Get a load of my buns!

 Before you read anything else, please take time to marvel at the beauty of the cinnamon buns. This batch has turned out the best I’ve ever made them, and I can barely wait till Christmas morning. 

The recipe is in Domestic Goddess – Norwegian Cinammon Buns. I always get irritated with it because the dough just seems so wet, and I always end up adding around about an extra 200g of flour during the course of kneading, but the end result is always so blimmin’ delicious that by the time the whiff of hot sweet cinnamon wafts out of the oven I’ve forgotten all about that. Rather like childbirth, I suppose, although on a slightly less drastic scale.

I’m planning to have them on Christmas morning, and wanted to bake in advance and freeze to avoid that element of irritation on Christmas morning. However, I’ve split it and frozen the buns in 2 pieces. As we’re having a pre-Christmas weekend with my parents and one of my brothers and his wife the weekend before Christmas, I expect that I might be tempted to get one of the pieces out for that.  And whether the second piece lasts till Christmas morning is debateable. I mean, I could always do another batch...

It’s been a slightly odd food week. Allotment Junkie and Grumpy (who was rechristened ‘Sit-a-lot’ by Blue while he was here – out of the mouth of babes and all that) were here having babysat for us last Saturday night while the Husband and I got a night out in London. For various reasons, Allotment Junkie did most of the cooking for the first few days of the week.  Monday was a re-run of the roast pork using the leftovers, and she made some truly delicious stuffed pancakes on Tuesday using the left over chicken from a roast she had done for the kids on Saturday night while we were out. She chopped up about ¾ tub of mushrooms really small then cooked them in the milk that she then used to make the sauce.  She also used some chard out of the garden – steamed and again chopped really really small, and then mixed in with the chopped leftover chicken. All mixed in with a ‘white’ sauce made with the mushroom infused milk and some vegetable stock powder, then rolled into the pancakes.

The highlight of the week, was Blue’s birthday fajita feast. Nothing unusual, although I used a spice mix that I’ve used for doing Golden Time cooking rather than a packet. Just ground coriander, cumin, crushed garlic and some lime juice. Marinated the chicken for a little while and cooked red peppers and onions with the chicken. We had sour cream, and avocado and cherry tomato salsa and cherry tomato and spring onion salsa (for those of us who don’t like Avocado, grrr). It was delicious. He wanted sticky ginger treacle cake out of the Camper Van Cookbook for his birthday cake and who am I to deny the boy. The only problem was that it is really very, very sticky. He did want me to make a ‘Harry Potter Wand’ cake out of it, but I made it clear that this was not going to happen. Fortunately he wasn’t too distressed about that. I feel I’m making a lot of progress as to birthday expectations. I kind of hit a peak when Blue was 4 and produced (if I say so myself) a truly amazing Thomas and the Troublesome trucks, and I’ve been desperately back pedalling since, trying to get back to something more manageable. Pink had a sandwich cake for her 5^th birthday cake in May – albeit pink and sparkly, decorated using Tana Ramsay’s ideas of dried rose petals and icing hearts, so a ‘normal’ cake was a real breakthrough. I did cut it into piece, arranged artfully on a plate and stuck 8 candles into it, but that hardly counts.

Anyway, Blue was happy and that’s all that counts. Now I just have to sort out the Husband’s birthday in a couple of week’s time and then I can get on with Christmas.