Welcome back to Spring Bake, our annual collection of delicious pastries, cakes, breads, and cookies—and tips for becoming a better home baker.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the honey buns that you so often find at bodegas or corner stores, which is why I decided to develop a recipe for honey buns that could shine front and center in any professional bakery’s pastry case. Unlike their close cousin, the cinnamon roll, these honey buns don’t just offer soft, ooey-gooey vibes. They’re more complex in flavor, with deeply caramelized nooks and crannies, floral notes of honey, and the chew of a well-developed yeast bread.
This recipe might look tricky at first, but I promise that it’s well within the grasp of most home bakers. A few tips, however, will help you to achieve the very best honey buns, with a flavor and texture that a cinnamon roll simply can’t match.
The first step for these buns is making a tanghzong, which is quite easy. A staple of most milk bread recipes, tangzhong is a roux—a cooked mixture of flour and water—that’s incorporated into the dough and helps to improve a bread’s shelf life. After heating the flour and water in a saucepan, simply stir it until it takes on the consistency of a runny paste. Make sure to cool the tangzhong completely before mixing it into your dough.
Honey buns are filled with a mixture of honey and cinnamon and are often topped with a sweet glaze, while cinnamon rolls are filled with a cinnamon-sugar mixture and typically topped with a cream cheese or powdered sugar icing.
Let the mixer do its part
Have you ever made a bread recipe, being extra careful to follow instructions from start to finish, only to end up with a dough that’s nothing but a wet, sticky mess? In all likelihood it’s not that you added too much water or didn’t add enough flour. Instead, I believe many people undermix their doughs—in other words, they’re not building the proper gluten structure necessary for good bread or pastries. I had been baking at home for years before I ever encountered a recipe that mentioned gluten development.
I will admit, this bun dough is very sticky, and it can definitely be a pain in the butt if you fail to mix it for what may seem like forever. (In reality, it should take somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes in the stand mixer.) Whatever you do, don’t pile in tons of unnecessary flour, which will ultimately make your buns dense and dry instead of light and fluffy. When mixing, if you notice the dough is no longer sticking to the sides of the bowl and begins to gather into a mass around the hook, it’s a good sign the gluten in your dough is close to becoming properly developed.
Tuck the dough in for a long, cold nap
Putting a yeast dough into the fridge may seem strange if you’re accustomed to only proofing dough at room temperature, but once you taste the flavor that develops in a cold-fermented dough, theres no turning back. When you chill your dough, you slow down the activity of the yeast’s sugar binge, allowing it to produce the compounds that give good bread its delicious aroma and flavor. When dough is left out to proof and ferment at room temperature alone, the yeast feasts on the sugar in the dough rapidly, and after a few hours the yeast may become spent before much flavor has had a chance to develop.
All you need to do is plan ahead: Make your dough during your down time, refrigerate it, and shape your buns the following day.
Honey Buns VS. Cinnamon Rolls #shorts
FAQ
Is honey bun the same as cinnamon roll?
What’s the difference between a cinnamon roll and a bun?
What makes a honey bun a honey bun?
What flavor is honey bun?
What is the difference between Sticky buns and cinnamon rolls?
Sticky buns and cinnamon rolls are quite similar. They are both made with a sweet enriched dough and filled with a cinnamon and sugar. The dough is rolled up and then cut into slices. The main difference between cinnamon rolls and sticky buns is cinnamon rolls are glazed with a yummy cream cheese frosting.
What is the difference between Ceylon cinnamon and other types of cinnamon?
Ceylon cinnamon has a softer and smoother aroma and taste compared to another cinnamon type, cassia cinnamon. In addition, Ceylon cinnamon contains less coumarin. Coumarin is an organic substance contained in cinnamon.
Are morning buns the same as cinnamon rolls?
They fall into the same category as cinnamon rolls, but morning buns tend to be a little lighter, not as sweet, and usually made with a puff pastry or croissant-like dough. I made this recipe first since it had “best” in the title, but it used more of a brioche dough, and while they certainly weren’t bad, they just weren’t what I was after.
Are sticky buns more dense than cinnamon buns?
We found that keeping the cylinder a little looser produced tall but level buns. Sticky buns are generally a bit more dense than cinnamon buns, and although they share the sticky element with honey buns, the reason each bun is sticky varies. (Both sticky buns and honey buns call for pecans, however.)