Chocolatey Yeast Rolls

In past years, we looked at Rhodes Bake-N-Serv cinnamon rolls, comparing their varieties and adding chocolate to them to see how that worked out. This year, Rhodes kindly sent me 3 coupons for free products so I've been on the lookout for more of them. The first one I got from our local Kroger was Rhodes Bake-N-Serv Yeast Dinner Rolls. These come in a bag of 36 rolls which can last 12 meals for my family of three. Of course we can just enjoy them as rolls but I tried out a few chocolatey ideas as well that I'm going to share with you, the successes and the failure both. All of these ideas are my own so their success or failure falls onto me not this brand of rolls. Rhodes sent me the coupon to get this product for free in exchange for my experimenting with them and sharing my results no matter what they were on this blog; no other form of compensation was received.

Dark Chocolate Center Rolls

This involved placing some dark chocolate chips inside the yeast rolls once they had risen. The problem is that these didn't really melt much so I ended up with yeast rolls that looked like this inside.

So I tried to melt some chocolate to put inside and this time, to make one of my family members happier, I used milk chocolate leftover Lindt eggs. As you can see they were very liquidy. This made it nearly impossible to fold up the yeast dough again so I ended up with one that worked and two that were more milk chocolate worked into the dough.

Both were tasty but still not what I was hoping for. I had to think of another to try and get chocolate into the rolls. Maybe there was a middle ground, melted by cool so it was more like a spread?

Twists with Chocolate Spread

Next I went more simple making twists from two yeast rolls and then just making a simple spread of dark chocolate chips and some buttermilk. To make the twists, I modified the recipe form the Rhodes website using only 2 rolls per twist. They baked very well! This worked better but I thought I could try again and see what happened since I still had several yeast rolls left over.

Double Coated Spicy Cocoa Pretzels

My final chocolate and yeast rolls experiments was on National Pretzel Day, April 26. I use the last of my yeast roll dough to do this so each pretzel turned out to have about 1 and 1/8th of the tolls per pretzels. Warning: I never made homemade pretzels at all so forgive some of their shapes. I let them thaw then rolled them out into long threads. That was difficult because the dough always wanted to go back into a ball shape. Once I thought I had them as threadlike as I could I twisted them into pretzel shapes. I melted 2 T of butter and got 1 T of spicy cocoa powder. I brushed the butter over the pretzel shapes and sprinkled the cocoa powder on them. Then I covered them with plastic wrap and let them rise. While I preheated the oven to 375°F I mixed together the last of the melted butter and the cocoa. I coated the pretzels again then put them into the oven to bake for 15 minutes. They turned out the best of all of my experiments, don't you think?

Spicy Cocoa Pretzel

That's my experimenting with the Yeast Dinner Rolls from Rhodes. Bread and chocolate go well together, if you haven't tried it, you should. Now to a sad reality. I can't find more of the wonderful Rhodes products I can see on their website near where I live. The next time I'm traveling I'll look ahead and see if I can find some other products. I think it would be neat to try out ideas with their Sweet Dough, Orange Rolls, Caramel Rolls, or even their pizza dough. If you can find any of those where you live, leave a comment and let me know. Maybe I can find a way to your stores and use my freebie coupons so I can bring us all more ideas on how to use chocolate with bread.