Cinnamon buns

Now that we are away from sunny and hot Fuerteventura, where I wanted to keep all the cooking to the minimum, it's time to start baking again.

Cinnamon buns are on sale here in all forms and shapes — starting from packages of ready-made ones that apparently will keep "fresh" for years (just how do they do that?), through freshly baked and "just stick in the oven" frozen ones, and to the ones that you need to assemble yourself from chilled dough.

But of course it is more interesting to make things from scratch.

Apparently truly Finnish version of those, although very similar in ingredients, is supposed to have a shape of "slapped ears", where you cut the roll of dough diagonally, alternating right and left angle of the cut, but I decided to go with straight cuts and spiral shape.

Here you can see how much butter, sugar and cinnamon filling is used. An awful lot, if you excuse a professional term.

I followed this recipe, with one important omission — I didn't use the cardamom (gasp, shock, horror). I know it is an essential ingredient, but the first time I did add it and our kids didn't like it, so... On the other hand, now, with the winter approaching, their firm preference is for anything with chocolate, so they might be leaving all of the buns for us, in which case I can start adding cardamom again. 

Copy of the recipe, so you don´t have to go to and fro, with slight modifications:

Ingidients:

Dough
  25 g of fresh yeast
  85 g of butter, unsalted
  250 ml of milk
  50 ml of sugar
  Pinch of salt
  700 ml  of flour
  1 egg for glazing

Filling 

  85 g butter, unsalted
  125 ml sugar
  1 Teaspoon cinnamon

Plus

  1 egg for glazing

Process

Melt the butter and add the milk in a saucepan until lukewarm, break in the yeast, dissolve, add the rest of dough ingredients and knead until smooth. Leave to raise for 30 mins. Mix the filling meanwhile.

Knead a bit more and then roll the dough out in a rectangle. I find it easied to roll it quite thick and in a long rectangle. Spread the filling. Roll into a tube on the short side. For the easiness of cutting, I suggest you stretch/rol the tube till you can see that you can easily cut it in 12 to 16 buns. The filling is slippery, so it is easier to cut into squarish cylinders and then slap them down to disks.

Place to buns on a parchment´lined baking sheet and leave to rise for another 30 minutes.

Start the oven to 225°C. You know your oven best, so time it accordingly. 

Glase with egg, sprinkle with sugar. Bake for about 10 mins.

That´s it!

I guess I should watch my weight carefully in the nearest few months. Freshly baked things are so difficult to resist.

Next — wheat and rye bread. Stay tuned :)

Baked stuff pics on Shutterstock

Peacock baktus

I had this yarn sitting in my basket for so long, I can't even recall what sort of mix it was. The only thing I am sure about is that it is a silk mix, bit that as far as it goes. I tried searching, but can't find anything that rings a bell.

And Kirill managed to find it! It's "sea silk" by Hand Maiden Fine Yarns, 70% Silk, 30% Seacell 400 m, 100 g.

Anyway. It's a thin soft shiny yarn, warm to touch, dyed in a shortish sections of raspberry, purple, green and blue, so it's quite a large spread of colors. Overall effect it's more or less dark blue. From the website it looks like that particular set of colors is not done any more.

I tried different types of stitches, but in the end went for simplest all-knit — more complicated stitches didn't go well with the yarn.

As a nice little bonus, and unexpectedly for me, the short sections did form two "pools". They formed in two places where the width of the scarf is about fifteen cm, and disappeared naturally as the baktus triangle widened/narrowed.

I should probably stop knitting scarfs now :)

Knitting pics on Shutterstock