Christmas cinnamon buns with a new ricotta cheese icing

As I’ve written a number of times, we’re gradually building up our stock of Christmas traditions buns, and that includes a special home baked breakfast of big, yeasty cinnamon buns. Now, the ones you can buy from bakeries usually have a quite gooey icing on them, and I’ve never quite cracked that before. This year though, I’ve been doing some pre Christmas experimentation and I think I may have found the answer – Ricotta cheese!

So, first of all, a quick trip to the local East of England Coop to stock up on the necessaries.

Ricotta is with the cheese spreads and so on – it’s a soft Italian cheese. I did find a recipe for making my own, but I decided that was a step too far!

Can’t make cinnamon buns without a healthy dose of cinnamon 😉

So, ingredients.

Dough

300 g plain flour

heaped tsp easy bake yeast.

120 ml milk (I use whole because that’s what we’ve got)

35g salted butter (then I skip the salt that other recipes call for)

33g gram golden caster sugar.

2 medium eggs.

Filling

80g light brown sugar.

2 tsp cinnamon

Icing

30 g ricotta

40g icing sugar

10g butter

drops vanilla

Warm the milk, butter, and sugar gently until just warm. Put yeast and flour in a big bowl, then add liquid and eggs, stirring to get dough. If it’s too sticky (will depend on the size of your eggs basically) add a bit more flour.

Leave to rise for a couple of hours, or even better overnight.

Punch back, roll out to a rectangle (mines probably 18″ by 12″) and spread the filling across it. Roll into a sausage and cut into 6 round buns.

Bake for around 15 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean at 190 degrees Celsius.

For the glaze, put ingredients in a bowl and blitz with hand held mixer, or a whisk if your mixer is playing up. Sigh. Drop over warms buns.

Serve on suitably Christmassy plates, mid Christmas morning after you’re done opening presents 😉

I’m actually really pleased I’ve worked out the glaze, it’s going to elevate Christmas morning breakfast to a suitably sticky occasion. I’ll probably double up on the quantities so that there are buns for tea too 🙂 If you’ve any Christmas food traditions of your own, I’d love to hear about them.