Home-Made Cinnamon Buns

Cinnamon Roll with Zesty Cream-Cheese Frosting 

For my family, newly back in South Africa, and no longer receiving expatriate revenue disbursed in dollars or pounds, the cinnamon buns proudly bearing a trademark, provided by the coffee house bearing their name, proved to be prohibitively expensive, particularly given that all three of my mini-me's proved to be mini-addicts of the mini-bons. In the malls of the Middle East, our stop for coffee (for me) and cinnamon buns (for them) had always provided a highlight in our forays out into those shopping malls which litter the previously desert landscapes. Hence when I received this recipe, it was a veritable godsend.

This recipe I received from Ilaria, who in turn was sent it from Brooke, to whom Kathi had given the recipe ... and so recipe exchanges go - a delightful circle of giving and receiving, of adding and adapting.

After my second, successful attempt at making them (the first was not a triumph, given that the conversion from cups to grams had a glitch in it), my husband came through rubbing his tummy and said, "Mmm ... next time we have guests for dinner we can make this as our dessert, with coffee" and I have to give him credit for his insertion of "we" into the equation. "We?" I squeaked, incredulous, "We?" "Mmmmm ..." he responded, continuing to rub his tummy contentedly.

Well, and so it turned out - with all three children insistent on 'helping' (in a context in which HELP is spelt: H I N D E R), my husband's help was required in the rolling out stage of the dough, and he proved more adept than I am at ensuring the rolls all looked like they could have been shop-bought - my forays with wielding the rolling pin (maybe I shouldn't go there) - look - well, in the worst sense of the word, "home-made", clumsy and sloppy, with some bigger than others and all slightly wonky about the edges. So thankfully my husband came to the rescue in this regard.

As my younger children bore the cinnamon buns out to the table in triumph, my eldest son stopped to tell me why he believes we can now claim our cinnamon buns are even better than their trademarked counterparts. First, he said, making our own is cheaper, secondly, they taste better, and finally, which he considered the best part of it all, he said, "we have so much more fun making them than simply buying them".

However - and this is a big caveat - which you can only ignore if you are prepared to imperil your waistline: If ever you had any illusions whatsoever as to the high calorific content of a typical cinnamon bun, making your own from scratch will disabuse you of that notion, for ever. That said, a fourth reason as to why you should always make from scratch presents itself to you - and that is that simply the time and effort involved militates against doing it daily, whereas in comparison, buying and eating the shop-made buns are so very easy, it can become an addictive activity, albeit it an expensive habit.

Since I don't like wasting buttermilk, and obtain it in 500ml amounts, and found that if I increased the initial recipe I received by a third overall, that I could make 16 cinnamon rolls, which fitted neatly into a rectangular pan 33 x 23 x 5 cm deep (13 x 9 x 2 inches), I therefore increased the amounts accordingly. 

Cinnamon Bun Dough Recipe:

766 grams cake flour (6 cups)

40 grams sugar (4 tablespoons)

26 grams yeast (2 ⅔ Tablespoon) although 3 10g packets of instant yeast work just fine

13 grams salt (1 ⅓ teaspoon)

⅔ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

500 ml buttermilk (2 cups)

80 ml water (⅓ cup)

80 ml oil (⅓ cup, 71 grams)

Cinnamon Bun Sugary Filling Recipe:

230 grams butter, melted (1 cup)

533 grams brown sugar (2 ⅔ cup)

3 teaspoons cinnamon 

1 Tablespoon orange juice (optional)

1 cup chopped pecan nuts (optional)

Cinnamon Bun Cream Cheese Glaze Recipe:

80 g softened butter (⅓ cup)

80 g softened cream cheese (⅓ cup)

175 g powdered sugar (1 ⅓cup)

80 ml orange juice (from one orange - ⅓ cup)

Preheat oven to 180 °C (350 °F, gas mark 4)
Baking time: 25 to 30 minutes

To make the dough, place all dry ingredients - the sugar, salt, yeast, bicarbonate of soda and the flour into a bowl. Mix the wet ingredients, namely, the buttermilk, water and oil.

Before we go any further - a word on the amount of yeast used in this recipe, which is very high. These buns therefore not only rise extremely quickly, but also are able to cope with the cold buttermilk and, in particular, the sugar and butter filling. If you use less yeast, these combined would utterly overwhelm the dough. As a result, you can be pretty debonair with this recipe and use the buttermilk cold from the fridge, it will not matter one whit.

Either make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and slowly work in all liquid ingredients until a dough is formed, or use your Kenwood dough hook to knead until all are combined.

Divide dough into two parts, then roll dough out onto parchment paper or a floured surface into a 25 cm by 50 cm rectangle. 

The thinner the dough (within reason) the better the final result

Make the sugar filling by softening butter and then adding sugar and cinnamon. I find the best result is slightly melted butter, which you mix with finely grained brown sugar and then leave to cool, such that while the resulting mixture is easy to spread, you don't want it too hot (it will make the bun all gooey and sticky since it will start to cook the dough before it has risen properly). For added flavour and interest, you can apparently add orange juice but I don't.

Spread the brown sugar, butter and cinnamon mix evenly over the dough

Roll up lengthwise, and a trick here is to massage the long roll of dough, so that the seam where the end joins is not really visible. 

Roll up into a nice, long even roll

Next, cut the roll into 8 pieces that are approximately 5cm (2 inches) long each, and then repeat with the other half of the dough.

Place in the rectangular baking pan, which you will have lined with baking parchment, since the rolls ooze loads of caramelising sugar out. Let the cinnamon buns rise for about 30 minutes, or until doubled in size, or place in refrigerator until ready to bake (at which stage you will wait until they have risen to the requisite height but, frankly, patience is not a game you are really willing to play at this stage, though it can be useful as a party trick). 

Bake rolls for about 25 minutes, until lightly browned. 

Cinnamon buns or rolls, having risen in the pan, placed into the oven for baking

Immediately invert onto serving platter. It is at this stage you will make the cream cheese frosting. 

Cream cheese frosting / icing on a cinnamon bun or roll, adds zest to it

Cream Cheese Frosting

Combine butter, cream cheese and powdered sugar. Add orange juice until mixture is to the required spreading consistency (I find I prefer my frosting a bit stiffer rather than runny, so am sparing in my use of the orange juice, checking before I add more). Slather onto warm, but not hot rolls, else the icing goes completely liquid. If, however, you don't have these ingredients, vanilla-flavoured buttercream or butter icing will suffice in a pinch, though, frankly, it is the slightly sour taste of the orange and cream cheese that helps to cut through the otherwise unalloyed clinging sweetness of the caramelised sugar taste, gives it a bit of zest, as it were (since 'zest' still also refers to the finely grated peel of an orange, the slightly sour taste of the orange in relation to the caramelised sugar and cream cheese mean that this icing, for all its richness, helps to cut through or counterbalance the heady sweetness of the cinnamon rolls. 

Serve hot, with lashings of frosting and dark, bittersweet coffee. 

Sunday cinnamon rolls. My husband made both bowl and board.