Baking bagels

Mr W has been eating a lot of bagels lately as an extra snack to help get him through the day without ending up totally exhausted and so today I thought I'd see if I could surprise him with some homemade ones....

Well, when I say 'homemade' I actually mean 'homemade with a bit of help from the breadmaker', but the thought was there.

This was the first time that I had ventured beyond the recipes in our breadmaker's User Guide to those in a breadmaker recipe book given to me many moons ago by my godmother. She gave me the book when we mentioned that we were thinking of buying a breadmaker, it took us at least another 2 years to actually buy said breadmaker and its been another 2 years of owning the breadmaker until I've actually been brave enough to try something different!

Things started well - adding ingredients to the mixing bowl in a specified order and selecting the 'dough' option on the breadmaker. A couple of hours later and the dough was ready to be shaped into bagels and these left to prove for 20 minutes. But then came the tricky bit - cooking the bagels in sugary water prior to them going in the oven. As soon as I put the first three in the pan of boiling water the join split and rather than being round like a bagel they instead looked rather like uncooked croissants. Not being one to panic I fished them out of the pan, turned the heat down prior to putting the next batch in and gave the join an extra squeeze together before dropping them in the water. Happily these all stayed semi-round and I gave the ones that split a little help in looking more like a bagel by pinning them together with a cocktail stick. 15 minutes or so in the oven and out came 8 golden bagels - not as uniformly shaped as those from the supermarket, but a taste test later this afternoon showed them to be perfectly edible. Now just got to wait and see what the bagel connoisseur thinks!