Pan de Muerto

• Start your mise en place e.g. putting all of your ingredients ready and weighing them off one by one. place in containers ready to use, grate the orage peel.

Starting your Pan de Muerto Dough

• Start with dumping out the flour on a clean work surfice making a bowl in the middle to later add our dry and wet ingredients to, make sure the bowl is large enough, because later you are going to mix in plenty of ingredients. See it as your own little volcano!
• Start with adding about 1/3 to half of the sugar all over the volcano, after that start adding the salt, on the rim of the volcano only. This is to prevent the yeast from dying later when we add it (as yeast and salt should never directly touch)
• Now start with adding the orange peel shavings, spread them out evenly so they mix in well later.
• After this, start adding the butter, this works best when the butter is already at room temperature and is cut up into smaller pieces, use pieces the size that you deem fit.

Starting a Poolish for fermentation

• Take two table spoons of flour a teaspoon of sugar and the yeast and mix together in a small bowl.
• Add and stirr in just soo much milk that it becomes a smooth thick sauce like texture, for reference take a nice cream sauce or a bechamel sauce.
• Leave the mixture in a warm place to ferment in your kitchen, for a minumum of 15 -20 minutes. Will come back to it later.

The main Pan de Muerto dough

• To our Volcano we will add one egg and start to slowly mixing all the ingredients together, meanwhile adding a bit of our anis water to your linking.
• Now we will start bit by bit addingthe milk and keep mixing until we form a smooth dough, this can take quite a while and Pan de Muertos doughs are infamously sticky. Do not worry it will come together.
• When your dough has come together and is less sticky you are ready to add another 1/3rd of the sugar so that we will still have some left for dusting later.
• Working in the sugar into the dough we are looking for it to almost completely absorb which will probably be around 3 -5 minutes of kneading the dough.

Fermentation

• Now we will start adding our Poolish into our dough spread out the main dough and add the poolish to it.
• Fold the doug over and start kneading again. Yes your dough will become very sticky once agian, this is part of the process.
• Now you will start kneading it untill it comes together once again using the slap and fold technique. So when the dough is managable but still sticky you will pick it up, slap it on the work surface , fold it over, turn it 90 degrees, knead it more on the work surface and repeat these steps until your main dough comes togheter.
• The dough is ready to start its (well deserved) first rest when you can stretch it between your fingers until very thin without the dough breaking apart. it should be smooth and elastic.

The rest

• We will roll our dough into a smooth ball, folding it into itself and making sure that it really looks like a little ball with a seem only at the bottom.
• Lightly greese your bowl and ball and place your dough ball into it, cover with a damp clean kitchen cloth and place in a warm spot in your kitchen or in an oven with the dough proving program on for about an hour or until it doubles in size.
• Be patient, grind down the rest of the sugar in the mean time so it becomes less granular and a bit more refined, we do not aim for powdered sugar here, that is too fine.

Forming the Pan de Muerto

• Now that the dough has rested, take it out, and knead it into a large roll about the width that you want your pan de muerto to be. Here you can be the decider.
• The easiest way to go about is to cut the roll into half and then into half again which shall give you four pieces.
• Keep in mind to trim of about two finger widths more from every portion for the bones and balls that we will make for every pan de muerto.
• Now start forming your panes de muerto like little round buns making sure to use your hands to create smooth dough balls.
• These balls we can place on a baking paper lined baking tray or greased baking tray, with enough spacing between them as they will still rise. You can slightly push them down for a bit flatter Pan de Muertos or leave them as neat balls.

The Bones

• So now we can take the set aside dough, dusting it with a little flour and start making two long strips of bones and one ball.
• The bones are made by rolling the dough into a relatively thin roll and putting a bit of pressure rolling in between our fingers.
• The ball is made by rolling a small ball in between your hands

Pan de Muerto Assembly

• Now place the bones in a cross patern over the Pan de Muerto and make sure there is a space in the middle pressed in for putting the ball in.
• Put the ball into the hole and make sure to press down the dough a bit before as well as to secure the ball in place (we don't that it falls off during baking.
  

2nd Fermentation

• Leave the Pan de Muerto to ferment for another hour or until doubled in size, now they are ready for the oven
• Pre heat your oven to 200 degrees Celcius and when you put the Pan de Muerto in you can lower the heat to 180 degrees.

Baking the Pan de Muerto

• Bake the Pan de Muerto for about 20 minutes *depending on your oven. Yet they should come out golden brown and ready.

Butter and Sugar glazing your Pan de Muerto

• First leave your pan de muerto to cool enough to handle in a rack.
• Brush the Pan de Muerto with the molten butter and straight after sprinkle the ground sugar over it making sure to catch any excess in clean bowl below.
• Shake off any excess and your Pan de Muerto is ready to enjoy!