Cinnamon Dreams

I woke up the other morning with the desire to bake and no idea what to do.  While the boyfriend snoozed, I mooched around pinterest looking at lemon cookies and blue velvet cakes and goats cheese and spinach pastries.  Eventually I decided on cinnamon rolls, but all the recipes I could find were american.  After a bit of googling I came up with a UK recipe, but the measures were all wrong.

After a bit of fiddling I've come up with the following - it's a combination of several recipes and ideas and it's brilliant.

For the dough

• 800g plain flour
• 300 ml warm water
• 7 tablespoon caster sugar
• 7g yeast
• pinch of salt
• two eggs
• 5 tblspn oil

Separate out half the flour.  Take the yeast and sugar and mix into the warm water.  Mix the yeast water into the flour until completely combined.  Add the eggs and the oil and then mix in the rest of the flour little by little until totally mixed.

Knead the dough for at least 5 minutes and then cover and leave to rise until it's doubled in size, which will take around an hour and a half.

For the filling

• 125g butter
• 100g soft brown sugar
• 1.5 tspn cinnamon

Mix the softened butter with the sugar and the cinnamon.  Then take the dough and knock it back, before rolling out the dough so it's a flat square.  Take the butter/sugar/cinnamon combination and spread across the dough using a knife.  Take an extra pinch of sugar and scatter across the butter.  At this stage you can fling on a handful of raisins if you like.

Roll the dough up into a long sausage, like a Swiss roll then slice into twelve pieces.  Lay out onto a baking sheet and cover and leave to rise again.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees for 25 - 30 minutes.

Make up lemon icing (water, lemon juice and icing sugar) and drizzle liberally over the top.