Kitchen Project #44: Apple butter cinnamon buns

All about no knead bread + guide to all the shapes!

Hello,

Welcome to today’s edition of Kitchen Projects, my recipe development newsletter. It’s so lovely to have you here, especially because today we are delving into one of my fave subjects: Buns.

And not just any buns - apple butter cinnamon buns. Over on KP+, I’m sharing a bit of a secret technique to take today’s (already gorgeous) cinnamon buns to the next level: It involves soaking in custard and an apple butterscotch icing. Heaven. Click here to read!

I launched KP+ earlier this year - subscribing is easy and only costs £5 a month. Over there I share lots of extra content, and when you subscribe, you help support the writing and research that goes into the newsletter. I really hope to see you there:

Love
Nicola

What bun dreams are made of

As we get into the colder months, is there anything more comforting than a warm bun? If you’ve made the salted apple caramel shortbreads from KP earlier this year, you’ll have already learnt the joys of apple butter.

To date, it’s still one of my favourite recipes I’ve ever made and is living proof that some ingredients are just meant to be together: That concentrated apple flavour combined with the brown butter shortbread dough are a true match made in heaven.

One of the things I really want to achieve with this newsletter is to give you the confidence to mix and match recipes and show you how once you have nailed a technique or a skill, you can use it in lots of ways. To be honest, this is how most dessert concepts are born in restaurants and bakeries - the custard from that dish combined with the crumb from that dish - it’s all about borrowing, tweaking, updating and making the most out of your ingredients.

Enter: Apple butter cinnamon buns, with elements you’ve probably already mastered (if you’ve made the salted apple caramel bars, anyway…)

Cinnamon buns, let’s be honest, are often a bit dry. So how can we counteract that? We’ll be using a several pronged attack. From upping the hydration, increasing the layers as well as adding apple butter into the mix, these buns are putting memories of dry cinnamon buns to rest, for good. Plus, brown butter is involved. Sold? Alright, let’s go deeper.

How to design a bun

There’s a lot of ways to make a bun. Sometimes I find this gloriously exciting and sometimes I find it OVERWHELMING.

This week, it was the latter - I seriously flip flopped around this week’s recipe. Should I be using a pre-ferment? What about a tangzhong? What should I hydrate it with? What sort of fat should I use? And how much? Should there be spicing in the dough? Or just in the butter? Should I rest it overnight? What about just making a straight all-in-one? ARGGHHH. My brain was overflowing. 

To try and quiet the noise, I made two doughs this week - the first was more in line with a more classic cinnamon / demi-brioche bun - coming in at 55% hydration with 25% butter. It was really easy to work with, I could mix it by hand and it tasted amazing… for the first day. 

It’s not that the buns were properly dry (the apple butter really helps with this, more on that soon) but I bit into it and had to stop to ask myself... ‘ are you sure this isn’t dry?!’. Even though the answer was ‘I don’t think so’, I always think: if you even have to ask the question, it’s probably not quite right.

The second dough I made was a big jump in moisture - I mixed up a 75% hydration dough with 40% butter which resulted in - unsurprisingly - a much lighter, springier dough that stayed squishy for longer.

Increasing the hydration does mean you get a much lighter and tender crumb, but it does make the dough harder to work with. In light of this - and knowing that not *everyone* has a KitchenAid, I thought it would be fun to try out a ‘no knead’ recipe. Let’s discuss

The deal with no knead bread aka “trust the process”

When I write this newsletter, I’m trying my best to teach you something a bit new every week. And this week’s lesson is in no knead bread. Usually reserved for sourdough (and pioneered by Jim Lahey), no knead bread is a very hands off technique in developing strength slowly over time. Although I’d never used it for an enriched dough, I had great results, even though the recipe turned out to be more of a ‘very little knead’ bread, rather than a ‘no knead’ bread.

Although most recipes require you to develop gluten by mechanically beating the proteins into order, the aforementioned Jim Lahey showed us all another way: Instead of slapping the dough around to create strength, he simply mixed the flour and water and gave it time to develop without touching it at all. 

Here’s how it works: Flour – once hydrated – will immediately begin to form gluten bonds and, in a process known as ‘autolyse’, the enzymes present in flour will begin to break down the proteins which makes the dough really stretchy and developed. As the yeast processes the sugars, the CO2 expands which has the effect of very gently ‘kneading’ and stretching the dough. Cool, right?

Well, for enriched doughs it is a bit trickier. As you know, enriched doughs are already more difficult to produce than a standard white bloomer. Not only does butter seriously get in the way of gluten development (think about making shortbread and the way you coat the flour in butter to prevent gluten forming), enriched doughs also have a high proportion of sugar.

First let’s deal with the butter. For this dough, to make it an all-in-one, we’ll be incorporating it whilst it’s melted rather than adding it in slowly at the end of the mixing process like a standard brioche. This means the dough is quite sensitive. Remember, brioche is actually an emulsion meaning it can split/become greasy. The risk of this is even higher as we’re using melted butter - it means we have to seriously limit how much we handle it.

Secondly, sugar is highly hygroscopic which means it really loves to steal the limelight. When it’s added to enriched doughs, it steals water from the flour and even nicks water from the yeast cells meaning sweet doughs take a lot longer to ferment. 

With both butter and sugar working against our little dough from becoming properly fermented and strong, there are some things we can do to help it:

• Tactical strength building

  • Once this dough is mixed we’ll let it ferment at room temperature for a 3 hours to get the yeast going before transferring it into the fridge

  • After two hours, we’ll perform a minute of rubaud mixing - rubaud mixing is a way of mixing your dough quite gently in the bowl with your hand

  • After one more hour, we’ll do another minute of rubaud mixing and then put into the fridge overnight

• Temperature is key

  • As it is pretty much winter here in the UK, our homes are a lot colder, so fermentation happens at a slower rate. Remember, the optimal temperature for yeast activity is between 26c-30c, so combining a no knead dough with a cold environment is tricky

  • The best way to mitigate this that I found, is to make sure the yeast was properly active. Even if you use ‘dry active’ yeast, or a yeast that doesn’t need to be ‘proofed’ before using, I think a no-knead recipe really benefits from that extra help

  • To proof the yeast, we’ll mix the liquids warmed to around 35c and stir in a teaspoon of the sugar. After 10 mins, the yeast will be super foamy and ready to party

  • One thing we really underestimate, I think, is quite how much heat is generated from the mixing process from your KitchenAid. If you remove this mixing process from the equation, you’re missing out on a serious period yeast activity encouragement, so it’s also advisable letting your dough proof in a warm spot - in a small enclosed cupboard is good, or a turned off oven with a bowl of 50c water in the bottom (this allows the oven space to heat up to about 25-27c and retains this temp for a while if you keep the door closed)

If this all sounds too complicated… I get it! But I promise it’s not. And it’s quite wonderful to make an enriched dough without hammering your mixer or exhausting your arms. Between you and me, I tested this dough with a standard mixing process and it works just fine. I’ll outline that method below for you, too.

Adding in brown butter

I’d never made brioche with brown butter before and am now wondering why it took me so long to do it. Although we’ll cover alternative fat brioches more in the future, this is a great foray into using something *a little bit* different from just the standard soft butter for your dough.

Adding brown butter is simple enough but it’s worth remembering that you are losing water in the process of browning the butter, so we need to account for that when we build our recipes. I know we covered this before, but here’s a bit of a recap:

Butter is made up of approximately 80%-84% fat, 1%-3% milk proteins and the rest is water. When you’re cooking, it’s impossible to get something to brown in the presence of moisture, so before you can brown the milk solids in your butter, all the water has to be removed. So, when you ‘brown’ butter, what you’re actually doing is browning the milk solids in butter. The fancy term for browning is ‘Maillard reaction’ and I think it’s useful to think of browning as a ‘reaction’ to understand what’s going on on a molecular level: Basically, the maillard reaction is a reaction between amino acids and sugar. In the case of butter, it’s the milk protein casein and the milk sugar lactose. With the help of heat, casein and lactose react and flavour compounds are created.

Given the brown butter we’re going to be making our brioche with today has lost all of its water,  it’s contribution to the hydration of your dough is pretty much nil, so I used a combination of water and milk to hydrate our dough today to make up for the lost moisture.

Lamination

One of the cool things about cinnamon buns is how they offer a really manageable (in my opinion) first foray into laminating a yeasted dough, especially with today’s recipe which sees us double up the layers.

If you’ve ever made puff pastry and then tried to make croissants after, you’ll know that handling the doughs are two different experiences - puff pastry, whilst tricky, at least allows you to focus only on the formation of the butter/dough layers, without having to worry about what the yeast is up to.

A standard cinnamon bun recipe has you roll out your dough, spread with spiced butter and fold into thirds, so there’s just one ‘fat’ layer of cinnamon butter throughout and from here, the dough is shaped and twisted. When you bake the buns, the spiced butter melts and infuses into the dough.

Today, we’re taking it a step further and will be splitting our spiced apple butter into two and adding an extra layer. For starters, this makes the buns SO much more fun to eat - so many more layers to peel away - and the moisture from the spiced apple butter affords a much softer bun.

Adding apple butter

For these buns, we’ll be combining our apple butter with actual butter. Although our apple butter is great, it doesn’t have quite enough integrity to carry itself through the buns. Trust me, I’ve tried.

Combining apple butter/actual butter is quite easy as long as your actual butter is soft - forcing liquid or… er… ‘wet stuff’ into butter isn’t always simple - it can split quite easily as you try and force liquid into the fatty emulsion. If, however, your apple butter/actual butter does split - don’t worry! You can use it anyway if it’s a bit lumpy - once its baked into the buns, you won’t notice.

Could we have also used brown butter for the spiced apple butter spread? Yes. But I think brown butter is best used sparingly in most cases - for this recipe, I really wanted the depth of flavour to add to the buns as a whole, rather than being a stand out flavour - that’s just a personal preference.  However, if you feel inspired and decide to double up on the bb… I’m 100% here for it.

Shaping cinnamon buns

A couple of your options!

Shaping cinnamon buns is not one of my top skills, I’m more than happy to admit that. Here I’ll run through all the different shapes - different shapes are often used in bakeries so you can tell the difference between the flavours. You can pick whichever you like best. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list - you can get super creative with the way you roll your buns, especially if you’re baking them in a mould because there is no risk of the dreaded unravelling. Basically, you just want to wind your strips of dough then secure in some way.

Admittedly, today’s recipe, with it’s extra fold / layer of butter and high hydration, is a bit harder to work with - it also doesn’t keep it’s shape as well as a standard bun dough. It works best when you pop it into a cupcake tin to bake it (less mess, also) but it’s up to you. Here’s a few folding methods:

1. The plait n fold
   

I think this is such a great way to shape your buns because it’s so easy. We also used to use this technique to shape pretty cruffins, so you can use it for loads of different doughs. For this technique, cut your dough horizontally so the strips are fatter/wider

For the rest of the techniques, it’s best to cut the dough into vertical strips so you’re already working with a long length

2. Roll up style

Stretch the dough and roll it opposite directions from each end to create a twisting effect. Spiral up the dough and tuck underneath

3. Classic tight twist with a binding strip - gives you more of a bun like round shape

Stretch the dough. Wind the strip around your (closed) two fingers and thumb. Once you’ve been round twice, change the direction of the bun and stretch over the top to secure the shape - this gives you a bun that looks like a ball of yarn

4. Classic flat twist with a binding strip for a ‘flatter’ /wider bun (FYI this doesn’t work very well with the extra layer of lamination as the layers spread out too much when baking). There are two ways to do this:

First is: Stretch the dough. Wind up the dough strip until about ¾ then bring the strip around the middle, securing under the bun. This gives you a more compact bun

Second technique - make a peace sign with your fingers then wind the dough around counting three times then loop the dough around the middle through your fingers

Okay, let’s make them.

Apple butter cinnamon buns

Makes around 10-12 buns

Apple butter ingredients
This makes more than you need but it keeps well in the fridge

• 400g apples - I used a mixture of bramley and braeburn

• 200g water

• 60g cider vinegar

• 40g light brown sugar

• 5g salt

“No knead” Brown butter brioche

• 250g strong white bread flour

• 40g caster sugar

• 6g salt

• 5g dry yeast

• 50g water

• 50g milk

• 100g eggs (2 small)

• 100g solidified brown butter (you probably should brown 130g butter to be sure you’ll get enough!)

Spiced apple butter

• 80g butter - soft

• 40g demerara sugar

• 35g caster sugar

• 1.5 tsp cinnamon

• 80g apple butter

Reduced apple juice glaze

• 1 litre apple juice of choice

• 2 cinnamon sticks

Apple butter method (for GIF, check this post)

• Dice the apples and put into a saucepan with all the other ingredients

• Heat on a medium heat for 20 mins until apples are soft

• Reduce heat and cook until the apples have reduced significantly and are a deep amber colour - around 2 hours - stirring regularly 

• Let cool before using. Apple butter will last in the fridge happily for 7+ days

Brown butter method (for GIF, check this post)

• Now, brown the butter. Melt butter in a saucepan. It will be noisy whilst all the water evaporates

• Once it gets quiet, it will be foamy and the butter will be browning quite fast at this stage. Use a spoon or spatula to scrape the milk solids as they will want to stick to the bottom of the pan

• Do your best to clear the foam and check the colour of your brown butter. I like to go for a deep amber

• As soon as it is the right colour, take it off the heat and pour into a heatsafe container

• If you are making the no knead bun, cool the butter to 35c before using. You still want it liquid. If you are making these buns in the mixer, leave it to cool completely until solid - either 1.5 hours in the fridge OR pop into the freezer for 20 mins until cool and solid then transfer to the fridge

Method - reduced apple juice (for GIF, check this post)

• Add apple juice to a high sided pan with cinnamon sticks

• Reduce on a medium heat until very thick and syrupy - around 40 minutes on a medium-high heat. You should get about 120-140g glaze at the end of this process. As you get closer, the mix will become dark in colour and the bubbles will get big. If you accidentally over reduce it, you can add a little water in! It should be the viscosity of honey by the end

• BE CAREFUL - if you take your eyes off it then it can easily scorch and you will be cleaning your pan for like, 2 hours which is very boring indeed

Bun dough - no knead method aka trust the process

• Proof the yeast - get your milk to around 35c. I use a combo of fridge cold milk and stop the kettle midway through heating to achieve this. Stir in a teaspoon of your caster sugar (take it out the whole recipe amount) followed by the yeast. Leave to proof for 10 mins, it should be bubbly

• Ensure your brown butter is around 35c max. Whisk your eggs into this really well, followed by the proofed yeast/milk/water mixture. Whisk it all until totally homogenous - you don’t want any egg white bits floating around

• In a bowl, mix together your flour, sugar and salt

• Pour your butter/egg/yeast/milk mixture into the flour and stir really well until a dough forms. It’s going to be really sticky. Don’t worry

• Cover with a tea towel for two hours - try to keep it somewhere warm if you can

• Scrape down the side of the bowl then perform a rubaud mix for 1 minute - this is when you use your hand like a paddle and lift the dough up and down from one angle to gently knead it! See gif. Check that it is fermenting and feels like the yeast is active. If not - put it somewhere warmer!

• Cover and leave for one more hour. Perform another rubaud mix for a minute then scrape into a clean container. Cover and put into the fridge for at least 6 hours or overnight. You might think there’s no way this is going to work, but it will!

Bun dough - mixer method

• Proof the yeast - get your milk to around 35c. I use a combo of fridge cold milk and stop the kettle midway through heating to achieve this. Stir in a teaspoon of your caster sugar (take it out the whole recipe amount) followed by the yeast. Leave to proof for 10 mins, it should be bubbly

• In the KitchenAid bowl mix the flour, salt and sugar

• Pour in the proofed yeast/milk mixture and the eggs

• Mix on a medium-high speed for 8-10 minutes until medium gluten development is reached

• Now you can start adding your solidified - but soft! - brown butter bit by bit. You need to be able to squish the butter easily inbetween your fingers

• Add it bit by bit and make sure each bit of butter is combined before adding more. It should take around 10 minutes

• Check for full gluten development using the window pane test. If it passes, transfer to an oiled bowl/container and leave to bulk ferment for 2 hours

• This dough is impossible to use unless you chill it as you need to re-solidify the butter. Put it in the fridge for 2 hours to chill. You could probably pop it in the freezer for 30 mins to give it a head start before popping in the fridge, but you want to make sure it’s completely chilled / solid so it can be rolled out

Spiced apple butter

• You can mix this by hand or in a KitchenAid. Mix soft butter (make sure it is soft!), demerara sugar, caster sugar and cinnamon until well combined. You don’t want it to be aerated

• Once combined, paddle through the apple butter

• Set aside until ready to use. You can do this in advance but you want it to be soft, so I don’t usually do it until i’m ready to use it

Shaping cinnamon buns

• Roll out dough to approx 40cm x 25cm

• Spread 100g of spiced apple butter onto the dough and perform a letter fold/a single fold ie. fold the dough into thirds, crossing over in the middle

• Cover and pop into the freezer for 10 minutes to firm up

• Roll out dough to approx 40cm x 25cm again and spread the rest of the spiced apple. Perform another fold

• Cut dough into strips (between 75g - 85g) and shape buns - you choose! Scroll up to see the options but remeber to either cut vertical or horizontal strips (see below)

Either cut it vertical or horizontal depending on your shape

• Proof for 45 mins until puffy. Brush with egg wash

• Pre-heat oven to 180c. Bake for 18-22 minutes until golden. The baking time will depend on the shape and weight of your buns

• Brush with reduced apple glaze and leave to cool. These should stay soft for a few days as long as you keep them covered!

Wanna know how to make these even better? Like, a true level up? And get the recipe for a beautiful butterscotch apple frosting? Check the KP+ post here.