from hunger and willing to find any justification to cannibalize your fallen comrades. Perhaps you have been offered a delicious summer treat as a reward for proper use of citrus.

One of these things is a lie.

End lesson.