Cinnamon bun-cake

To celebrate finally finishing my Christmas cake it seemed appropriate to bake something new so I opted for my own little bit of scandomania and looked for a cinnamon bun recipe. The older I get the more appealing a cinnamon bun becomes as compared to something like a cup cake or anything else smothered in to much icing, until now my go to recipe has been this one but it makes a lot of buns and a change doesn't go amiss sometimes.

I've had 'Scandilicious Baking' since it came out but apart from the Santa Lucia buns haven't used it much, but I found a good looking bun recipe in it yesterday and had pretty much all the ingredients I needed to make them so that's what I did. I guess my next project will be to find something which isn't based on a sweet dough in there.

Possibly the best thing about these buns from my point of view is that the quantities are a little bit more modest (the worst is that there was no need for baking powder so my new kitchen accessory remained unused) this bun recipe makes 7 rather than 12, they're also reasonably quick to produce - at least in terms of anything bready and that's good too.

To make the dough scald 225mls of milk with 75g of butter. Meanwhile measure out 425g of strong plain flour (the original recipe uses a mix of plain flour and spelt flour which I didn't have) 70g of castor sugar, one of those little sachets of instant yeast, half a teaspoon of ground sea salt, 1 teaspoon of ground cardamom (this is a flavour that I'm coming to particularly associate with Signe Johansen and whilst I like the lemony hit it gives these buns I'm not overly sold on it and would say it was distinctly optional) because I misread somewhere along the line I also added a teaspoon of cinnamon to the dough but I like cinnamon so that's staying in). By the time all the dry ingredients are assembled and stirred together the scalded milk butter mix should have cooled enough to add along with an egg. It's a wet dough so it's much easier to use a mixer of some sort than hands... When it's turned into a nice dough cover the bowl with cling film and put somewhere warm for half an hour to rise. Meanwhile butter a 23cm spring form tin and make a filling out of 75g of soft butter, 50g of caster sugar, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, and half a teaspoon of vanilla salt (the salt adds something special and is worth having on hand) cream that lot together. When the dough has risen to about double in size roll it out into a rectangle about 35cm long 25cm wide, spread all over with the filling and then roll up into a long sausage. Cut into 7 rounds and arrange in the tin. Put it back somewhere warm to rise for another 20 -30 mins and heat the oven to 200c or gas 6. Have a tray to put the cake tin on or risk butter dripping all over your oven. When the dough has doubled in size again glaze it with egg and a sprinkle of sugar, put it in the oven and bake for 20 to 25 mins (or until cooked). Allow to cool and then enjoy.