I am never, ever going to be a Domestic Goddess – No matter how hard I try, I always end up doing something wrong.
I have just tried to make cinnamon buns from here and I managed to mess up a really simple recipe. It was all going so well and they are in the oven now but I have a feeling that they are not going to taste nice as I forgot to activate the dried yeast. Actually I didn’t forget, I just didn’t have a clue that you have to mix dried yeast with water to activate it. I just poured it in to my mixture and only realised that I had a problem when the dough didn’t rise as much as I was expecting…. Then I read the instructions on the yeast packet DOH.
I halved the recipe from the Not Quite Nigella website (I love that name) so here’s what I used….
Cinnamon buns
For the dough:
300 g flour
50 g sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
10g dried yeast
50 g butter
200 ml milk
1 egg
For the filling:
75 g butter
75 g sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon ( I like mine to be really cinnamony)
1 egg to glaze
I combined the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in a large bowl. Miss Frugal was way too enthusiastic with this bit and I now have flour all over my floor.
Next we melted the butter and whisked it into milk and egg before stirring it into the flour mixture.
Miss Frugal couldn’t wait to get her hands in here to give the mix a good knead. We did have to keep adding extra flour as the mixture was really sticky at first.
When she had been kneading so long that her arms ached, we made it into a ball in the bowl, covered it with clingfilm and left it to rise for about 25 minutes.
After 25 minutes we went back to check on the mixture and realised that we had a slight problem as the mix was only a bit bigger than it was before. We ploughed on regardless though – no choice as I had no flour left and we’d already started the next step.
Next you are supposed to take one-third of the dough and roll it or stretch it to fit your tin; this will form the bottom of each bun when it has cooked. However, as we had very little dough to spare we skipped this bit.
Roll out the rest of the dough on a lightly floured surface. You need to roll it quite thinly into a rectangular shape.
Next mix the filling ingredients in a small bowl and then spread the rectangle with the buttery cinnamon mixture.
Next the fun bit, we rolled the covered dough up starting from the longest side until we had a giant sausage. We cut the roll into 2 cm slices and put them all cinnamon side up in our greased and lined baking dish.
We brushed them with egg and left them to rise for another fifteen minutes hoping that they would rise a bit more but not unsurprisingly they didn’t!
They are currently in the oven at about 230 degrees and have been in for 15 minutes. I would say that they will be done in about five minutes so I reckon you will need about 20 minutes altogether.
EDITED TO ADD – They might not be as big as they should be but they taste gorgeous!
I will definitely be trying this again and might even make them properly next time lol.
