Cinnamon Roll Monkey Bread

subtitle: Americans have weird food names.

So, on the look out for something manageable after the last disappointment and waiting for the new Heston episodes on Masterchef Australia, I stumbled over a recipe on the Waitrose website: Cinnamon Roll Monkey Bread. Weird name, but hey, I thought my family loves cinnamon scrolls, and this is cinnamon scrolls as dessert!

The recipe serves 3. There are three of us. Perfect, no?

Let's check out the steps.

• Make the dough
• Make the caramel
• Make the cinnamon butter
• Roll out the dough, lather with cinnamon butter
• Put the caramel in ramekins, top with cinammon scroll
• Bake.

Sounds like... making cinnamon scrolls, right? Looks like it too. So I figured, perfect for a Winter's Friday night!

Let's try it out, and see if I am as swish as Heston (hint.. no.)

 

Making the dough

Warm milk.

Add in the yeast and sugar, put the it aside to let the yeast yawn, wake up and smell the coffee. (Not literally, since you know, there's no coffee. And yeast is just like...nevermind.)

Add the butter, vanilla and egg to the yeasty milk. Then add that to the flour and salt.

Mix it up.

Pop it into the mixer with a dough hook until it looks dough-like.

Into a bowl for it to prove for an hour. (i.e. Get fat and puffy)

As instructed, I pressed down on it with the palm of my hand. (Mine didn't seem as puffy as his.)

Then it goes into the fridge. For four hours. Why? No other cinnamon scroll recipe I have made needed this. *scratches head* Oh well, in it went. Insert random knowing-nodding-head-comment about starches resting or something. Mumble mumble.

 

Make the caramel

This caramel has apple in it. Rather shades of the apple caramels we made a while back. This one uses apple sauce.

This is a dry burn caramel recipe. I found it interesting as he suggests a slightly different way of doing this than the one I am used to - no stirring at all, just lots of water on the edges. (And, I suspect, finicky temperature management, which he doesn't mention on the video).

Ah, caramel. (No interim photo, the heat fogged up the lens).

Add in your apple sauce. I think his was a chunkier one than mine.

Chop some nuts. I had hazelnuts in the cupboard, not the called for pecans - so hazelnuts it was.

Prep the ramekins with caramel and nuts.

Make the cinnamon butter. Cinnamon, butter and unrefined caster sugar, which I always have on hand now, since he uses them in his chocolate biscuits and they are our go-to easy biscuit these days.

Ready for spreading!

 

Make the cinnamon rolls

So roll out the pastry. I went to a tapas class last week, where I conviently learned how to improve my pastry rolling skills. (Sidebar: In case you didn't know this either. Don't roll all the way to the edge - leave a gap at the top and bottom, then when you turn it to roll the other way, it makes a better shape, and more even thickeness). This turned out the be very timely, because you want thin, even dough for this.

It made more than I expected. Then smear all over with the cinnamon butter, with a palette knife. Or if, like me, you don't have a palette knife (kitchen kind, not art kind) use a stiff spatula.

Then roll it up.

Put them into the fridge to "harden them up" for 10 minutes. In addition to making them more manly and gruff with others, this makes them easier to cut into the required 3 cm pieces.

 

Assemble the scrolls into the ramekins

Realise you have more dough than you need, and make up a fourth one so whoever likes it best can have seconds. Or the same dessert tomorrow night. They go to prove again for 20 minutes.

Then into the oven for 30 minutes. Mine are darker and more crazy puffy then Heston's. I could have probably just put 4 bits in each instead of five and made another one.

 

Serve

Turn them out and serve with extra caramel.

Guest opinions:

• One 'guest' of the smaller and younger variety, liked it very much. Because ... cinnamon scrolls for dessert! With caramel!!
• The other 'guest' felt they were ... I'll edit and prove the gist. Why not just make cinnamon scrolls? They are lighter, and tastier and there is nothing wrong with them.

Verdict:

• I felt like they were just a bit much. Too big, and overwhelming and over sweet as a dessert. I fear I concur with my husband on this one.
• I did like the finer scrolls (thinner dough) and would probably do this for breakfast scrolls in the future. 
• I have no idea why they needed to rest for four hours in the middle, it felt excessive and didn't seem to produce a different quality outcome to Nigella's shorter process.
• Not a failure or anything, just... uninspired. I am suspecting my standards for Heston are getting higher as I move on...

Next: Time for another dinner party... I have my eye on a few potential candidates.

Breakfast! Heston Blumenthal scrambled eggs with brown butter, and Nigella's cinnamon scrolls.

So, this week, I thought I'd take it easy, and make some Heston Blumenthal scrambled eggs.

This was to be easy, because I've made them (sort of) before and thought it would be an easy win. So much so, I invited some friends of ours over for breakfast on Sunday.  Of course, as soon as my family realised that we were having guests for breakfast, they started insisting on cinnamon scrolls. Of course, eggs alone would be insufficient, they simply MUST HAVE the cinnamon scrolls. These scrolls do tend to elicit that kind of reaction, and since they are my person go-to brunch food by preference, I caved.

So. Scrambled eggs a la Heston Bluementhal, and Nigella Lawson's cinnamon scrolls from How to Be a Domestic Goddess.

I woke up (early no less!) dreaming and thinking about food, which is a good start.

Today we have 2 dishes:

1. Cinnamon scrolls  from How to Be a Domestic Goddess, by Nigella Lawson.
2. Scrambled eggs (sous vide method) from Heston Blumenthal At Home, by Heston Blumenthal

Cinnamon Scrolls

from How to Be a Domestic Goddess, which is, hands-down, my favourite baking book and gets used a lot in our  home.

It is saying a lot that I realised part way in that I am so familiar with the recipe that I mostly need the book out for the quantities, not so much the method. I also have a recommended alteration to the recipe - I'll note this as I go. It is pencilled in on my own copy, much to the disgust of my daughter who told me off quite sternly for writing in a book!

I do have to say if you don't have a lot of experience with bread-type baking this is a good intro as it's not difficult and gives awesome bang-for-effort. 

Steps:

1. Make up your dough (Mix the wet stuff into the dry stuff, knead)
2. Make up your filling
3. Roll it up into a long sausage roll
4. Cut into pieces, let rest
5. Bake 

Stuff assembled ready to go.

Okay, bowl of flour, sugar, salt and yeast.

Then you milk and eggs. Okay, my own suggested edit here - use 300ml of milk, not 400ml. If you use 400ml, the mix is way to wet, and you end up having to add too much flour and then the dough gets tough.

Add melted butter.

Mix it up ...

And then the wet stuff goes into the dry stuff.

Mix it up.

And ta-da! Wet sticky dough! (don't worry it gets better).

Start kneading.

 

It will end up nice and smooth(ish) and not sticky and sproingy when you press your finger in it.

Then it gets a bit of a rest to fatten up. (Go that good yeast!) This is actually a lot of dough, its just in my super-huge dough making bowl.

While that is doing its thing you put all the filling stuff in a bowl and mix it. This is what it looks like when its all mixed together. It uses a lot of cinnamon and butter and sugar.

Here it is a bit bigger. I do find that some batches get puffier than others, all things being equal otherwise. Don't know why it happens, but it doesn't seem to effect the outcome, so I don't really worry about it. Maybe its an atmospheric thing.

Okay now for the fun bit. Keep a chunk of dough aside to line the base of the pan. I think this is mostly so the sugar doesn't burn the bottom of the pan, having a dough layer. It all just gets pulled apart so that's fine.

Now, personally I like smaller rolls, with more spirals. So I roll mine out very thinly and extra long. The longer it is, the more rolls you'll get but they'll be smaller. If you want one-per-person fat rolls, then just follow the book (50cmx25cm). Mine was almost double that length.

Put a layer of filling all over the dough. You can use a spatula to smear it out, but I recommend using your (clean) hands. Using your hands is more gentle and you don't pull at the dough too much.

Roll it up!

Slice off individual scrolls. These are about 2-3cm thick or so.

They then sit around for 20mins or so puffing up before baking.

Then into the oven, and then here we are! Eat hot. I recommend sharing with lots of people. it makes rather a lot :)

It was good these were low stress, because it gave me time to muck about with the eggs. Recover, and still get there, albeit a bit late.

Heston Blumenthal Scrambled eggs with brown butter (sous-vide).. or not.

So this was interesting. I thought I'd try Heston's scrambled eggs done in the sous vide method. I don't own a sous vide machine, but on the How To Cook Like Heston TV show, he noted you can do the same thing with a water bath and a thermometer. It's only relatively short cooking time so I thought this would be a good test before I tried other sous vide recipes of his.

Steps

1. Whisk the eggs, cream etc.
2. Put in a zip lock bag
3. Put in a water bath at 75 degrees.
4. Squish every 3-5 mins.
5. Serve.

Yeah. So... that's almost what happened. 

Step one was pretty straight forward. Eggs, milk, cream, salt and butter get whisked together.

Put the mix in zip lock bags. These are just regular sandwich bags.

Get your water bath ready.

Realise that you need a lot more water than you thought.  Start boiling the kettle. Get a little frustrated. Have your husband ask why you didn't just put it on the stove. Explain that you're doing what the TV program suggested.

Realise this isn't going to cut it and give up and do what your husband suggested and put water on the stove-top to heat. Admit openly he was right, much to his amusement.

Once the temperature hits that magical 75 degrees, turn the heat off and pop in your egg bags.

Now every 3-5 minutes you take the bags out with over mitts and squish ("or massage the contents".)

So this is supposed to go on for 15 minutes. And give you perfect eggs.

Except... that about 14 minutes they weren't looking cooked through yet and both bags had developed small splits (1cm) on the seams at the base. At this point what you do, or what I did anyway, is panic slightly. Apparently this looks a bit like this. (Helpful assistants photo of the event)

I should note careful examination showed the eggs were leaking out, but no water seemed to be getting into the splits. 

At this point, I reverted to the other Heston Blumenthal way of doing eggs, namely mixing constantly in a double boiler. (Or, in this case a glass bowl over water, which is my personal preference.)

The advantage of this is that you can put the butter on low (for the brown butter) next to you while you mix the eggs.

And this time, it worked!

Drizzle with nut brown butter and eat on nice toast. Yum.

Verdict:

So the cinnamon scrolls were good as usual, if a little extra brown as I got distracted (almost not) making eggs. A recommended recipe. If you like the cinnamon scrolls from bakeries even a little, these have those kicked to the kerb. Nothing like having them hot and fresh.

Eggs. Well, not a complete failure, though very disappointing. I'm not sure whether it was a bag fault or not but it is kind of a moot point as I could tell it both wasn't cooking in the allotted time and the texture was not as good as when I do it on a stove top over water. (It was a bit lumpier).

In future, I'll stick to my usual method - eggs, cream, milk, lumps of butter. Cook in a bowl over water on low. Stir constantly for around 20 mins. Best scrambled eggs ever. (Actually, this is a also a Heston recipe - given when he was interviewed by Radio National a few months back.)

Guest opinions:

Appreciation of the cinnamon scrolls was to form, they had strongly requested them, and so they were eaten with great relish. Eggs also enjoyed, though my husband noted (and I agreed) they just weren't as good as when done on the double boiler. Ah well, I know for next time. Given my poor experience with the zip lock bags I think I'll have to investigate a little more about if they need "special" zip lock bags and/or consider borrowing a proper sous-vide thing. Hmm.