Each spring when Easter time rolls round, I get the itch to bake once more. Lengthy dormant because the winter holidays, I really feel ready as soon as extra to deal with doughs, desserts and different candy issues with gusto. I all the time decide a brand new baking venture to mark this shift, ideally one thing fully novel to me. This 12 months, my accomplice expressed his want for a do-it-yourself model of one in every of his favourite snacks: “Texas”-size honey buns. They’re the type you used to get from a gasoline station or a merchandising machine in your college’s lunchroom throughout break interval. That definitely match the standards for my venture.
Although I didn’t develop up within the Lone Star State, I do know these honey buns properly. Whether or not referred to as “Massive” or “Jumbo,” they’re marked by a uniformly light-brown coloring and a flattened, rectangular dough spiral laced with a powdery cinnamon filling. They're a mass-produced model of what was maybe a Swedish kanelbulle — what we name a cinnamon roll — when it first got here to the U.S. with Scandinavian immigrants. Alongside the way in which, cinnamon rolls grew to become extra of a crusty, white-icing-glazed mountain of dough.
Although made with more-or-less comparable elements, the honey bun, in contrast, has a surprisingly skinny and delicately utilized glaze and fewer gooey filling than the cinnamon roll. Nevertheless, as with most nostalgic baked items of the post-WWII period, honey buns are laden with unpronounceable chemical compounds, stabilizers and synthetic elements, which suggests they're prepared for a makeover.
Earlier than I began to develop my very own honey bun, I learn the record of elements on the again of their packaging to glean what is definitely within the cellophane-wrapped treats. Regardless that I by no means observed a powerful honey taste within the namesake buns, it seems there's some — in powdered type. There may be additionally cocoa powder within the filling, which triggered my reminiscence of consuming the vaguely bitter, powdery filling that hardly laces the dough spiral.
Making a pillowy-soft dough is the straightforward half, since I’ve made numerous cinnamon rolls in my lifetime. My go-to cinnamon bun dough makes use of butter, however I switched it for vegetable oil, which retains doughs and desserts extra moist than butter. I additionally added an egg yolk to the milk-rich dough for a little bit coloration. However to actually guarantee the precise pillowy texture I needed, I turned to the Asian bread approach referred to as tangzhong, whereby you cook dinner a small quantity of flour and liquid collectively earlier than mixing it with the remainder of your dough elements. This not solely retains the dough white-bread smooth, however it additionally helps protect the buns’ freshness for days longer. In an age when crusty, crackling sourdough is seen because the supreme dough texture, it’s refreshing to know that you may apply those self same ideas to a satisfyingly smooth bread dough too.
With the dough discovered, I turned to the filling, which solely required taking part in round with ratios of butter, cinnamon and cocoa powder till I hit that attribute taste. However I additionally needed these buns to be extra purposefully “honeyed,” so I added precise honey to the filling, as properly — some fixes are hiding in plain sight, ya know?
The largest problem can be to re-create the honey bun’s distinct rectangular, fats spiral form. To assist with that, I take advantage of some, let’s say, “inventive molding.” First, whereas for cinnamon rolls you’d roll a sheet of dough right into a spherical spiral, I as a substitute pleat the dough right into a flat log, much like folding a sheet of paper for an envelope.
Subsequent, I organize the minimize oblongs on a baking sheet in a barely crowded style in order that once they rise and bake, they squish up in opposition to one another, additional reinforcing their soccer type. Lastly, I place one other piece of parchment paper and a baking sheet on prime of the buns whereas they proof. This may increasingly sound odd, however it gives the proper quantity of weight to maintain the buns flat whereas nonetheless permitting them to rise and broaden whereas baking.
For the ultimate step within the course of, I make use of a standard cake approach for offering moisture and a supple crumb: soaking the buns in syrup. As an alternative of merely glazing the buns with a powdered-sugar glaze, I make a skinny syrup that will get poured over the buns as quickly as they emerge from the oven. The syrup soaks in and helps to forestall any a part of the buns from turning into “bready” in any manner. Then, as soon as cooled, a thicker opaque glaze is drizzled excessive and left to arrange, giving the buns their iconic visage.
Surprisingly, it took about as a lot engineering to make my do-it-yourself honey bun because it most likely did for the economic scientists to create their packaged model. However it was enlightening and thrilling to search out out that you may re-create a childhood favourite — and make it even higher than it was earlier than — with just a few playful maneuvering. And now, with my do-it-yourself honey buns assembly my accomplice’s approval, I sit up for seeing fewer cellophane wrappers mendacity within the automobile and extra spent paper towels stamped with that well-known swirl.
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