I’ve been putting off posting, and hence I decided to post about two of my recent baking experiments at once to make up for it

Part I : Cinnamon Roll Muffins

Recently I made these cinnamon roll muffins from Joy the Baker. They’re made with yeast, but only take about an hour total as opposed to regular cinnamon rolls, which usually require several hours for the dough to rise, rest, bake, etc.

The recipe, which was originally for a loaf version, isn’t clear about when to rest them as muffins instead of a loaf–I ended up resting them in the pan. That turned out fine and they rose ok, but I was concerned when I took them out of the oven because the cinnamon topping had melted off the top and spread out in between the muffins in the pan. However, it ended up being pretty easy to scoop it up and get it back on top of the muffins, so crisis avoided

As for the taste, the muffin part was pretty bland and had the muffin-like texture you’d expect (not like a cinnamon roll, despite the yeast in the batter–which is to be expected because the dough wasn’t kneaded to develop the gluten), but the topping was so sweet that I wouldn’t have wanted a sweeter muffin. Overall, they were good and perhaps could substitute for cinnamon rolls if you had a real craving, but I’d rather use my calories on real cinnamon rolls!

Part II: Tarte Tatin

When I was at home in Atlanta, I decided I wanted to make a fruit dessert, so I chose the apple tarte tatin from smitten kitchen. I love tarte tatin, and will usually order it in a restaurant that has it on the menu, but I’ve never tried to make it. I guess I was always intimidated by the amount of caramelization you have to do to the apples…plus the fact that you need a pan that can go from stovetop to oven But, emboldened by my recent completion of the Daring Bakers caramel challenge, I picked up my mom’s stainless steel pan and decided to go for it.

Overall, it went way better than I expected. In fact, it was almost perfect — apart from the fact that the apples got a little too caramelized (some might say burnt) in the middle. The problem was that the pan I used was about 15 inches across, and just didn’t heat evenly enough to caramelize everything at the same time. So rather than having perfectly caramelized apples in the middle and undercaramelized ones on the outside, I ended up cooking the ones in the middle a bit too much. Still, the flavor was amazing. The crust was super easy to make and really flaky and delicious, and the tarte even came out of the pan with minimal apple displacement (only a couple in the middle stuck)! In all, I was really proud of it, and I guess everyone else liked it because it was gone by the end of the meal

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