Baking Requires Attention

As much as I love to cook and bake, sometimes it’s simply not a good idea. The day I decided to make these cinnamon buns was one of those times. My concentration was particularly low, and for me to be saying that is not good news. My mind was wondering to all sorts of things but baking didn't seem to be one of those things. When I'm that inattentive, mistakes are bound to be made, and they were. And that's too bad because I’ve wanted to make cinnamon buns for a long time so when Marce of Pip in the City announced Cinnamon and/or Sticky Buns as the recipe for this month’s Daring Baker Challenge, I was looking forward to it. Marce selected a recipe from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker´s Apprentice and allowed us to make quite a few modifications, including whether or not we wanted to make cinnamon buns, sticky buns or both. I decided to start with the cinnamon buns and the only thing I changed was to use maple sugar along with the cinnamon for the filling. This recipe was really easy to work with, the dough came together easily, (even in my sketchy state) and the buns went into the oven without too much difficulty. I had to reread all the directions five times because I forgot what I had read by the time I walked from the recipe to the mixer, but other than that, it went alright.

Once the buns were in the oven, that's when my problems started. You see, I was making the cinnabuns for Mom to take to a meeting the next morning and so I was starting them late at night. I was also supposed to make some muffins and scones for the meeting as well, so that meant that I had been multitasking, which apparently, I may not be overly good at. To start with, I should have only baked one tray at a time, but oven space was at a premium because I still had to bake scones and muffins, so I shoved both trays in at once. Once I had them all in there, I should have rotated the trays part way through because I know that my oven runs hot and cold and in spots and if I don’t rotate trays, something always gets burnt before the rest is done. I could have gotten away with this if not for the fact that I forgot about my poor cinnabuns and they ended up in the oven much longer than they should have been. You’d think the wonderful smell of baking cinnabuns would have alerted me to their completion, but no, it was the smell of burning that made me jump out of my chair and rush to the oven in a panic. I pulled the buns from the oven and really should have taken a picture at that point so that you could have seen the outer ring of burnt buns with two pretty ones in the middle of each tray. Those four buns you see in the pictures are the only four that I managed to save. If this had of happened at another time, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but it was already the wee hours of the morning and the lack of buns meant that I had to bake something else for the meeting.

It wasn’t the recipe that I was angry at, just myself for making a stupid mistake. It seems to be a trend as of late. I also managed to stick my hand into the oven a couple days ago to retrieve a hot pan, sans oven mitt. Ouch. Another stupid decision was not to remake the cinnamon buns or attempt the sticky buns when I was in a more sane state of mind. I suppose I haven’t quite reached that point yet, but when I do, these buns are on my “to-make” list. Thanks for passing along a great recipe Marce! Which, by the way, can be found on Marce’s post about this month’s challenge. Also, make sure to check out how all the other Daring Bakers fared by checking out the Daring Bakers Blogroll, which is growing larger every month and thus requires its own site.

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Daring Bakers + Cinnamon Buns + Blogging Event + Baking