Cardamom Buns

Cardamom Buns - The Bearded Bakery

Well hello there, it’s been a little while hasn’t it. Nearly a year, in fact. A lot has happened in that time. I guess the headlines are that I’ve moved to Brighton, been made redundant and very happily gotten engaged. That’s a lot to take in really. Sometimes life just gets in the way of stuff like this. I have been baking though and late autumn and Christmas is the perfect time to get back blogging about it. I thought I’d kick things off with some cardamom knots I made the other week. They’re absolutely perfect for this cold weather, going great with a hot coffee or mug of tea.

Cardamom Buns - The Bearded Bakery
Cardamom Buns - The Bearded Bakery

The awkward bit with these buns is the knot itself. As you’ll be able to see from my own knots, it doesn’t always go to plan. The bonus is, that as long as you ball them up pretty well it still looks good, but I’ll run you through the process for knotting them below:

  1. Cut each strip down the centre – making sure it’s still attached at the top.
  2. Pull the two halves away from each other and twist each one away from the centre a couple of times
  3. Tie this into a knot
  4. Tuck the ends underneath

Got that? It’s easier than it sounds, but you will make mistakes. Just don’t beat yourself up about it when you do – cos they’ll still look and taste great.

Cardamom Buns - The Bearded Bakery
Cardamom Bun - The Bearded Baker

Cardamom Buns

Michael
Warming and doughy cardamom buns.
Prep Time 45 minutes
Cook Time 25 minutes
Proving 2 hours 30 minutes
Total Time 1 hour 10 minutes

Ingredients
  

  • 35 Cardamom pods
  • 350 ml Full fat milk
  • 200 g Butter cubed
  • 500 g Strong white bread flour plus extra for dusting
  • 1/2 tsp Salt
  • 225 g Golden caster sugar
  • 7 g Sachet fast action dried yeast
  • 1/2 tsp Ground cinnamon
  • Vegetable or sunflower oil for greasing
  • 1 Large egg beaten
  • 2 tbsp Pearl sugar optional

Instructions
 

  • Open 10 cardamom pods, crushing the insides with a pestle and mortar and add to a saucepan.
  • Add the milk plus 50g of the butter (leaving the rest of the butter at room temperature until required).
  • Gently warm the milk, stirring so it doesn’t catch, until it’s steaming but not boiling. Remove from the heat and leave to cool until lukewarm, making sure the butter has melted into the mixture.
  • Put the flour, 75g of the sugar, the yeast, cinnamon and 1/2 tsp salt into a large bowl, or the bowl of a freestanding mixer and mix until combined.
  • Pour the cooled milk mixture through a sieve into the flour mixture, this will remove the cardamom.
  • Using a dough hook or wooden spoon mix to form a soft dough, then turn out onto a very lightly floured surface.
  • Knead for 10 minutes until it’s smooth and stretchy. You could do this using the dough hook for 5-7 minutes, but I always find I get better results if I do it by hand.
  • Clean out and lightly oil the mixing bowl, transfer the smooth ball of dough into it and cover with a tea towel before leaving to rise for 2 hours, or until doubled in size (you could leave it in the fridge overnight if you wanted).
  • Crush the remaining cardamom seeds with the mortar and pestle and combine them with the remaining 150g of sugar.
  • Mix the remaining room temperature butter with all but 2tbsp of the cardamom sugar.
  • Line two baking sheets with greaseproof paper in preparation for the buns.
  • Punch the dough down to knock out the air and turn out onto a flat surface.
  • Roll out into a rectangle of 35x45cm with one of the longer edges facing you.
  • Cover the whole thing with the cardamom butter, spreading it as evenly as possible, right up to the edges.
  • Fold the top third down to the middle and the bottom third up over that, so you have one long piece with 3 equal layers of dough.
  • Cut in to 12 equal strips (about 3.5cm wide).
  • Making sure you leave it attached at the top, cut each strip down the centre so it has two tentacles.
  • Now for the tricky bit. Follow the instructions above, but in summary: Twist each strip away from the centre two or three times, then tie the dough in a knot and tuck the ends underneath the bun.
  • Place each finished knot onto the prepared trays when you’re done.
  • Lightly oil some clingfilm and cover the trays, leaving them to prove for another 30 minutes to an hour, until they’ve doubled in size again.
  • Preheat your oven to 190°C (170°C fan assisted).
  • Remove the clingfilm, brush each bun with the beaten egg and sprinkle with the peal sugar.
  • Place in the middle of your preheated oven and bake for 20-25 minutes. You may want to swap the trays around half way through. They should come out golden brown.
  • Once they are out and cooling, tip the remaining cardamom sugar into a saucepan with 50ml of water and bring to the boil.
  • Remove from the heat to cool and brush over the buns 2-3 times while they are cooling.
  • Leave the buns 20 minutes to soak up the sugar syrup and serve warm. They’ll keep a couple of days in a sealed container.
Keyword cardamom, cardamom buns, cardamom knots

Music Monthly: September Jams

Apologies for the, slightly, late music monthly (you can see the others here). It’s been an exceedingly hectic couple of weeks and over the weekend I had a trip to Leeds for the #BloggersBlogAwards. However, September was absolutely bloody fantastic for new releases. The month started with me binging on Brand New (The Devil in God are Raging Inside of Me, in particular) as I was going to see them at Ally Pally (and later in Edinburgh, they played Deja in full and I can now say I’ve seen them do it twice), so I was already assuming that they’d be one of the main people to go in my music monthly for September.

I was very wrong.

Three different bands all put out superb records and I’ve been listening to almost nothing but a combination of these three records since they have. So here goes.

Read more

American Style Pancakes

Pancake Day! Everyone’s favourite thing about lent, and when everyone momentarily acts half religious again. The other being Christmas, or when they want to get married in a church. Aaaaanyway, Andy (my housemate) has requested American style pancakes this year so that’s what he’s getting. Topped with Maple Syrup and crispy fried bacon. I still remember a few years ago when the idea of this completely disgusted me, but these days the sweet/savoury combo is just down right salivating. PASS ME THE BACON.

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Also, I’m doing this before actually making the pancakes… so I’m relying on an old picture of ones I made when some friends came round last year and I made Sunday morning hangover pancakes. I will get some proper snaps tonight, but the recipe is the same.

American Style Pancakes
 
Prep time
Cook time
Total time
 
Serves: 4-6
Ingredients
  • For the pancakes:
  • 135g/4¾oz plain flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 2 tbsp caster sugar
  • 130ml/4½fl oz milk
  • 1 large egg, lightly beaten
  • 2 tbsp melted butter (allowed to cool slightly) or olive oil, plus extra for cooking
  • For the toppings:
  • Streaky bacon, fried until crispy
  • Maple Syrup
Instructions
  1. Sift the flour in to a large bowl along with the baking powder, salt and caster sugar. In a separate bowl whisk the milk with the egg. Mix in the melted butter.
  2. Pour the milk/egg mixture into the flour mix and beat with a fork until the lumps have all disappeared. Leave it to stand for a few minutes.
  3. Heat a non-stick frying pan and melt a knob of butter. Drop one ladle full (two if your pan is big enough for two separate pancakes) and fry until the top starts to bubble. Flip and cook both sides until they are golden brown and the pancake has risen by about 1cm.
  4. Serve warm topped with bacon and covered in maple syrup.

 

Caramel

I meant to do this before the Millionaire Shortbread recipe. However I didn’t get any good pictures until after the event. So you’ll just have to put up with it now. This caramel is wonderfully thick and spreadable and with extra salt works really well as a salted caramel too. Therefore I will keep this short and sweet.

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Caramel
 
Prep time
Cook time
Total time
 
Ingredients
  • 250gm sugar
  • 400ml cream
  • 50gm unsalted butter
  • ¼ teaspoon of salt (optional)
  • Vanilla extract (optional).
Instructions
  1. In the bottom of a large heavy based stew pot, heap the sugar and place over a low heat.
  2. As the edges start to melt, mix (using a wooden spoon) them in to the non-melted sugar. At this point my sugar started spreading out over the pan.
  3. Keep stirring so it doesn’t catch on the pan. Allow it to completely melt. It will colour at this point. The longer you leave it the more bitter it will be.
  4. Take off the heat. Stir in half the cream. The mixture will bubble up furiously. Be careful of any steam coming out. Parts of the mix may start to harden, but keep on stirring and it should all combine nicely.
  5. Add the remaining cream then return to the low heat. Add the butter and the other ingredients (if using). Keep stirring over the heat until the butter is combined.
  6. Take off the stove and allow to cool for 15 minutes. Pour in to jars and allow to cool. It’ll be very runny at this point but will thicken as it cools. It’ll last about 3 weeks in the fridge.

 

America!

Hello everyone, just a heads up that there likely won’t be any updates for a couple of weeks as I’m going to America (Orlando, Tampa, Gainesville and New York City). I’m going to Fest 12, the halloween horror nights and generally being a tourist. It does mean however, that I’ll be eating a whole lot of food, that I’ll likely blog about. Plus I’ll be bringing back some American treats to bake in to things. Nutter Butter cookies anyone? I’ll see you all when I get back. Happy Baking!