INNAMON BUNS should be big and gooey, tender, and over-the-top sweet. And did I mention the requisite sweet, shiny glaze? Naturally, we have a recipe at America’s Test Kitchen that produces just such a cinnamon bun. It’s irresistible. So what’s the problem? We rarely have time to make it. Between mixing, kneading, rising, shaping, rising again, and baking, these buns take more than 3 hours out of our overscheduled lives. I wanted to make cinnamon buns in half of the time. I found plenty of recipes that claimed to deliver quick cinnamon buns. I made a half-dozen or so. They were delicious—but they weren’t cinnamon buns. Instead, they were more like frosted cinnamon biscuits. No surprise, since these recipes called for taking ordinary biscuit dough (leavened with baking powder and/or soda), rolling it out in a rectangle, brushing it with butter, sprinkling it with cinnamon sugar, rolling it up, and slicing it into individual biscuits, which were then baked and glazed. Good as they were, they lacked the unmistakable yeasty flavor and sweet bread texture of a real cinnamon bun. I decided to
take a “cinnamon biscuit” recipe, retain as much of its efficiency as possible, and try to restore the yeasted cinnamon bun taste and texture. Taking the best of the biscuit recipes from my initial test (a basic buttermilk biscuit with cream-cheese-and-butter glaze), I began its transformation. Almost all baked items are leavened, either by yeast (think bread or Danish) or by the chemical leaveners baking soda and baking powder (think cookies and cakes). But I had an idea based on an unusual Southern recipe known as angel biscuits. To get their famously light and fluffy texture, these biscuits pull out all the stops, incorporating baking powder, baking soda, and yeast. Similarly, I’d take my cinnamon “biscuit” dough and try adding back the yeast of a cinnamon bun. My working recipe, which used 11/4 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda for 23/4 cups of flour, made eight buns. I tried the recipe with gradually increasing amounts of yeast, from 21/4 teaspoons (the amount in a single envelope of yeast) up to 2 tablespoons. I hit the sweet spot at 4 teaspoons; we liked the flavor that it gave these cinnamon buns, plus the amount—quite a bit relative to the amount of flour—produced
lots of carbon dioxide gas fast. That meant that the buns, helped along by the two other leaveners, would rise quickly in the oven. To further speed along the yeast, I first dissolved it in warm milk with a little sugar. Once upon a time, this step, which is known as proofing the yeast, was part of every recipe calling for yeast. With instant yeast, which I was using, it isn’t necessary. But I did it anyway, since proofing accelerates rise and flavor development, and speed was my mantra. Now that I was making a yeast dough, albeit an unusual one, two things came into play that don’t with biscuit dough: kneading and rising. Our classic recipe for cinnamon buns calls for about 10 minutes of kneading in the mixer, followed by two rises, totaling 3 long hours, both before and after shaping the dough into buns. Where was the line between cinnamon bun qualities (tender, yeast, breadlike) and my desired cinnamon bun timetable? It took many tests to figure that out— not that I heard much complaining from coworkers, who cheerfully lined up to “evaluate” bun after bun. Eventually, I found the perfect compromise between time, taste, and texture: a mere 2 minutes of kneading by hand and—after
the dough was rolled out, filled, and cut into buns—a single 30-minute rise. But I still had a problem. Despite the leaveners, the kneading, and the rise time, the buns remained somewhat squat; they didn’t spring up in the oven, as they should. All along, I’d been baking them at 425 degrees—a standard oven temperature for biscuits. But with my hybrid biscuit bun, this high temperature worked against me: The goldenbrown tops set before the combined leaveners had time to lift. In several tests, I turned down the oven in 25-degree increments. At 350 degrees, these
quicker cinnamon buns reached their full height potential. Our science editor mentioned a second benefit to the cooler oven: Because the yeast was killed more slowly (yeast dies at 140 degrees), it had more time to multiply, ergo there was more flavor development. The hard work was done. Now I tweaked the filling and the glaze, adding more brown sugar and butter to the former and a little vanilla to the latter. I retained the cream cheese in the glaze from the original biscuit recipe; its tang brought balance to these sugary buns. I was writing up the recipe when I spotted a chance
to simplify. Could I switch from buttermilk to more convenient milk? Yep. And without acidic buttermilk, it turned out that I didn’t need baking soda either. I wrote it out of the recipe, increasing the baking powder accordingly and making my cinnamon bun recipe shorter and simpler. It would be an exaggeration to call these cinnamon buns “quick.” If you count prepping, shaping, rising, and baking, they still take about 11/2 hours. But that’s less than half of the time needed to make ordinary cinnamon buns—for the same tender, oozy, and deliciously indulgent reward.
Since the filling, dough, and glaze all require melted butter, it’s easier to melt all 10 tablespoons in a liquid measuring cup and divvy it up as needed. Stir the melted butter before each use to redistribute the milk solids. We developed this recipe using a dark cake pan, which produces deeply caramelized buns. If your cake pan is light-colored, adjust the over rack to the lowest position, heat the oven to 375 degrees, and increase the baking time to 29 to 32 minutes.
1. For the filling: Combine brown sugar, granulated sugar, cinnamon, and salt in bowl. Stir in melted butter and vanilla until mixture resembles wet sand; set aside.
2. For the dough: Grease dark 9-inch round cake pan, line with parchment paper, and grease parchment. Pour 1/4 cup milk in small bowl and microwave until 110 degrees, 15 to 20 seconds. Stir in yeast and 1 teaspoon sugar and let sit until mixture is bubbly, about 5 minutes. 3. Whisk flour, baking powder, salt, and remaining 5 teaspoons sugar together in large bowl. Stir in 2 tablespoons butter, yeast mixture, and remaining 1 cup milk until dough forms (dough will be sticky). Transfer dough to well-floured counter and knead until smooth ball forms, about 2 minutes. 4. Roll dough into 12 by 9-inch rectangle, with long side parallel to counter edge. Brush dough all over with 2 tablespoons butter, leaving 1/2-inch border on the far edge. Sprinkle dough evenly with filling, then press filling firmly into dough. Using bench scraper or metal spatula, loosen dough from counter. Roll dough away from you into tight
5. Roll log seam side down and cut into 8 equal pieces. Stand buns on end and gently re-form ends that were pinched during cutting. Place 1 bun in center of prepared pan and others around perimeter of pan, seam sides facing in. Brush tops of buns with remaining 2 tablespoons butter. Cover buns loosely with plastic wrap and let rise for 30 minutes. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. 6. Discard plastic and bake buns until edges are well browned, 23 to 25 minutes. Loosen buns from sides of pan with paring knife and let cool for 5 minutes. Invert large plate over cake pan. Using potholders, flip plate and pan upside down; remove pan and parchment. Reinvert buns onto wire rack, set wire rack inside parchmentlined rimmed baking sheet, and let cool for 5 minutes. 7. For the glaze: Place cream cheese in large bowl and whisk in butter, milk, vanilla, and salt until smooth. Whisk in sugar until smooth. Pour glaze evenly over tops of buns, spreading with spatula to cover. Serve.
Light Pan Makes Underdone Buns: We’ve long known that dark cake pans produce more deeply browned cakes, but it wasn’t until we tested our Quicker Cinnamon Buns recipe in both light and dark cake pans that we understood how great the difference can be. We developed our recipe using a dark cake pan, which absorbs heat more efficiently. Made in a light-colored pan, the same recipe yielded doughy, pale, and sunken buns.
3/4 cup packed (51/4 ounces) light brown sugar 1/4 cup (13/4 ounces) granulated sugar 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon 1/8 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 1/4 cups whole milk, room temperature 4 teaspoons instant or rapid-rise yeast 2 tablespoons granulated sugar 2 3/4 cups (13 3/4 ounces) all-purpose flour 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 teaspoon salt 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 3 ounces cream cheese, softened 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 2 tablespoons whole milk 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 cup (4 ounces) confectioners’ sugar, sifted
Twice the Power, Half the Time: By adding a lot of yeast to an ordinary biscuit dough, we combine some of the speed of biscuit-making with the flavor and texture of sweet yeast dough. With both yeast and baking powder, our Quicker Cinnamon Buns take just 2 minutes to knead and 30 minutes to rise.
or a home baker who had to beat cake batter as long as an hour in order to get it to rise, the invention of baking powder might have been viewed as a miracle. In fact, American cooks in the mid-19th century took to the chemicals with some trepidation. Baking powder’s composition and potency varied among brands, and manufacturers weren’t required to list the ingredients. Early baking powders were associated with adulterants that could upset your stomach or, at worst, kill you. Joseph Hoagland made the first successful commercial mix around 1865, later founding the Royal Baking Powder Company. “The company began to sponsor advertisements that claimed the ingredients in alum powder [named for the acid in some baking powders, but not Hoagland’s] were poisonous.” Clayton Anderson Coppin and Jack C. High wrote The Politics of Purity. “It set up phony pure food organizations that released findings stating that the lives of women and children were threatened by alum powders.” Royal went so far as to try to have alum powders outlawed, bribing politicians to support its position and hiring women to go door to door, impersonating pure food inspectors and warning of the dangers of alum powder. Other manufacturers hit back with their own ad campaigns, touting “entirely new invention[s]” that were “without an equal” and testimonials from “EMINENT CHEMISTS.” At some point, anxiety about the new products began to diminish. In the last 20 years of the 19th century, domestic science teachers embraced baking powder, several even promoting their own brands. Their change of heart led to the wider acceptance of the ingredient by home cooks, and today pancakes, biscuits, brownies, carrot cakes, and more would be unthinkable without a handy can of baking powder.
Issue No. 53 October/November 2013 $5.95 U.S. / $6.95 CANADA CooksCountry.com