I have to admit I’m not all that fantastic with making desserts. If anything, making them, especially if involving baking of any kind, is a complete science in itself, the very reason some “starred” restaurants employ highly specialized pastry/ dessert chefs. Every once in a while however I’m tempted and sometimes Lady Fortuna smiles upon me. The idea was to make these Cinnamon Rolls for the Thanksgiving weekend, as they are simple enough to make, I have all I need already in hand and it is traditional, no? Well, it would all be fine and dandy if I didn’t had these little cogs always turning in my head and turning me off track constantly. My Cinnamon Rolls ended up quite different and quite delicious, hopefully I’m still in Lady Luck’s good books next time around! Here goes.
As soon as I started thinking about it, I got hit with a lot of other ideas, to the point where, as witnessed by the above image, the cinnamon is entirely absent. In the more or less serendipitous list of ingredients I ended up with store bought puff pastry, orange (the zest only), walnuts, pecans, pistachios, butter and honey. It does indeed read more like baklava ingredients than anything else. At this point I haven’t figured the flavor profile completely but something will come up shortly. It always does.
Yea, I know, the big flavor surprise… coming from waaay left field is… cardamom. Big surprise, yes. It is only one of my absolute favorite spices, it makes even aspirin taste better, I love it! Joke aside, the more I thought what direction I’m going to take flavor wise the more cardamom made sense. It’s not unlike cinnamon in brightness so it will match well here, yet is a little unfamiliar to combinations such as this one so it might play a little neat surprising trick with your taste erefore the orange zest was mixed with a generous amount of cardamom. Come to think of it, lime zest would have been also great… oh well… next time…
It’s become quite apparent where I’m rolling with this one, eh? I laid the pastry nice and flat on parchment paper, slathered it thoroughly with melted butter, topped it with the nut mix and around two tablespoons of honey swirled all around to cover. The nut mix went loosely thru my knife once just to break it up a little. It could be minced further, ground in the processor even and the taste will be the same. I was however after a bit of crunchy texture so, what you see size wise in the image is what I settled for. There’s room left on both sides of the pastry, one to start the roll and the other to “glue” at the end. Let’s see how that went.
Rolling this thing is as straightforward as it can be. Fold the clean end over the start of the nut mix and continue rolling until get close to the end. Brush on some more butter over the end of the pastry and the roll, press it all nicely to stick, turn it around, get it back into more or less round shape and voila, roll is done. I cut it first in half then those pieces in half again and stopped to decide whether to split these in two again or perhaps three this time around. Splitting those quarters only in two seemed to result in bigger rolls that would have a hard time baking uniformly so three it was, for a total of 12 “mini” rolls. And it was all handmade, no? The Holy Grail! Topped the rolls with a little nut mix I set aside for this purpose and in the oven they went.
This is the result after I have no idea how many minutes in the oven set on baking at 400F. I was watching them as a hawk to avoid burning them after a certain point, maybe 20 minute-is into the baking process, that’s why I have no clue as to how long it actually took. It’s irrelevant anyway, they are done when they are nice and golden and crispy, however long that may be. I squeezed a bit of honey on top of each the moment I took them out of the oven. The rolls were good and crunchy and flaky both warm the same day and cold, the day after. One thing to observe here is that honey has a tendency to drain out of the rolls while baking. You end up with some delicious caramel in the tray, of course, but it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to add some more on top maybe toward the end of the process. I might try some raw plantation sugar instead of honey next time, I’ll let you know what happens.
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