Cinnamon Buns!


Nothing is better on a sunday morning than a fresh batch of Cinnamon Buns, (or on a wednesday evening when your craving something sweet)
I used a bread maker to whip up the dough using a basic dough recipe. Even the dough smelled good!

The first step is to flour the surface,

Apply flour liberally... we ended up using more than we needed...

try and get the dough in a ball, only because its way easier to roll out that way!
we the rolled out the dough to about a 1/4inch in thickness, trying to make it into a rectangle... we settled on wonky circle. A 1/2 a cup of melted butter was then spread all over the dough.

a half a cup of of brown sugar and a tablespoon of cinnamon were then spread on the buttered dough.

we the rolled the dough in to a cinnamon log and cut out slices to make the cinnamon buns!

They are starting to look like real cinnamon buns! yum! The cinnamon bun slices were placed on a greased pan and allowed to rise for 40 minutes.

shhhh... they're getting delicious! After the cinnamon buns were allowed to rise they went in the oven at 375F for 15 minutes. The house smelled so good!

Dont they look good? The smelled wonderful!

The brown sugar/ butter mixture caramelized perfectly and there was just the right amount of cinnamon. But wait... it gets better.
Maple icing! Yum! I whipped up a simple icing and added some maple syrup. The icing was a little to runny, but it tasted amazing!


Oh. My. God. They were amazing! Needless to say not a single bun made it until sunday morning. not even until thursday morning. We will defiantly be making these again!

3 Steps to Awesome!

Step 1: Chocolate Cupcakes

Make your very favourite batch of chocolate cupcakes! These ones baked so well, the tops came out perfectly round! I never get them looking quite this good... Need more practice.

Step 2: 7 Minute Frosting

This is the chocolate cupcakes best friend. Its sweet and sticky and yet still fancy.

Step 3: Combine steps 1 and 2

YUM!
I piped on the frosting using a ziplock bag that had a quater inch of the corner cut off.

Optional Step 4:

Allow the frosting to set in the fridge for half and hour and then carefully dip the cupcakes in melted chocolate. Chill cupcakes for an additional 20 minutes in the fridge. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of this but the cupcakes tasted amazing!

Royal Icing Cookies!

I have never decorated cookies using royal icing. So i thought i'd give it a try. 156 tiny hands with teeny tiny iron rings later...

I had this brain wave while planning the grad... wouldn't each place setting look cute with a little hand cookie with an iron ring. So I got my mom started cutting out hands (there are a few left hands in there as well!) and we set to work! I used stiff consistency royal icing for the borders and the runny consistency for the filling. If you look really closely you can see that I even glittered every single ring.

All 156 turned out really well and they looked so good at everyones place setting!

Needless to say i now know how to decorate a cookie with royal icing. It is really easy to do, but i'd start with a batch of 12... not 156.