Homemade Bagels

I got a wild hair the other day and decided to try to make homemade bagels.  I don't normally post recipes and food stuff on the blog since it is more of a scrapbook for me but I had several people ask for the recipe so I thought this would be an easy way to get it to multiple people.  I actually used two separate recipes.  The first is this one.  I followed the recipe as written except I did add about 2 tsp. cinnamon to the dough(I was going to add raisins too but my raisins were old and crusty so I left them out)  After I added the yeast I also added the butter to the warm milk and just stirred it around until is melted.   Also after reading a few reviews it seemed that to make 12 bagels out of this batch would be to have really small bagels so I did 8 instead and they were perfect. 

Here are the cinnamon bagels.

The 2nd recipe I tried was this one.  This one had slightly different ingredients and with this one I made 6 of the bagels plain and 6 everything bagels.  I tried the shaping method in the recipe on this one and found that really either way, shaping into a ball and poking your thumb through for the hole(like the 1st recipe said to do) or rolling into a "snake" and then twisting the ends together either way worked and one didn't really look better then the others.  For the everything bagels I mixed minced onion, kosher salt and poppy seeds(I thought I had sesame seeds but I didn't) together on a plate and then right after the bagel came out of the boiling water I place the bagel upside down to coat it then put it on the baking sheet to bake.  Also my oven seems to heat a little hotter then some so I only had to bake my bagels for about 16 minutes and they were perfect.  I also didn't flip them over at all during baking and they turned out just fine.  Each kind tastes really good and they have the perfect crusty outer layer and then soft inside.

The bagels before boiling and baking

 

The Everything Bagels

The plain bagels

I was really pleased with how they turned out,especially for my 1st attempt, I am excited to try different flavors and keep improving my shaping technique.  They have been a hit at our house.