Hokkaido Milk Loaf

Well traditionally this milk loaf is made with the gorgeous, yummy milk from cows in Hokkaido, Japan. Unfortunately, because we all live in the UK, we can't get Hokkaido Milk. So, my Hokkaido milk loaf, in fact, contains milk from British cows :O! Now having actually spent some time in a Hokkaido dairy farm in Japan, and having tasted freshly baked bread made from this milk, I can say that it is one of THE best loaves I have ever had! Needless to say, I am willing to try anything in order to recreate this great tasty bread. So my milk loaf contains, milk (shock), cream, bread flour, sugar, egg, salt and yeast. I also added in a special ingredient, more on this later. After hrs of kneading, proofing and kneading and....proofing again, here is my finished result:

 My dough actually proofed much more than I expected and spilled over the tin, haha which, explains the weird shape at the top!

The dough is super soft in texture, so I am definately pleased with how this one turned out. If you can't already tell, the dough has pink streaks in it! Yes, my secret ingredient was strawberry milk powder, I wanted to add some sweet strawberry flavour in and I wanted to make it look pretty!

Too be honest, you can add any flavour you want to the basic Hokkaido milk loaf. Let me share my previous failure of a milk loaf. This one I tried was pandan flavoured and it turned out into this brick:

Totally dense, heavy and non-edible! My mistake??? was that I forgot to activate the yeast d'oh, no wonder the dough never rose!

Satsuma-imo.