These are not your traditional cinnamon scrolls but more like a cross between walnut sticky buns, where the stickiness comes from maple syrup, and cinnamon scrolls. As I am trying to do most of my pastry and bread baking using sourdough starter , I applied this with this recipe as well. The recipe is very similar to the Sourdough Hot-Cross Buns I made some months ago, but slightly more buttery (because why not), making these even fluffier and lighter. Needles to say making these resulted in having waaay to many. Plus not only these are delicious, but no need to use scented candles for the day as your whole house will smell awesome.

Recipe:

Leaven:

• 290g full cream milk
• 200g white flour, type 00
• 1 tbsp sourdough starter

Overnight Poolish:

• 100 g spelt flour
• 80 g full fat milk
• 1/2 tsp dry active yeast

The Dough:

• 200 g White flour Type 00
• 8 g Salt
• 40 g coconut sugar
• 30 g Raw sugar
• 1 egg
• 100 g unsalted butter, melted and cooled, plus extra for greasing

Cinnamon filling:

• 5 tbs cinnamon
• 80 g maple syrup
• 100 g butter
• pinch of salt flakes
• a handful of walnuts

Extra:

• Maple syrup and butter for greasing the pan plus a handful of walnuts
• Milk and maple syrup for brushing

Method:

Day 1 (Evening):

1. 36 hours before you’ll want to bake the buns, mix the leaven ingredients in a bowl and leave them on a bench, covered with a kitchen towel, overnight. At the same time mix the ingredients for the poolish in an air-tight container and rest in the fridge overnight.

Day 2:

1. The next morning, in a self standing mixer with a hook attachment, mix the leaven, poolish and all the dough ingredients, except the salt and butter. Let it knead for 5 minutes. Leave the dough to rest for 30 min to hydrate.
2. Add the salt and the butter and let the mixer do its thing for another 10 minutes until the dough is nice and shiny.
3. Now it’s time for your bulk rise. Leave the dough on the kitchen bench for around 6-8 hours, turning and folding the dough on itself every hour to strengthen it. (If you’re new to sourdough baking, maybe look up some videos on the folding technique. Otherwise to recap, although I will probably butcher the explanation: Wet your hand and from one side of the bowl try to lift a part of the dough, stretch it upwards as well as you can and flip that part over the top. Do 5 more folds like that and let it rest for an hour. Then repeat this folding every hour or so to get the dough nice and aerated.)
4. After completing the rise, generously butter your working surface, the baking pan and your hands. Pour a couple of tablespoons worth of maple syrup and some walnuts into the the baking tin.
5. On your buttered surface roll out the dough (half a cm thick). Generously top it with the cinnamon mixture, and roll the dough into a long “sausage”. Cut it into 4cm thick equal parts and place them in your buttered, “mapled” tin. I actually got 18 out of the whole lot so I used two tins, one fit 12 and the other one 6. (I cling-wrapped and froze the smaller one at this stage and took it out of the freezer the night before I wanted to use them, let them out on the bench overnight and they were perfectly proofed in the morning.) Cover the tin you will use with cling-wrap or some beeswax wrap and rest in the fridge overnight.

Day 3 (Morning):

1. Early the next day, take the tray out of the fridge. If you have hours before wanting to bake them, leave it rest on the bench for a couple of hours until doubled in size, or if you want to speed it up, preheat the oven on 40C, turn it off, let a bit of the hot air out and then place the tray inside. This will give you a warmer environment and a faster rise and should take around 1.5 hours.
2. Brush the buns with milk and bake for 20min on 190C on the lower rack of your oven, this will ensure that the maple on the bottom will make the buns nice and sticky. Once they are baked, brush them lightly with a little bit of maple syrup, to get a nice shiny top. Serve warm on their own, or with butter, and optional extras like almond or macadamia butter, some berries, yogurt,… (Hint: having them with some coffee is even better)