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Melissa, those look surprising and delicious! What a great thing to serve guests and watch their faces when they discover the beautiful purple filling.
I like the surprise idea. One of my kids doesn’t particularly like sweet potatoes but I told him, “these are like the buns at dim sum” and that did the trick. He enjoyed them 
Plus the purple sweet potato flavor is maybe a little less squash-y than orange ones.
Yes, I much prefer the firmer texture and flavor of both purple and white sweet potatoes to the more usual orange ones. The 3 mixed together make a wonderful autumn hash with onions and dried cranberries.
Oh that sounds lovely, a mix of salty, sweet, and tart?
When you say to place the baking sheet on a rack one up from the middle, I assume you mean where the heating element is on top? So, can you say approximately how far from the heating element it should be? I have a double oven (so two compartments that are smaller than a regular single oven compartment. The rack spacing is much closer. It would be easier if I knew, say, 6 inches from the heating element, or something like that.
Secondly, you don’t say if the butter is softened or melted, so I went with room temperature butter, although it’s not very easy to mix into the flour in a bowl without considerable beating.
Did you do any kneading or other gluten development?
Good questions!
When I put my baking sheet in the middle rack of my oven, the bottom of the buns got a little too toasty for my preference. But if you’re using a different style baking sheet or a silpat, this may not even be an issue for you. The concern is the distance from the heating element on the bottom rather than the top. I think if your baking sheet is one shelf up from whatever the center of your oven is, it should be fine.
I also used room temperature butter cut in chunks and I’ll add that info to the recipe – thank you for pointing out the need. The warm milk melted it fairly easily and that mixing to get the chunks to disappear is indeed the only gluten development.
Edited to add: The top heating element doesn’t fire when an oven is set to bake. My “one-up” shelf is about 9" inches from the base of my oven and 8" from the coils.
Thank you for the recipe. I will bake this Brot for my fellow expats here in Germany or for anyone who loves bread.