Kids Cooking Thursday: Cinnamon Scrolls

Another Cooks Club Challenge from the Taste.com.au Forums. This one held a first for us - cream cheese icing! I'd never made or eaten it before, and now I see why Americans use it so much! Yummo! Below is the recipe as given for the challenge (with our photos though!). We used the bread maker, and subsitituted craisins for the currants, because I don't like currants. I think they are crunchy, bitter, tiny, inferior sultanas. If you are going to eat a dried grape, it may as well be a full sized one. We cooked them for 20 minutes at 180C.

ICED CINNAMON SCROLLS
¼ cup lukewarm water
1 cup milk, slightly warmed
125g butter, softened
2 eggs, lightly beaten
¼ cup sugar
5 cups plain flour
pinch of salt
2 x 7g sachets dried yeast

1/3 cup currants
1/3 cup sultanas

80g butter, softened
¾ cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 tbsp ground cinnamon

To make dough, place ingredients in breadmaker in following order: water, milk, butter, eggs, sugar, flour, salt, yeast.
Start bread maker on dough setting, and add currants and sultanas during last few minutes of kneading time. (Some breadmakers beep when time to add extra ingredients.)

(My breadmaker is a bit small for this amount of ingredients and didn’t mix properly at first, so I had to stop it and mix it up a bit with a spoon, then start it again. It worked beautifully after that.)

When dough cycle is finished, take dough out of breadmaker onto benchtop and knead into a ball. Leave to rest for 10-15 minutes until dough relaxes.
(I forgot to add my currants and sultanas while the machine was kneading, so when the dough was finished I kneaded them in by hand.)

Alternatively, to make dough by hand: dissolve yeast in warm water in a small bowl. Place milk and butter in a medium saucepan and heat until butter is melted. Sift flour and salt into a large mixing bowl. Add sugar and stir to combine. Make a well in the centre and add eggs, and milk and yeast mixtures. Stir until a dough forms.
Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 6-8 minutes, working in extra flour if dough is too sticky. Add the currants and sultanas during the last 2 minutes of kneading. Turn the dough into a large, lightly greased bowl and cover loosely with plastic wrap. Keep the bowl in a warm place and let the dough rise for 30 minutes to an hour, or until the dough has doubled in size.

Roll dough out into an oblong. I made mine approximately 40cm in length and maybe 20cm wide. It was about 1cm thickness. The original recipe says to make the oblong longer and the dough thinner, but that makes a thinner crisper scroll rather than a soft bun-like one which is the type we like. :D

Spread dough with most of the softened butter, saving some to spread over scrolls once they have been cut. Sprinkle evenly with brown sugar and cinnamon. The original recipe says to melt the butter but we find it easier to spread softened butter over the dough with our hands.

Roll the dough up from the SHORT end, swiss-roll style, to make a log.

Cut the log into 2 ½ - 3 cm slices and arrange on a baking tray which has been lined with baking paper. Leave a slight gap between each scroll. Spread scrolls with remaining butter. (As you can see, I got 10 scrolls from my dough. Doug gets about 16. It doesn't really matter, they'll just be larger or smaller.)

Cover loosely and leave until they have doubled in size (mine took about 20 minutes). Bake in a moderate oven for 20-30 minutes (mine took about 20 mins). I used fan-forced on about 170.
Remove from oven and cool for a few minutes on a rack.

Spread with icing.
(I forgot to put them on a cooling rack first, and spread with icing while they were still on the tray. Also, I used WAY too much icing as my Douglas forgot to tell me he only uses half the icing recipe and I made the whole quantity. So if you think mine look a bit over-iced, you’re right!! But they were still good! I have written out the CORRECT icing quantity to use; you may even like to use less than this, according to taste.)

ICING
125g cream cheese, at room temperature
50g butter, softened
1 ½ cups icing sugar
1-2 tsp milk

Beat cream cheese and butter until soft.

Gradually add icing sugar and continue beating until well combined and soft.
Add milk until icing is desired consistency. (Mine turned out really soft and fluffy.)

ENJOY!!

Note where her feet are!

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