Cooking Bucket List #4 – Cinnamon Buns!

Cinnamon rolls ended up being the perfect treat for me last week. It was a sunny, warm Sunday. My partner was away for the night for a friends’ wedding, and I had the whole day to myself. I’d booked the Monday off too because I was intent on letting a few glasses of red wine take me to bed. On Sunday morning, I got myself ready to visit MF Books for the first time, wearing a pair of airy jeans and a knit cardigan, ready to breathe in the lovely day. 

And then the clouds ripped open and I was drenched. Through my 30ish minute bus ride to Mount Florida, I kept trying to convince myself that this torrential downpour simply couldn’t last. It was unsustainable! I looked ahead to clear skies in the distance and convinced myself that the blue sat perfectly above the place I needed to be.

No such luck. Within a minute of alighting the bus, I was drenched. Cardigan, soaked through. Tote bag, sopping. Hair, unsalvagle. Forty minutes earlier I was complaining about the heat. Then, I was asking the nice lady in MF Books for some kitchen roll, or anything, to dry my glasses with. 

After successfully picking up some books and indulging in a hot flat white and Biscoff Cronut from Honey & Salt (my new fav), I headed home and embarked on another challenge: baking cinnamon rolls from scratch. 

I was delighted to be able to use a new toy for the first time – a Kenwood stand mixer that was on offer at Morrisons – but afraid of what lay ahead. Working with yeast scares me, to be honest. I don’t have the practice down yet, and I see it as fussy and unruly. Still, I took comfort in resolving to follow Andrew Rea’s (Binging with Babish) recipe for cinnamon rolls to a tee. Babish could never steer me wrong, right?

While the recipe was easy enough to follow, it proved a bit much for my small stand mixer to handle. The dough was thicc but it all ended up ok! 

Waiting first two hours and then ninety minutes for my dough to proof was painful. I sat in fear, terrified that I might go to check on it and find that dead yeast hadn’t expanded. No such horror befell me. I don’t know if my first proofing saw the dough double in size, but there were no incidents anyway. 

One thing I did forget to do was knead my dough before turning it into cinnamon rolls. Again, everything worked out beautifully, so it wasn’t the end of the world! 

Cinnamon rolls seriously take a lot of time to create but it was all worth it for how delicious and GORGEOUS they turned out. Honestly my breath was taken by my beautiful little babies. They were lovely and golden and shapely and I have very little to complain about!!

That said, when I make these treats again, I will be making some changes: instead of a mix of sugar and cinnamon, I will be using cinnamon butter as my bun filling, and I will be trying to make more of a glaze to top the buns with instead of the cream cheese icing. This icing was beyond delicious – rich, sweet, creamy – but Jesus, it also made the rolls unsociable to handle. Picking one up entailed extreme sticky fingers.

Thank you for visiting hol7ly.co.uk ! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading today. If you REALLY ENJOYED your visit, I accept donations via my Ko-Fi account here. Any donations are massively appreciated as they encourage me to keep writing, and fuel my dreams of writing full-time and completely independently one day! 

Thanks again ~ 

Holly x

Leave a Reply

One comment