November 14th, 2009 by Sha

So here’s a couple pics of winter 2009’s first baking project: my first ever attempt at baking 100% homemade cinnamon buns. I used the “Almost Famous Cinnamon Buns” recipe that was in the Thanksgiving issue of Food Network Magazine. It’s a copy-cat recipe for CinnaB–, well, you-know-who’s cinnamon buns. We don’t want any trouble; just good cinnamon rolls. Anyway…I made the dough and filled and rolled the buns the night before; after cutting and proofing the buns in what would ultimately be the baking dish they went into the refrigerator overnight. (By the way, the recipe said to cut the rolled dough log into six buns but as you can see in the photo I wound up with eight counting the funny looking ends.) I took the buns out of the refrigerator as soon as we got up the next morning so they could warm up a little bit, then we popped them into the oven for 30 minutes and oh my – they were fabulous! Slightly crunchy outside, light and fluffy inside; a nearly impossible feat when it comes to baking breads at 7,600 feet elevation. Baking is one thing that has been quite a challenge since moving here; the arid climate and the altitude have huge effects on the outcome of anything that contains yeast. You know, I think this is the first time that something baked came out good the first time!

Oh, and the frosting was a perfect copy of you-know-who’s, and I even had to improvise on that part of the recipe because I did not have any heavy cream! (A storm was rolling into B.F.C. and I couldn’t justify a 30 mile round trip to the grocery store just for heavy cream, so I got online and found several substitution suggestions. This is the one I went with and it worked great: 2/3 cup whole milk + 1/3 cup butter, warm the milk, melt the butter in the milk, let it cool down, and use as you would heavy cream.) The only thing I will do differently next time is to use less cinnamon in the filling, which was also great but because we used  Morton & Bassett organic pure ground cinnamon it was just a little too cinnamon-y in my opinion. I think next time I’ll try using 1/3 less, that will probably work better with the organic ground cinnamon. All in all they came out really good, and we decided to call them CinnaBoos – after me! The best part of making these cinnamon buns just may be how amazing the house smelled all morning. This recipe is definitely worth the effort, and I’m sure I’ll be making these again very soon!