Sticky Buns

I was watching Barefoot Contessa on Food Network last week and drooling over this Sticky Buns recipe. The recipe seemed simple and the results looked totally delish.

First, you make a butter & brown sugar mixture. This will be your sticky bun's topping. Add dollops of the mixture into each cupcake tin and sprinkle pecans on top. Shown below:



Once that is finished, unfold your dough on a floured surface. Butter the dough and add brown sugar, cinnamon, and raisins. Roll it, chop off the ends, then cut the roll into 6 equal pieces. Like so:



Place each roll on top of your butter & brown sugar mixture (below) in the cupcake pan. Bake for 30 minutes at 400F.



Each pastry roll yields 6 pieces. So, 1 box of puff pastry dough comes with two rolls of dough, yielding a total of 12 sticky buns when completed. Like these:



Finished product:



Follow the entire recipe here.

Some tips I learned:

1) the frozen puff pastry dough can be found in the frozen foods aisle with the completed-frozen desserts dishes. I made the mistake of looking in the baking goods aisle first.

2) Do not buy pie crust by accident. That was all I found in the baking goods aisle (beside all the ready-to-bake cookie dough, crescent rolls, etc). I made this mistake and had to venture back out to the store to buy the puff pastry dough. Pie crust would end up being too stiff, and not flakey enough.

3) I heard phyllo dough works just as well.

4) Give yourself enough time to prep for it. While it only takes minutes to make the rolls and 30 minutes to bake, you must devote 45-60 min to thaw out the puff pastry dough and time for your sticks of butter to become room temperature.

5) recipe says to use a paddle attachment for your mixer (when making the butter/brown sugar topping). I used a regular hand mixer and it worked just fine. Just make sure you have it on the lowest setting possible and only mix it for a little bit (10-15 seconds is plenty).

6) Once your cupcake pan is filled and ready to go in the oven, be sure to put it on top of a larger, flat baking sheet. This will ensure that when all the butter melts in the oven and overflows out of the cupcake pan, something will be below to catch it. I may or may not have caught my towel on fire by trying to clean up the mess! (I didn't obey the recipe and disregarded the baking sheet rule).



7) grocery stores already sell chopped pecans and baking-specific raisins. These are quite handy. I found the pecans (in small bags) in the candy/granola bars aisle, and the raisins by the produce aisle.

8) Don't have a brush for brushing on the butter? Use a folded papertowel. It gets the job done.

9) Open the windows and turn on the fan. These buns produce a lot of smoke! My apartment ended up with a thick layer of smoke resembling the haze of London. I don't know if this is normal? Is it the butter causing all of this? Maybe I didn't clean up well enough after some butter overflowed out of the cupcake pan? Maybe I need a larger cupcake pan? Someone enlighten me.

10) I believe less butter could be used, so that it's not TOTALLY saturated. I will do this next time. Since less butter will be used, I'll try 20 minutes bake time instead of 30, or reduce the temp from 400 to 350. I think you'll end up with a tummy ache if you eat too many because of the high butter and sugar content!

My coworkers seemed to enjoy them when I took them to work today. I can't wait to bake these around the holidays, their smell is definitely Christmassy!