Cinnamon Sticky Buns

The children and I used to make CINNAMON STICKY BUNS years ago when the oldest were young and we had a weekly Education Bakery, wherein we baked cookies on Wednesday and started the dough for these buns, and then made bread on Thursday and drove the finished products around to sell to workplaces and friends to learn about measuring, cooking, time management, and marketing. These buns were always our top sellers.

 

Ingredients for Approximately 30 Buns

 

Dough

1 1/2 cups — cooked potato, reserving the potato cooking water (2 cups)

1 tblsp. — baking yeast

1 tblsp. — sweetener

1/2 pound — tofu, blended with cooked potato and 1 1/2 of its cooking water

2 cups — sunflower oil 

2 cups — unbleached white flour (2 more cups later)

2 cups — whole wheat flour (2 more cups later)

1/2 tblsp. — salt

Later, 4 more cups of mixed flours to knead the dough, so altogether about 8 cups flour

 

Filling

1 cup — maple syrup

1/2 cup — tahini

1 tblsp. — cinnamon

Sprinkle of salt

1 cup — pecans

Method

To start the dough, first cook a cut up large peeled potato in two cups of water. You will need one and a half cups of potato, so estimate how big a potato you will need. Remove one cup of the potato water and, when it is warm to the inside of your wrist and doesn't burn you, dissolve a tablespoon of baking yeast and a tablespoon of sweetener in it. I had run out of yeast, so I only used about two teaspoons, and that seemed to work fine. I also used rice syrup as my sweetener. Stir and let sit for ten minutes.

Blend half a pound (eight ounces, or about two thirds of a Morinu tofu, or half of a pound block of tofu) with one and a half cups of cooked potato and one cup of the warm potato water into a smooth and creamy slurry. Stir it into the yeast mixture in a big bowl.

 

Now stir in two cups of sunflower oil, two cups unbleached white flour, two cups of whole wheat flour and a half tablespoon of salt. 

 

This seems like an awful lot of oil to me, these days, but the end result is very tasty. Just don't make this recipe too often. Beat all of this maybe a hundred times, so you will feel like you have struggled, and let it rise for twenty minutes in a warm place.

 

Meanwhile, you can mix up the filling for the buns in another smaller bowl by combining one cup of maple syrup, half a cup of tahini, one tablespoon of cinnamon and a sprinkle of salt. Chop up a cup of pecans. I used a small processor. Stir the nuts into the syrup. It won't seem like very much, but it will be enough for approximately thirty buns.

 

After the twenty minutes is up, press down the dough and add in up to four cups or so more of the mixed flours. Knead the flour in until the dough is somewhat smooth and soft. This will be the messiest part of the process, but all the oil keeps it from sticking too badly to your hands.

 

Divide the dough in two parts. Roll out half into a long rectangle about one quarter inch thick on top of a well-floured board. Spread filling over most of the dough's surface, except the edges. Roll the rectangle up like a jelly roll, so you end up with a long thin round.

Slice the round into fifteen one inch rounds and place them down flat, one inch apart, on oiled cookie sheets.

 

Do this to the other half of the dough.

 

Use any leftover syrup filling to dab on the tops of the rounds. Let them rise while you preheat the oven to 375F degrees.

 

I had four cookie sheets at this point, and tried to cook them with two sheets each on the upper two levels of racks in my oven. As I suspected, the bottom ones got burned on the bottom. So, even though it will use more energy, you should probably bake these in two batches, unless you want to somehow squash them together more tightly on two of your cookie sheets and then just pull them apart after cooking.

 

Bake them for twenty minutes. This seems like a short time, but they were done. Your oven might be a little different, but just know that they don't need to bake for very long.

 

Somehow I ended up making twenty-nine of these, and some are bigger than others, but unless you are selling them it shouldn't matter.