Junior Bake Off Challenge 3 - Apple and Cinnamon Buns (Bread Week)

This bake actually turned out a lot better than I thought it would - I have made a similar version of these before, so that probably gave me some experience. It looks quite good overall, but I would say I was a bit heavy-handed on the icing!!

This was the technical challenge from Junior Bake Off, so I was able to find the recipe on the website. The kids on Bake Off would've probably had a trickier, more scaled-down version of this recipe to make it just that bit harder, but luckily for me I had the normal one that you can find here. The only adjustment I made was that I added in an extra apple becuase the ones we had were quite small and it didn't look like the same amount as they had in the show.

To make these buns, you have to first make the filling and then leave it to set while you do the dough. Obviously, I tasted the filling and it was AMAZING - delicately spiced and all caramely with chunks of apple 😊. That was easy to make - you just put all the filling ingredients in a saucepan - and the dough was easy too.

But as I got to the middle of the recipe, it was going so well that it was too good to be true. Something had to go wrong at some point, surely!! And it did... In the recipe it says 'butter, cooled and melted.' I read the recipe through, and saw that you had to cool the butter, so I did that at the beginning to make sure it had enough time to cool before I put it into the dough. But when it was time to put it into the dough, it was still quite warm - so I put it into the freezer for 5 minutes, which is what I usually do if something like this happens. But on the ONE DAY when I needed it to cool just a bit, it decided to FREEZE in 5 minutes... 🤔 so that was great! I melted it again in the microwave and decided to just put it into the dough - I was too impatient to wait ages for it to cool. I had stayed up late the night before reading a particularly good book (admittedly, I do that a lot...) so I was quite tired and didn't think that mixing warm butter with cold milk would do anything. It did. The milk solidified the butter and even though it looked kinda cool - like tiny ice crystals made of butter - it was NOT what I wanted the butter to do, and in the end, I melted some more butter and put it in separately to the milk... I definitely won't make that mistake again!! 😂

Anyway, after I had got over that disaster, I got the filling out the fridge. It has to set before you put it onto the dough, otherwise it will literally just run out of the sides when you roll it up. I tried it again, and it thankfully still tasted delicious 😉. So I spread on the filling, and rolled up the dough. I was worried that the filling would all dribble out the end as I rolled it up, but it was actually fine, so I must've chilled it for a good amount of time.

Once I had cut up the roll, baked it and taken it out of the tin, I made the icing - although personally I would have prefered the buns with a little less, or even no icing at all. The almond extract was really strong and it just made it taste like marzipan... so yes, less icing would definitely have been great.

We ate the buns warm, and they were actually really good! The dough was baked for just the right amount of time, which gave it a great texture and a great taste.

Everyone said that I could've used a little less icing and put more cinnamon in - but that's not my fault, it's the recipe's... so overall they were really good!!