At Home With Theresa

Have you ever seen a Swedish Cinnamon Bun? I mean, we love the cinnamon buns/sticky buns I regularly make(with raisins and pecans!), but Kanelbullar is like a little, round, braided babka. It is just so pretty that I vowed to make it at home one day so we can have/eat/devour as much as I want.

I bought a couple of “Fika” cookbooks to figure out how to make it and learned along the way that “fika” is the essential coffee break that Swedish people take. A time to reconnect with friends, or a little “me” time, over coffee and some little snack. I do wish we take our breaks as seriously as they did. They have a lot of little delicious looking morsels to go with coffee and I do intend to bake my way through both cookbooks.

An instagram account I follow, The Invy Baker, makes these buns regularly for sale and I was always wishing he lived close by so that I could just order some every weekend morning.

I ordered the Pearl Sugar needed to top these beauty online since I couldn’t find it locally. After the sugar came it took me a the usual few more months to find time to actually make it. Time is always short, unfortunately!

As for making the sugar stick, I used maple syrup/pancake syrup instead of eggwash as I figured I will sprinkle the sugar after baking so that I’m sure it’ll retain the crunch and I just love maple syrup. I also added the ground almonds since the recipe posted by The Invy Baker had some in the filling.

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Ingredients for the dough:

1 1/4 cups water

1 tablespoon instant yeast

1/2 cup sugar

4 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 teaspoon salt

100 grams unsalted butter, softened, cut into little cubes

Ingredients for the filling:

1/3 cup finely ground almonds

1/2 cup sugar

1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

1 1/2 tablespoons water

100 grams unsalted butter, softened

1 tablespoon maple/pancake syrup with a drop of vanilla extract

For the glaze/topping:

1/2 cup maple/pancake syrup mixed with 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Pearl sugar

1. For the dough: In a Thermomix bowl or food processor, combine all the dough ingredients and mix for 3 minutes, until the dough is smooth and well blended.

*If using a stand mixer, combine water, yeast and sugar in the bowl. Add in the flour, salt, cardamom, and butter and knead using the dough hook, until the dough is smooth, about 5-8 minutes.*

2. Cover the dough and let rise until doubled, 1-2 hours. Or you could also refrigerate it for 4-6 hours, up to overnight, if you need to.

3. For the filling: place all the ingredients in a food processor and whirl until combined.

4. Roll out the dough into a rectangle 12 inch wide, 1/4 inch thick. Spread the filling to cover the entire dough evenly.

5. Fold 1/3 the dough up and the other 1/3 down, like folding a letter. Gently roll out the dough into a 12 inch long rectangle, about 1/2 inch thick.

6. Cut the dough vertically into 1 cm strips, 12 inches long.

6. Roll the dough around your left 3 fingers 3 times and tuck the end in. Place on a large baking pan, tucked end down.

7. Let rise 1-2 hours, until puffy and about doubled in size.

8. Bake at 450F for 12-14 minutes, until lightly golden brown.

9. Brush with syrup mixed with vanilla while hot and sprinkle generously with pearl sugar.

10. Serve warm and enjoy!