Toffee Apple Cinnamon Bun Rings

After watching Bake Off last night I knew exactly what I was going to bake this week, and it wasn't going to be 36 doughnuts or Povitica. I love making cinnamon buns, but as they don't have fruit in, and I have a load of windfall apples to use, I decided to pimp up my regular cinnamon buns with an apple & raisin filling and a toffee drizzle.

Toffee Apple Cinnamon Bun Rings - makes 2 rings / 12 buns

500g white bread flour
1/2 tsp salt
50g caster sugar
50g butter, softened
7g yeast
225-250ml milk
1 egg

filling
4 apples
Juice of half lemon
75g raisins
25g butter
25g soft brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
extra butter for greasing

Toffee sauce - recipe here

• Add the flour, salt, sugar, butter & yeast to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a flat beater
• Add the egg and 225ml of the milk with the motor running, until it all starts to come together, adding more milk if necessary
• You want the dough to be slightly sticky, but not wet
• Turn out onto a floured surface & knead for 5-10 minutes, until soft, stretchy and smooth
• Place the dough in a greased bowl and cover with clingfilm
• Leave to double in size for approx 2 hours
• In the meantime peel, core & slice the apples
• Add the apples to a pan with the lemon juice, raisins, butter, sugar and cinnamon
• Heat until the butter has melted, and mix well
• Place a lid on & cook gently for 10 minutes, until the apple has softened but holds its shape
• Leave to cool & then drain any excess juice
• Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and roll out into a large rectangle
• Cover evenly with the apple mixture
• Roll up tightly into a long sausage
• Slice the ends off and then slice into 12 equal pieces
• Grease two 8" sandwich tins with butter
• Lay 6 slices into each tin
• Cover with clingfilm and leave to prove for an hour
• Brush the tops of the dough with melted butter
• Bake in a preheated 200C oven for approx 15 minutes
• Allow to cool in the tins for 10 minutes before turning out & drizzling with toffee sauce

Sprinkle Party and a 5 layer Sprinkle Covered Ombre Cake

How do you keep eight 11/12 year olds happy?

First of all you let them hang around in trees for 90 minutes at Go Ape, working up an appetite. You then let them loose on sandwiches, crisps and a whole lot of sugar, then you send them home to work the sugar off in the comfort of their own homes!

Last weekend Hanna and her friend had a joint birthday party, and my part was to provide the party food. I've wanted to make a sprinkle cake for ages but have never been brave enough before. So what do you do when you're nervous about making a sprinkle cake? You make two of them, of course!

Once I'd decided on the cakes, a quick browse on Pinterest (if you can ever have a quick browse on Pinterest) led me down the path of other sprinkle covered party foods.

chocolate covered breadsticks


chocolate covered Oreo pops


chocolate covered marshmallows on cocktail sticks


 chocolate covered pink wafers


cake pops (made from off cuts of birthday cake and leftover buttercream)


chocolate covered Rice Krispie bars (cut into 3 pieces)


chocolate covered strawberries 

The 5 layer ombre cake was made using a Wilton layer cake pan. They are only 6" pans but it makes a cake which is plenty big enough to go around 8-10 people. I used ingredient quantities as below :

250g butter

250g caster sugar

4 eggs

250g self raising flour

This was then divided between the 5 pans, and once the cakes had cooled I sliced the tops off to level them (and used the off-cuts to make cake pops).

TIP : I see many recipes for Ombre cakes telling you to divide the cake batter into separate bowls (5 bowls in this case), but that really isn't necessary for an Ombre cake - a rainbow cake then yes, but not an ombre cake. What you need to do is weigh your cake batter - the easiest way to do this is to weigh your bowl before starting and then weigh it once the batter is made, and deduct the weight of the bowl. I divided this by 5 (5 layers), and this is the quantity of cake batter that would go into each greased and lined tin (give or take a couple of grams). Once you've made your calculations you need to colour the batter - add a little colouring to the whole batter (this will be the colour of your palest layer), and then weigh out the batter into one tin. Then add a little more colouring, and weigh the batter out into the second tin, and so on, until all tins have been filled - saves washing 5 extra bowls unnecessarily. 

The cakes were then sandwiched together and covered with vanilla buttercream, which I then left for a few hours (and overnight for one of the cakes) before rolling in sprinkles - not as easy as it looks (lots of tutorials on Pinterest)! The confetti dot covered cake took 3 full tubes of dots, however the 100's & 1000's covered cake took less than 2 tubes.

We also had sandwiches, crisps and teapots filled with pink lemonade, and Jack made some place cards and tucked a napkin into each tea cup.  It was a party very heavy on sugar, but that's ok once in a while, and especially when it's possibly the last party of this kind for this group of primary school friends, now they're all at high school.