Bread. I love to eat it but I do not have that much experience making it.

Today’s recipe is these blueberry thyme rolls which isn’t a bread per se but it’s still involves a yeast dough so that’s close enough for me. I think the main reason I don’t usually make bread is because of the time it takes to rise. I just prefer to start and finish something right away instead of waiting and coming back to finish it later. But the day has come and here I am making some rolls.

So like I said, this recipe uses a yeast dough and it was fairly basic and simple to make. You can use a stand mixer but I did it by hand with a spoon and it was pretty easy. Kneading the dough was a little bit of an arm workout but honestly not horrible, I actually found it kind of fun. It came together well and then it had to rise for the first time – I put it on top of my fridge which was a nice warm place.

While the dough was rising, I prepared the blueberry thyme preserves, which is another recipe in this book. It says you could use any jam you want but the name of the recipe is blueberry thyme marble rolls so it made sense to make the blueberry thyme preserves. It’s made with blueberries (I used frozen), sugar, salt, lemon juice and thyme. It thickened up really nicely and was delicious. I liked the flavor of the thyme too. It wasn’t overpowering and really helped to cut some of the sweetness of the fruit and sugar.

The dough doubled in size from the rising and it was so nice and soft. I rolled it out to the size it was supposed to be and cut in half as written. I sort of just spread the jam on the one half, I didn’t really measure how much I was using. I mention this because I think I put too much jam. When I put the other piece of dough on top and then started cutting and twisting into the rolls, things were getting a little messy. The jam was oozing out everywhere. It was a mess which made it a little difficult to form the knots how they were supposed to but that’s all in the fun of cooking sometimes. My rolls turned out way more rustic than they should have but that’s fine, I knew the taste was still there. I’m also not sure if I had the technique right at all because every roll looks different.

This dough makes a dozen rolls so I split them into two 8-in pans but if you had a 9×13 like the recipe says then definitely use that. I let them rise again for another 40 minutes and then it was time to bake. They get a little brush of vegan butter and thyme before going in the oven. They got nice golden brown on the outside and they were super fluffy on the inside. You can see though, because of my difficulties rolling, some of the rolls were coming undone.

No matter the imperfections in appearance, these roles were delicious. The dough itself is not very sweet so it works really well with the blueberry thyme jam. And if you think that the thyme is going to be too strong of a flavour and too much of a savoury component, you are wrong. It works wonderfully. You need to make these rolls ASAP.