I'm going to bump this since it may have gotten lost in the Christmas shuffle, and since I'm still looking for a recipe.
I ended up using Saveur's recipe for
Brioche a Tete. It didn't produce the desired result, and I encountered problems on a few fronts, most my own doing.
1. I upped the sugar to ~ 1/3 cup (from 1/4 cup) and the finished product still didn't taste like a sweet sugar brioche. So I know I'm still looking for a recipe with a larger proportion of sugar.
2. Forgot that my Mom doesn't have a stand mixer, just a hand mixer. There was no way we could beat it in the mixer for 8 minutes. We got about 1 minute of mixing once the ingredients were fully incorporated, then started kneading. I don't think the texture ever reached what Saveur calls "satiny smooth."
3. In an attempt to replicate the sugar granules that are often found on top of sugar brioche, I sprinkled sugar on the dough after brushing the dough's tops with beaten, but before baking. The sugar dissolved in the oven, and contributed to a darker than desired crust.
4. My own screw up...the oven was at 425, not 375, so the dough baked too quickly and didn't rise any more in the oven. The finished texture was not light and fluffy, but fairly heavy and dense.
I'm willing to tinker with recipes if I can't find one myself. But I'm curious about people's thoughts on a couple things...
When I've had good sugar brioche, I've often found what I'd describe as "sugar pockets" in the finished product. These are usually air holes that are extra sweet. I'm not sure how these pockets are created. It occurs to me that perhaps large-granule sugar (or some kind of sugar paste) is kneaded into the dough toward the end of the kneading (so it's distributed throughout, but the ingredients aren't absorbed into the dough as a whole).
When do I add the sugar granules to the top of the brioche? I suspect these are added toward the end of baking, but I'm not sure. And I'm a little puzzled because I've eaten brioche where the sugar granules could be found toward the bottom of the brioche--inside the cardboard pan--and not sure how they'd get there if the sugar was added toward the end of the baking.
Thanks for any suggestions you can offer!