In honor of Comic Con, this week I bring you a shiny new Marvel Comics related recipe. Get ready to punch your sweet tooth in the face, because it’s hunger clobberin’ time!
If you’re jealous of all the folks in San Diego, you can always win a little superhero swag of your own by entering Kitchen Overlord’s Superhero Contest.
Dough:
4 – 4 ½ cups flour
½ cup milk
¾ cup mango nectar*
2 eggs
1 tbsp yeast
1 tbsp vegetable oil
½ cup sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp yellow food coloring + a few drops red
Filling:
1 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp cinnamon
½ stick butter, melted
Topping:
½ stick butter
¼ cup mango juice
2 – 2 ½ cups powdered sugar
You don’t need to be a blind artist with a heart of gold to enjoy this craggy orange loaf.
To make your very own edible tribute to Ben Grimm, start by warming your milk to the temperature of a warm bath. Add in your yeast, rough it up a little, and leave it alone for 10 minutes. When you come back, it should be all riled up and ready for action.
Add your mango nectar, eggs, oil, sugar, salt, and food coloring. Mix it up until you have a big orange mess, then add the flour.
If you have a stand mixer, attach the dough hook and let it act like cosmic radiation exposure for the next six minutes, transforming the gluten into a new, more powerful form. If you don’t have a stand mixer, knead it for ten minutes, forcing the change more slowly and painfully.
Cover the orange dough with a clean kitchen towel and let it rise for an hour.
While it rises, set up your Fantastic Four construction station. You want one bowl of melted butter for Reed’s stretchiness, another of cinnamon for Susan’s spicy love life under the sea, a third of brown sugar which can be as surprisingly flammable as Johnny Storm, and finally your well buttered loaf pans to represent the Baxter Building.
Once the dough doubles in size, punch it down. Working quickly, pinch off golfball sized balls. Roll them in either the cinnamon or in butter first then brown sugar. (You can always mess up the continuity by mixing the cinnamon and brown sugar in order to save a step, but if you want some darker, more dramatic lines separating the rocky look of the bread, a few cinnamon-only coated balls go a long way.)
You should have enough dough to make two decent sized loaves. Once you’ve coated all the balls with sugar and/or cinnamon, cover the dough again and let it rise for another hour, or until once more double in size.
Bake at 350 for 23-25 minutes.
Much like Ben Grimm’s temper, let the loaves cool down before handling them. Once they’re comfortable enough to touch, run a knife along the edges of the pan and turn the loaves out upside down.
Melt the butter for your topping. Add the mango juice and powdered sugar. Whisk it all together until you have a nice, thick glaze. If it’s not thick enough for your tastes, add more powdered sugar.
Paint the top and sides of the loaves with the glaze.
Let the loaves and glaze cool completely before trying to slice this bread. The faintest hint of warmth will leave it as brittle as a monster’s broken heart. Once it’s cooled, then you can carefully slice through the layers in order to see the richness within.
*Available from your finer Dollar Stores or on the bottom shelf of your grocery’s juice aisle. “Nectar” legally contains more actual mango in it than “juice.”