Camembert and rosemary bread with honey and walnuts

Before you express outrage at the fact that I'm featuring a savoury recipe (Shock! Gasp! Horror!), let me just say that, cheese is basically the chocolate of the savoury world. So it counts. Sort of. 

If there's one thing I love more on this earth than chocolate (and cake), it's cheese. And bread. No wait, homemade bread! 

This is a combination of both those pleasures - homemade rosemary bread wrapped around a wheel of camembert and baked. So that when it comes out the oven, you can put it on the table (and if you're a nice enough person to share) let friends and family tear off crusty chunks of bread and dip them straight into the oozy, stringy, gooey cheese... But if you bake it and sit on the kitchen floor doing that all by yourself, then hey, who am I to judge!

Camembert rosemary bread with honey and walnuts

Recipe developed and featured in Food & Home Entertaining Magazine

Serves 4-6

850 g bread flour

15ml (1 tbsp) sugar

15ml (1 tbsp) salt

55 g unsalted butter

360 ml milk, scalded

240 ml warm water

7g sachet active dried yeast

olive oil, for drizzling

30 ml (2 tbsp) chopped rosemary

250g Camembert wheel

100g walnuts

30 ml (2 tbsp) honey

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Stir the flour, sugar and salt together. Stir the butter into the warm milk and allow to cool to room temperature. Place the water in a bowl and add the yeast. Wait one minute before whisking and adding the cooled milk. Stir in the flour mixture to form a rough dough. Knead the dough until perfectly smooth, either by hand or machine. 

Allow to rest for 10 minutes. Place in a lightly oiled bowl, cover and leave to rise in a warm place until doubled in size. Knock the dough down by kneading it gently to push out the air. Break off a fist size piece of dough and roll out into a small circle.  

Wrap the dough around the wheel of Camembert and set aside. Roll the rest of the dough out into a rectangle, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with chopped rosemary. Roll the dough up into a sausage and then cut the sausage in half lengthwise, leaving the top still attached. Twist the two pieces around each other then form into a circle around the Camembert, pressing the two ends together. 

Cover and leave to rise in a warm place until doubled in size. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with walnuts and bake the bread at 200°C for 30-40 minutes or until golden and firm. The bread is ready when it makes a hollow sound when tapped on the bottom. Drizzle the walnuts with honey and serve immediately while still warm.