Bite-sized Bagels

So the other day when I was looking for a recipe for bread (I made a Rosemary Focaccia), I also found a post for Cute, cuter, mini bagels over at the Delicious Days blog.  The photos made them look simultaneously delicious and adorable and I've been looking forward to making them ever since.  I actually made two batches, one on Saturday and one on Sunday.  They were fun and easy to make, and boyfriend and I had a great time making them together, and an even better time eating them.  We ate them all, two batches.

Wouldn't you?

Bite-sized Bagels
2 cups white flour
1 tsp salt
165 mL warm water
1 tsp olive oil
1 tsp dry yeast (1/2 a 7g packet of dry yeast)
sesame seeds (or whatever) for topping

1. Sift flour into a large mixing bowl with salt, making a depression in the middle.
2. Pour water and oil into the depression.
3. Spread yeast overtop and cover bowl with a towel.  Set aside for 5-10 minutes.
4. Mix dough until shiny and smooth, either by hand or with the dough attachment on your mixers, adding extra flour if needed.
5. Put in bowl and cover with a towel, set aside in a warm place for 60 to 90 minutes - dough should double in size.
6. Preheat oven to 200C/400F and start a large pot of salted water to boil.
7. Roll out dough and separate into small balls (~1.5-2" in diameter, or the size you want).
8. Poke a hole through the centre of each ball of dough - the recipe recommends a wooden spoon, I used chopsticks and my fingers.
9. Drop bagels in boiling, salted water for ~1 minute, they will rise to the surface.  They will look pruney when they're ready.
10. Place on a baking tray and cover with sesame seeds, or poppy seed, or dill, or whatever you like.
11. Bake for 10-15 minutes.
12. Enjoy the awesomeness.

This recipe was remarkably easy - I mean, making bagels. It seems like a scary amount of work.. but it wasn't! It was super easy! The only bump we hit was that the recipe called for "250g of flour" and I don't actually own a kitchen scale.  I did the usual and got dry weight and liquid weight confused and used the smaller weight of flour - they still turned out ok, we just ended up with a really sticky dough in the early stages.   This recipe makes somewhere between 12 and 16 bagels, depending on how big you make them.

Saturday night, we had these with sloppy joe and a delicious salad.  On Sunday, we had bagels for lunch with cream cheese, smoked salmon and capers. All in all - super delicious. A big thank you to the lovely people at Delicious Days for posting this recipe!

PS - thanks to boyfriend, all the really nice looking photos were taken by him. The slightly out of focus and generally average looking photos were my camera.