Pineapple Bread - FAIL... and finally, SUCCESS!

Known also as 菠蘿包 (pronounced: bwoh lwoh bao) in Taiwan and other Asian countries, this bread actually does not contain any pineapple. Instead, it derives its name from the criss-cross design on its cookie dough exterior that causes it to look somewhat like the pineapple fruit. In Japan, these breads are known as melon pan (with pan being the Japanese word for bread). For that, I have no explanation.

I got this recipe from Angie’s Recipes, and I used her recipe for Japanese Melon Pan. However, I substituted the chocolate she used as a filling with red azuki beans instead. I love love LOVE azuki. Love. I made a few other modifications to the recipe as well in order to convert it properly to the English system of measurement instead of SI units. So I have posted the recipe at the bottom with my version.

(I won’t rant –too much– about this now, but I would just like to say that Americans are stupid and should have converted to using the metric system of measuring things YEARS ago and making everything easier and more universal rather than having to deal with annoying pounds and ounces and figuring out conversions between grams, weight, etc. Bah HUMBUG! End rant.)

Now, I tried this recipe twice. I thought the first batch was too small with only four pieces, so I doubled the recipe to make eight.

But the first time, as you shall see, was… well…

Not so good.

Out of the four of them, the best one looked like this:

Not that it didn’t taste fabulous. Inside, the bread and red bean were sweet and fluffy. My parents just scraped off the burnt portions (like any normal, self-respecting parents who often are forced to eat their daughter’s creations), and these four little buns were gone pretty quickly:

You see, I was in a rush that day and just left the buns in the oven and told my mom to take them out when they were done. Not a good idea. Apparently one second they were fine, and the next second… a burnt mess.

So I tried again!

TRIAL TWO.

This time I made sure I had time to be there the entire time.

Lined up, the pineapple bread buns were very cute! I had a difficult time getting the red beans inside the dough, but I think that’s just a matter of practice. And the outer cookie dough was a bit sticky to handle, but an extra layer of sugar on top helped create a barrier between my knife and the sticky dough.

Almost good enough to eat…

And… success!! It looked “normal” this time! The chronic problem of not quite-finished dough inside was there (I’m going to have to bake a bit longer next time and allow the dough to bake a little longer), but it came out beautifully.

Voila! Pineapple Bread!

The recipe is at PineappleBread.