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.

Pea and Pancetta Spaghetti

Thankfully due to the nice soul over at In Search of Heston, you can find lots of Heston dishes online, helpfully indexed (even if some are behind a pay wall - boohiss.)

This is where I found another one of Heston's Waitrose dishes - Pea and Pancetta Spaghetti. And since it's online I can link to the recipe. Linketty link. I am going to have to go visit a Waitrose in London, just so I can see all these Heston linked meals...

I found this recipe interesting because it is very similar for my go-to Spaghetti Carbonara recipe from Jill Dupliex's Old Food.(Which is one of my three desert island cookbooks).

So anyway, it's an easy, midweek kind of dish. The kind of midweek dish that you cook when you're tired, potentially making blurry photos. Sorry about that.

Pea and Pancetta Spaghetti

Steps

1. Cook your pasta
2. Cook your onion and garlic
3. Whisk together egg yolks, parmesan etc
4. add the peas to the onions
5. Mix onions/peas and egg yolk mix to hot pasta
6. Stir through and serve!

It's like the laziest Heston ever. I feel like I've been saying that a lot. I obviously need to get on to the harder dishes again. Let's watch it happen.

Gather yon ingredients.

Prepare yon ingredients.

Cook the onion etc.

Cook the olive oil, onion, garlic. Plus chilli if your family eats chili. Sadly, mine doesn't.

Add and cook the pancetta. Smells tasty. Salty italian bacon stuff.

 

 Get your sauce sorted.

 So this is parmesan, egg yolks, salt and pepper. Sounds like my spaghetti carbonara.

 But instead of cream, you add a ladel of the cooking water from the pasta. And whisk it up.

Add your peas to defrost in the pancetta and onion mix.

Drain your spaghetti

And back into the still hot saucepan.

 Then add in the meat and veg. Mix.

And stir through the egg yolk mixture.

You might be worried about the raw egg. Fear not, the heat from the pasta very quickly cooks the egg into a thick sauce. (I was totally chill, having seen this trick before on my carbonara).

Serve and garnish with more parmesan.

Eat with gusto.

Guest opinions:

• The family liked it. Daughter is not difficult to please on this front. It has pasta and a bacon variant so always likely to be a winner from her. Husband liked it but not hugely whelmed. I think he preferred my usual Carbonara, which is a favourite of his. (Which is pretty much this with bacon in place of pancetta, no peas and a smaller amount of cream in place of the water).
• My thoughts was it was a good go-to easy recipe probably mildly healthier than the usual. I would probably make it again, but might down grade the amount of pancetta, which I found a little salty and overpowering in this quantity. Which may depend on the pancetta you use of course.

Verdict

I'd probably make this again. It would be a tasty and easy little entree (or 'il primo'... I've been getting ready for my trip).

Tasty and very low effort. I think its worth getting the better ingredients for this one if possible - one of those Italian things of 'simple done well'.

Diamond Jubilee Strawberry Crumble Crunch: Sort of Eton Mess without the Eton.

How could you not like a recipe with a reference to Diamond Jubilee. It sounds so chipper and British and what-have-you. I have actually wanted to make this for a long while, only when it was released it was ... cold and rainy here. And winter-like. And no strawberries in season.

But then Christmas came and yay for strawberries and heat and all things sweet and Heston-like.

This recipe was published by Heston Blumenthal for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and thus is actually one I can link the recipe to. It's found here.

Like many Heston dishes, it has several elements brought together. Thankfully for this though, none are overly taxing, and all can be prepared for final assembly just before serving.

So the components are:

• Crumble
• Strawberry and rose compote
• Marbled cream
• Meringue pieces and freeze-dried strawberries to serve.

Let's get into it.

Crumble

So if you've made a crumble before, this is familiar-ish territory.

Take your crumble elements:

Here we have sugar, almonds, flour and salt in a food processor, and process it.

 Add in some butter. Pulse into nice lumpy bits. (You could almost certainly do this by hand if you didn't own a processor). (Looking at you Feep. ;)

 Then pop it in the oven to bake. After about 20 minutes we have golden crumble stuff. Let it cool and put it into a container until needed. (I did mine the night before to make it easier).

Strawberry and Rose Compote

While the crumble is baking and making your house smell like amazing baking cake-smells, chop up your seriously-I-know-it's-Christmas-but-six-dollars-a-punnet-these-better-be-good strawberries. (Obviously you may be able to get regular ones, not the variety I got).

Wash and hull your strawberries. Side question: Why do you hull strawberries in England? No-one does that here. I've only seen reference to it in English cookbooks. Is there something different with English Strawberries? Anyway. I did as told, and hulled them. (That's cutting the middle bit out)
Then chopped half and quartered half.  (This is so that some turns sauce-like and pulpy but then you still have strawberry bits in the finished product too. Don't skip this and think it will be better, it won't)

Add in your fructose (fruit sugar). When packing it away, if you have evaporative air-conditioning, (this time) put it in a zip lock bag or it will become a hard solid mass that you will need to throw away.

 Mix it up.

Make some lemon juice. If you don't have kids or don't believe in spoiling them with Heston Blumenthal desserts you can put in vodka.

 Interestingly, a short time later the fructose took otherwise dry chopped strawberries and immediately started making them pulpy and nice looking ruby colours. Add in that lemon juice.

Cook it on the stove for 6 minutes. Mmmm. Thick syrupy, bright red niceness. Resist the urge to eat it all with a spoon and tell your guests there is no dessert, you have become French and will serve cheese instead. Let it cool.

Add in the rosewater (easily found, supermarket sells it in the "ethnic food" section. And the elderflower cordial (which I was surprised to find also in the supermarket section. But I'd already bought a nicer one at the speciality grocer.)

 Add in the quartered strawberries.

Mix and set aside for assembly and serving. Doesn't it look delicious? And less work than it felt like it deserved. Maybe I've gotten so used to complex dishes, the easy stuff throws me.

Marbled cream.

Last stretch! Whip some cream. Then fold through a good quality yogurt.

 And again leave it until ready to serve. You do swirl through a little of the strawberry mix which I did, but then forgot to photograph, sorry.

 Assembly

Take your nicest glass bowl. (Thanks Granny, miss you! She would have totally approved of this dish, most of her favourite things in it.) Pour in the compote (after swirling some through the cream).
Top with the marbled cream. (You can see faint marbling in the picture.)

I actually decided to layer mine - compote-cream-compote-cream. Which I quite liked the look of, and distributed the ingredients a bit more.

Then top with crumbled meringue pieces, and crumble. I did this at the table, since it was obvious that we were going to have leftovers and I didn't want it to all go soft. No one minded. It was also supposed to have freeze dried strawberries, which I wasn't able to find in time for the meal - my usual supplier of these things having sold out. I also used supermarket-bought meringues. It was Christmas eve and I was busy. So there.

Result & Guest Opinions

It was very much a mess on serving. Sloppy and messy and inelegant.


It didn't matter.

It was so tasty! All the guests loved it. One even noted that when I was serving and it was all wet and messy he was getting prepared to be all polite and not saying anything.. but then it was perfect! The sloppy strawberry compute was sweet and a little bit sharp from the lemon and contrasted beautifully with the cream, but not overly rich because the yogurt gave a slight balancing sour note. The broken meringue pieces and crumble gave different degrees of both sweetness and texture against the soft compote.

Lessons learned:

• I think layering it worked beautifully. If it was for a dinner party, I think it would look amazing in those stemless wine glasses to serve.
• I think a bit more whipping of the cream might have helped a little - recipe says to medium peaks - I'd err on the firmer peaks side, so that you get a soft body to it once the yogurt goes in.

Verdict

A seriously good summer dessert. Almost all of it can be prepared ahead of time, it makes the strawberries shine. As its on the messy side, perhaps less dinner-party and more casual family lunch vibe, but all the better for it.


Next time? Not sure, I have a picnic to plan for my daughter's birthday, so maybe after that.


Also: Seeking help and advice: In other news, I will now be going to London for a few days in May (as a side trip of my Italy trip). I would desperately like to get a table at the Fat Duck. (As per my sidebar above). But I'll be travelling solo - any hints on getting a table that don't require me to be uber rich and staying somewhere fancy?

I only really wanted to go to London see the British Museum and eat at the Fat Duck. Maybe not in that order. Any suggestions gratefully considered.

I lucked out and got a table-for-one at Dinner and am absolutely ecstatic! Thanks for the help folks. (On the plus side, since its in London, I don't lose a day of sightseeing.)