To follow up on my January visit to the famed Violet Bakery in London, I checked out owner Claire Ptak's cookbook from the Queens Library. The book has produced a few winning recipes to date, the first being the untraditional cinnamon buns.
These cinnamon buns are untraditional in that they are not made from a yeasted batter, so result in a much more dense bun, and also do not have any sugar in the dough itself. So the dipped sugar topping and the cinnamon / sugar layers inside the buns are key to giving the buns their sweet flavor. The dough otherwise has the flavor of a standard unsweetened biscuit.
The benefit of this non-yeasted approach though is that buns are super easy to put together, and do not require the several rises of yeasted doughs which have made cinnamon rolls an extreme rarity in my home.
You start by melting some butter and preparing the cinnamon sugar, so that it's ready to be put into the dough right away.
The dough comes together in a similar manner to biscuits or pie dough - blend into the dry ingredients some chilled butter cubes via a stand mixer or a fork, and then add in some milk (unsweetened soy milk in my case) to bring the dough together.
(also, welcome to the kitchen my scale friend. I love you!)
After letting the dough rest for a bit, you then roll it out - my dough rectangle is approx. half the size of what the original recipe calls for as I halved the recipe to get 6 buns instead of 12.
Put each of the cut cinnamon buns into a prepared muffin tin and bake. What surprised me the most about the post-baked buns is how much they popped out of the pan! The irregular shapes of the baked buns was really lovely and felt truly "homemade."
Roll the tops of the cinnamon bun into sugar, and serve while warm or re-heat in the microwave before devouring!
I had one of these and it was DELISH! I had no idea I was eating something so untraditional!!!
Posted by: Cuddles | April 09, 2019 at 23:35