Cardamom Buns!

I've been meaning to write a little post about these Cardamom Buns for a few weeks now, but as I had very mixed results I was a bit unsure about digging this post out of the drafts! I had three attempts at them, and they proved to be very technical. It'll be good to compare these to the any future ones I make!

Cardamom Buns! The tails aren't 
tucked away properly, ruining 
the shape.

 

Initially, these buns seemed as though they'd be relatively straight forward to make. Strong bread flour, yeast, salt and sugar are mixed in a bowl, before warm cardamom-infused milk is added. The flavour of the infused milk is divine! Then, the dough is kneaded until it is smooth, and is then proofed. In the meantime, the filling is made by creaming together butter and sugar, and adding ground cardamom pods. So far so good!

This is where the more complicated steps come in. The proofed dough is knocked back and rolled out into a rectangle, before being covered with the cardamom filling. The dough is then rolled back up, before being sliced into long strips. Each strip is then sliced in half down the middle to produce two smaller strips. These strips are then folded into a long plait. The biggest issue I found was shaping the plaits into the buns. Apparently there are several ways to do it, and it would seem I settled on the most complicated one! To shape the bun, the plait is wrapped around two or three fingers depending on how long it is, before the end is tucked into the bun using your thumb (it sounds so much easier than I found it to be!).

Problems with the second proof 
meant the buns didn't shape very 
well!

Annoyingly, it wasn't until after my third attempt at these buns that I came across a simplified version of the method for shaping the dough...on the Tesco website of all places! Do your research James! This method simply called to leave the plait on the counter and roll from one end to the other. Why I didn't think of this before I'll never know!

Something else I struggled with was keeping the layers intact. When it came to cutting the strips in half my knives were quite blunt, which dragged the layers apart as opposed to a nice clean cut. As a result, much of the filling was on the outside of the buns, which I think made the dough too heavy to rise properly on the second proof. However, investing in a new pizza wheel made this a little easier.

As weird as this will sound, I changed my mind about publishing this post during this week's episode of Bake Off! *Spoiler alert!* Whilst consoling one of the eliminated bakers of the week, Prue Leith said "it's only cake". Some people took this to be quite patronising, considering it was *bake* off, but I didn't see it this way. I know I have a tendency to get quite worked up when bakes don't go to plan, but there's really no need to deep it so much! 

I plan to revisit these cardamom buns at some point, but I was so fixated on them that I'm in need of a break from them!

Gibby x