My sister has been raving about some cinnamon buns that she had from a bakery in Cornwall. I have posted about these before. But whatever I did, they didn't measure up to her exacting standards. She finally sent me a picture of what she was after. So I figured that I would try to replicate them. Not an easy task as it turns out. But over the weekend I had a cinnamon bun from "The Village Baking Company" here in Texas and I now understand what Alison was going on about. I set to re-recreating the buns. Who in their right mind would attempt to make a laminated dough in the Texas heat? No one that I can think of!
The brioche dough seems to be a bit weird. It is incredibly dry - until the butter is added. Then it comes out beautiful and silky. But I was a bit worried looking at the liquid ratios.
There is lots of butter in use. Butter in the dough, butter in the laminations, butter in the cinnamon....
Sorry about the metric measures, folks. I do all my baking that way.
Sinful Cinnamon Bun
Just out of the oven
Ingredients - The Dough
1 Kg Bread Flour
70 g 2% milk
5 g half and half (approximates whole milk - very approximate - I eyeballed the calculation)
4 egg yolks (of course the whites went into macaroons)
6 whole eggs
20 g salt
15 g rapid rise yeast
150 g unsalted butter cut into 12 cubes
A further 375 g unsalted butter for lamination
Method - The Dough
Warm the milk and half cream to about 90F. Add the sugar and the yeast, to allow the yeast to hydrate. Whisk the milk/sugar mixture with the eggs until completely combined.
Whisk together the flour and salt. Stir in the egg/milk mixture to make a shaggy dough. Turn out on to a board and knead gently. It is too stiff for my Kitchenaid mixer at this point. Stretch and fold four times over the next hour until the gluten is well developed.
Place the dough into the bowl of the mixer, fitted with the dough hook. Knead slowly, adding the butter one cube at a time. It will take about 20 minutes to get all the butter mixed in and for the dough to become smooth again.
Leave the dough to rise at room temperature for an hour and then refrigerate overnight.
Method - Lamination
The key to lamination is to make sure that everything stays cold. Hard to do in a Texas kitchen in the summer.
Pound the refrigerated butter flat between 2 sheets of cling wrap - or inside a plastic bag. The butter must not become warmer than about 60F.
Roll the cold dough out into a large rectangle. Place the butter into the rectangle and then fold the rectangle over the butter into thirds. Roll very lightly and immediately wrap the dough and return it to the refrigerator for an hour.
After an hour, chill the work surface with ice bags/freezer packs. Remove the dough from the fridge. Roll into a rectangle again and then rewrap and refrigerate - 1/2 hour should be adequate.
Repeat the chilling, unwrapping and rolling twice more, resulting in a 30" by 10" (75cm x 25 cm) rectangle. Now ready for the filling and baking.
Filling - Ingredients
3T finely ground cinnamon
8T granulated sugar (I used Bravetart's toasted sugar). I didn't want brown sugar's flavors
100g melted butter
pinch of salt
Method
Grease 2 12 muffin pans with non-stick spray. Spread the butter/sugar/cinnamon mixture over the rolled out dough. Using a pizza wheel cut the dough into strips about 1 1/4" in width (10" lengths). Roll each strip into a wheel and place into the muffin pan. It should be quite crowded. Cover the tins and refrigerate while heating the oven to 350F. Again keeping the butter from premature melting is key.
Once the oven is heated, place the prepared muffin tins into the oven and bake for about 30 minutes - until the tops of the rolls are browned and the internal temperature is 205F.
