Welcome to my little corner of March’s #greatbritishbakeoffinternational challenge. I really enjoy doing these challenges with my baking friends. I learn so much by baking a new kind of food and by seeing other’s successes and failures. For this month’s challenge, we picked “Pigs In a Blanket”. However, the dough was not a crescent roll from Pillsbury, but rather a pretzel yeast dough.

The recipe was pretty straight forward, except, I have to keep reminding myself that some words used over in Britain are different than how we use them here. The recipe calls for “sausages”. In my mind, I’m looking for that exact thing. However, sausages are huge in size compared to hot dogs, bratwursts, or cocktail weenies. Wait, what kind of meat do I need?! Of course I didn’t even think about this conundrum until I’m at Kroger, staring at a bunch of raw meat. Ehh, it doesn’t matter. I chose “sweet Italian sausages”. The recipe is for 8 piggies, but these sausages only come in packages of 5 or 10. So i decided to just go with 5.

Once the dough has been mixed and risen according to the recipe, it’s time to form “ropes” and wrap them around the piggies. This part was especially fun because you practically have to swing the dough around in circles to get it to stretch out in rope fashion. The recipe instructs you to divide the dough into 8 pieces. In hindsight, I should have just divided it into 5 pieces and had a little more to wrap around the sausage. But meh, it still worked out.

After forming the ropes, the next step is to wrap them around each little piggy. See what I mean about using more of the dough next time? These sausages are huge and could have used a little more covering up. But either way, they’re going to taste great. And this way, they’re just a tad bit less carb-y than otherwise.

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After they’ve been topped with the egg wash and sesame seeds, it’s into the oven for about 20 minutes. I had hoped that the dough would’ve risen a little more in the oven, but no such luck.

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They look like cute little curly pig tails! (not the hairstyle, but I guess that works too) These smelled so good, I couldn’t wait for them to cool down so I could nom on one. These were perfect with a side of the same Dijon mustard that I put on the sausages pre-baking. I’m not much of a mustard person, but between this challenge and last months challenge, it’s really growing on me! This challenge was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to share it with the baking group! -Jen

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