Goddess of Cake

Bread Rolls in 3 Different Colours

Long time ago, me and some friends were doing this vegetarian cafetery thing for a reggae dance party. It was mostly for fun, and we were being quite creative with the dishes we made. I had this idea of making bread rolls with dough that would be dyed in rasta colours: green, red and yellow, using natural ingredients only.

This never happened though, since my friends thought the idea was quite revolting. But after all these years, I still remember it! And now I finally realised it for a birthday party of two year old twins Oka and Aarni.  I think the end result was gorgeous and I am very happy I finally did it..

First, I put on some reggae music. Jah Rastafari…

Then I started by making a a batch of bread dough in quite the normal way. I usually use about 20 g of yeast for about a litre of water. I heated the water to 37 Celsius and diluted the yeast to it.  Then I added flour enough to make the dough feel like thick porridge. Then I let the yeast brew for about 30 minutes, until the mixture was bubbling.

After that I added 3 tsp salt, some more flour and some oat flakes, and divided the dough into three different bowls.

Then I added 1 dl of finely grated beetroot to one of them for red colour, 1 dl of finely grated carrot and 1 tsp turmeric to the other for yellow colour, and about 1/2 dl of frozen spinach and 1/2 dl  frozen, pureed peas to the third for green colour.

Then I added enough flour to all of the three to make a nice dough. After that I let the dough rise for about two hours.

After two hours I baked the bread rolls. For the first batch, I simply made three long tubes of the dough and then combined them, and cut the result into pieces, rolled them a bit with my hand to get nice round shape, and put them on an oven plate.

For the second batch, I rolled the dough flat with a dough roll and then set the three slabs on top of each other. This construction I rolled into a tube so that the colours would form a spiral in the middle. Then I cut the tube into pieces and put them on an oven plate.

Then I baked the rolls in the oven for about 20 minutes in 225 Celsius.

The end result was both pretty and tasty, and I was quite happy how I got the different colours to show in the dough even after baking them in the oven. Though I realised that it was important not to bake them too much, since the first batch got a little bit too dark and brownish, and the colours weren’t so vivid. I knew from previous experience that beetroot makes a really beautiful red, and turmeric yellow, butI was especially happy for the green colour, because I thought it might be hard to create.