Cinnamon Buns

These are fucking amazing. You need a lot of time to make them, but so worth it when you have them fresh from the oven.


Head over to Recipe Rifle for the ingredients and recipe and a picture of much more uniform buns.

I'm not sure I actually kneaded/worked the dough enough at steps 2 and 4, since I've never really had to do much of it before.  They took forever to rise and didn't rise nearly as big as I was expecting, so I figure it wasn't enough elbow-grease on my part. I'm going to be doing these again this coming Saturday, so I'll definitely be kneading the hell out of it.

At step five, I didn't nearly roll out the dough thin enough for the first two rectangles, which is why the bun right at the front of the picture has such a huge dough-y edge. The problem is that the dough contracts on itself every time you even make the mistake of breathing on it, so rolling it as thin as the recipe tells you (3-5mm thick) is a little difficult, but not impossible. The last batch were a big smaller, but looked nice because I'd managed to make it thin, so they were all uniform.

200g of butter for the filling sounds like a lot; I only used about 175g, but I think I need to do 200g next time because you want a lot of filling, especially if I know I need to roll it thinner. I didn't use pearl sugar or any sugar on the top, but I think they were still good without them.

It might not to be everyone's tastes, but for the last quarter of the dough, I sprinkled dried fruit on top of the filling before rolling and cutting. The fruit itself was a tad too sweet, but it made for a nice variation.