Brioche and Buns

Nothing like a 2 hour school delay to help me catch up on my baking blog! Hip hip hooray for snow! OK so now where was I - oh yes November.....

BRIOCHE
I let hubby choose which brioche he would like to visit our Thanksgiving table. I was surprised but he chose the Rich Man's Brioche. I thought my Italian stallion would go for the meat filled bread - Casatiello. As some of you have mentioned in previous blogs, I put butter on the table and it wasn't even touched. I did buy a six pack of those cute little tart pans to make buns for dinner and with the remaining dough I made two smaller boules. One of our guests for Thanksgiving appreciates food more than your average Joe so I was very excited when he took one bite and said it was the best bread he's ever had in his life - WOW! Now Peter Reinhart was not sitting at my table, but still, I'll take the compliment! Needless to say I sent him home with one of my proud boules and froze the other one for Christmas dinner. FYI - it didn't freeze great, it was almost below average for bread. But I'm looking forward to adding this to my Thanksgiving tradition!

CINNAMON ROLLS
I had hopes and dreams of making these for Christmas day, but the busy season got the best of me and I resorted to the traditional Monkey bread we usually make. It's very simple and low maintenance, which was what I needed Christmas Eve morning as I was looking at my list for the day. So I saved the Cinnamon rolls, as a lot of you did, for New Years Day. I have a recipe for cinnamon rolls that I have made several times in the past from our trip to Hawaii (pre-children). We were in Maui on a catamaran going from Maui to Lanai and they served us these AMAZING gooey cinnamon buns. They had a sweet citrus flavor to them and you definitely needed a few napkins. The captains wife was so kind and e-mailed me the recipe. Now it's actually on their website if you'd like to try it! For many years I had made these to bring to my in-laws house for our Christmas celebration. They live 7 hours up north so traveling with dough for 7 hours is not always easy. Needless to say, I haven't made them since the Cinnamon Bun Tragedy of 2002. Just this past Christmas holiday we were reminiscing on the tragedy of 02. The story goes.......I had diligently made two large trays of cinnamon buns at home. Husband packed them gently in a cooler and off we went on our 7 hour drive. It was Christmas morning and my sister in law gleefully went to the garage to retrieve the buns we had enjoyed for the previous several years to put in the already preheated oven. My poor sister in law walked back in with a look of tragedy on her face. Apparently when they were packed (ahem) they were tilted sideways. AND the ice packs some how melted (by the way they live in upstate NY so I'm still not sure how this happened in December) and the water leaked into the sideways dough balls (is the best way to describe what they looked like). Wow was that a buzz kill or what! We pulled out some Pillsbury (is that a bad word on this blog?) canned rolls and sulked over the loss. And that my friends is the cinnamon bun tragedy of 02. I haven't made them since - recovery I guess.

So after 7 years, I was ready to conquer this new recipe. I was very surprised at the lack of butter in this recipe and actually found a lot of the cinnamon sugar to fall out when I was cutting the buns from the log. I sprinkled it back in as much as possible. Did anyone else have this problem? I liked the dough. It was light, with a sweet taste but just not enough goo in my opinion. Perhaps next time I will make Peter's sticky buns. Oh and instead of using the fondant icing, I used the Hawaiian icing which has lemon and almond extract in it with macadamia nuts. It was nice and light and brought back the memory of sailing on the sea. We taped the ball dropping on New Year's Eve and on New Year's Day at noon we toasted with fresh squeezed OJ and the cinnamon buns with the kids. My six year old was sad she couldn't stay up till midnight and welcome 2010, so we did a reenactment for her sake....highly recommend this! So my overall review - so so - and I'll try sticky next time.