TWD: Bagels

 I love bagels!!  I even worked at a bagel place in college and I still want to eat them after eating them all the time for 2 months straight!  (I only worked there for 2 months or I would have kept eating.)

These were time intensive, but not too labor intensive (especially if you use a mixer).  I refrigerated mine overnight and I should have used a bigger bowl because the dough had a mind of it's own by morning.  There were a few things in the recipe that I wondered how important they were, like the ice in the bottom of the oven (to create steam)?  I did it anyway (using a pan) but didn't notice a difference between these bagels and others I've made so I'd probably save myself that trouble next time.  I think spraying the oven with a spray bottle might be just as effective.  I also just baked both pans of bagels at once and rotated the baking sheets halfway through.  I didn't want to repeat the process of boiling and baking because I am lazy.  I also didn't bother with the oven turning off and whatever else there was at the end of the recipe, I just took them out when they were done, let them cool slightly and ate them.  

My family loved them, Calvin ate 4!  They were quite a hit.

If you'd like the recipe, you can visit the blog of our host for the week, Heather.

If you'd like to see what the other TWD bakers did this week, you can go HERE to get to their links.

Apple Struesel Bagels

 

 Let me just tell you, I started out on this bagel quest with the idea of making a pumpkin bagel.  There are a few recipes out there for pumpkin bagels, but apparently, they aren't for me.  There were 4 attempts made, and none were successful enough to make me crave them or even share the recipe.  And that was my lesson.  Just because I am in a pumpkin craze right now, doesn't mean everything needs to be pumpkin.  Some things just aren't meant to be pumpkin (for me anyway).  I did add a pumpkin crumb topping to some of these bagels, and they were good, but the pumpkin flavor wasn't particularly strong and I liked the apple crumb better after taste testing.  I did do some messing with the cream cheese that was very successful, but that's another post.  And these bagels are good enough, you don't even need the cream cheese.