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.

Review: Heston's Christmas Puddings with hidden clementine

So, for something different I decided to review one of Heston's supermarket Christmas offerings.

I decided to try the smaller Christmas pudding with the hidden clementine. This is because I didn't want a full sized pudding with only two of us eating it and and because I wasn't impressed by the idea of pine-scented fruit mince pies.

The whole "pine scented=Christmas" just doesn't work for me. I suspect because since I've never had a "real" tree (too expensive, messy and really, just too hot) I associate pine scented with cleaning products.

So the pricey tiny pudding it was.

I know from over at my fellow Heston blogger, In Search of Heston,  that Heston has a whole range of branded food. We only get the fruit mince pies and Christmas puds - I suspect the rather long shipping journey may be to blame.

So it's pretty much a heat and eat thing. Steam it.

Sauna away my little lovely...



After steaming the requisite 40 minutes or so.. you tear off the foil and plate it up.

 

Looks nice on the plate though...It's around the size of a smallish orange.

 And cut into the two serves. You can see the slightly squished clementine in the middle. I consider squishing the clementine unavoidable since the outside is soft, but the clementine more firm.

Opinions:

Now, to be fair I have to give a context. Every year sometime between August and October, I make Christmas puddings from scratch.  I use (and highly recommend) Stephanie Alexander's recipe from The Cook's Companion. My current pair of puddings is happily macerating in the back of my fridge as I type, preparing for Christmas.

If you're not familiar with this tome, check it out. It was originally released in a smaller volume against the author's larger intent because the book people didn't believe anyone would buy a cookbook that resembled a doorstop. They were wrong. It sold out. A lot. So they bought out the bigger edition shown above. I only have the original, but it is an excellent resource on how to cook a wide variety of foods. It is probably the best Australian cookbook I own. (And competes for the best, period.)

So anyway. I suppose I am - albeit in a somewhat circuitous way - suggesting that I have a pretty high standard for Christmas puddings.

• Heston's pudding is a nice pudding, but not earth shattering. 
• If you are used to the typical dry, cake-masquerading-as-pudding you'd probably think this was excellent. 
• Also, I felt like the clementine just wasn't worth including on a flavour basis. Unless you like glace fruit a lot. I felt like I wanted more pudding in my pudding.
• It was however, nicely moist with good overall flavours.
• And I think for a bought one, it's pretty good.

When I went back more recently, they'd sold out so I gather they are very popular - and it's not like they can easily get back stock. In summary, if you are going to buy a supermarket pudding and not make one, or get one of those artisan-style ones, this (or the larger orange one) would probably be a good choice.

(And given I also make fruit mince pies each year, I don't think I'll be rushing to get those pine dusted ones...)

Next time: Back the to usual programming, promise. Summer is here and I think I might try that banana Eton mess!

Winter Feast, Dessert: Lardy cake

So I am recounting my Winter Feast adventures. We had:

·     Pumpkin soup

·     Fish pie with Sand and Sea topping

·     Lardy cake

Dessert. Ever since I saw the picture in Heston Blumenthal at Home, I realised that this would be perfect for a winter’s dinner. Butterscotch paired with warm fruit and sweet bread. Heston claims that this is a highly traditional dish, but it seems not one that really made it to the colonies (unlike many others, like Plum Pudding for Christmas, or trifle.) So, prior to this, I’d not ever eaten a Lardy cake. Or, as my daughter kept thinking it was called, a la-di-dah cake. Which is kind of funny, since that really is everything this dessert isn’t.

The ‘cake’ (though I think of more as a sweet bread) had three components – the bread, the filling and the butterscotch sauce. I feel that making this is very similar to making a combination of cinnamon scrolls, fruit mince pies and Christmas pudding. Nothing super challenging.

 

Steps:

1. Make the bread
2. Make the filling
3. Assemble and bake
4. Make the sauce
5. Pan fry and Serve

Really, its fairly straightforward. But then, in comparison to that fish pie, maybe everything is straight forward.

 

Make the bread

You mix up the flour and water, then let it rest for 30 minutes. Given there is no yeast in it here, I have no idea what this step does beyond making wet flour. (I regularly make pizza dough, which doesn’t need this, so if you know why you do this, please leave a comment. Is it a bread-making thing?)

Then the yeast, salt and a tiny bit of lard get added in and mixed well. It gets popped into a bowl, and left to rise. This give you… puffy dough.

 

Make the filling

This step reminds me rather a lot of making fruit mince pies. (Which I do every year. Bought ones are always too sweet, and mealy). Lots of fruit gets cooked with cognac until all the cognac is pretty much gone.

Then you cream butter and sugar, add in the lard and golden syrup. Once that’s all mixed up the fruit goes in. (Now it really reminds me of Christmas pudding mix. Speaking of which I need to make them for Christmas!)

 

Assemble and bake

Roll out your dough as if you’re making cinnamon scrolls (i.e. a nice even rectangular shape.)

Spread over the fruit mix, leaving an end bit to stick.

 

Roll it up into a nicely perfect tube of fattening soused fruit. Or, as in my case, struggle to get it to roll nicely due to the filling being a natural lubricant, and realise your rectangle was more a trapezoid. Apparently. More simply put, you are supposed to tightly roll it. I found this very difficult, because the dough is very soft, and the fruit mix very slippery, and thereby resists you doing anything “tightly” with it. This means it was more flattened than nicely circular, and I can’t see how it would stay nicely rounded like in the picture anyway. Not having made this dish before, I don’t know how soft or hard the dough should have been  but was concerned about adding more flour in case it became tough. It wasn’t sticky or anything, just.. well, doughy.

So that gets put on a tray and left to puff up and get fatter. Which it did.

 

Then it goes into the oven while you make the sauce. Periodically, you ladle over the melted lard/fruit mix.

 

Making the sauce

So it’s butterscotch. Which is kind of what happens when you make caramel and add butter to it. That is, its sugar plus butter, rather than just the molten sugar. This one also has cream and golden syrup. 

You whisk it…

 

Then heat it up to soft crack stage. (i.e. Before it becomes toffee).

Finishing the cake

So the cake comes out of the oven. 

And get placed upside down to cool. Disappointingly, because the top of the cake was quite hard/firm and the bottom quite soft (but cooked) it cracked, thereby removing any elegance possibly promised. Cooking also seemed to make it even more likely to fall apart than it was before I cooked it. Messy.

Pan fry and serve.

So when you are ready to serve it, you cut slices, then pan fry these in butter to heat them up and serve with the warmed butterscotch sauce. I was so busy getting them sliced and pan fried, I totally forgot to take a picture til quite a bit later…

As you might be able to see under the pile of ice cream, the shape didn’t hold, instead of nice rounds they were more like a flattened shape.

But more importantly, taste:  the lardy cake was okay, but not really anything more than that. The butterscotch sauce was nice and I’d make again, but the cake was pretty disappointing. It’s possible that the fault was the not-tightly rolled shape, but I’m not convinced.

 

Lessons learned:

• Butterscotch sauce is a winter popularity winner.

 Guest opinions:

Guests enjoyed it, but nowhere near as much as other dishes. It was nice, fruity, and good for winter and they loved the butterscotch sauce.

 

Verdict:

Disappointing, but not bad. To be honest, there are many other desserts with equal or less effort I’d make again before bothering with this. Perhaps its just that I wasn’t aware of what it should be like and so was underwhelmed.

Next: Mustard sauce, courtesy of Heston’s recent appearances on Masterchef Australia.