Thank you for this post! After my mother raved about the cinnamon rolls I made her for her birthday and wondered aloud on Christmas morning why she keeps making the date filled braided loaf she has made since dinosaurs roamed the earth when the cinnamon star bread I've been making is so soft and delicious, I pulled up this post and her date filled bread recipe (which I've never looked at as an adult because I hated that stuff as a kid--the bread was hard and dry) and reworked her recipe so that it is now equally soft and delicious. I tested the reworked recipe on New Year's morning and it turned out beautifully. I polished off the bread this morning, four days later, and it was still soft and tasted fresh. This post helped me understand hydration levels to aim for (hint: her recipe made dry, hard bread primarily because it just didn't have enough liquid in it!) and calculate how to account for the butter and eggs in the recipe, then make the necessary adjustments to use the tangzhong method. Thank you!

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