Cinnamon Rolls and Sweet Buns

A cinnamon roll can be made in about two hours. It can also be made in about eighteen. They are not the same object, and the difference has nothing to do with the cinnamon.

What a slow prove actually does

Enriched dough is bread dough with butter, milk, egg and sugar worked into it. All four of those make life harder for the yeast, which is why an enriched dough takes longer to rise than a plain one and why the temptation to hurry it is strong.

If you hurry it, by using more yeast or a warmer room, you get a dough that has risen without developing. It will bake into something perfectly edible that tastes mainly of yeast and sugar, with a crumb that tears rather than pulls apart.

Given a long slow prove, and ideally a cold one overnight, two things happen. The gluten network relaxes and organises itself, which is what produces a crumb that comes away in strands. And fermentation produces flavour compounds that a fast rise never gets round to making, which is why a slowly proved bun tastes of something beyond sweetness.

That is the whole difference, and you can taste it immediately when the two are side by side.

Strawberry Vatrushki£32Poppy Seed Buns - 4 Pieces£30

Our cinnamon rolls

Six large rolls at £44. Slowly proved, filled with cinnamon sugar, and finished with cream cheese glaze while they are still warm so it settles into the top rather than sitting on it as a lid.

They are properly large, which is deliberate. A small cinnamon roll has too much crust in proportion to its middle, and the middle is what people are actually after. The best part of a cinnamon roll is the soft coil at the centre, and a bigger roll simply has more of it.

The glaze is cream cheese rather than water icing, which is sharper and cuts the sweetness. Water icing on a cinnamon roll is sugar on top of sugar.

Warm them for a few minutes before serving and the glaze softens again. They are best on the day and good the next morning.

Airy cinnamon buns

Four for £32, and the lighter of our two cinnamon options.

The dough carries less butter and sugar, and there is no glaze at all. What you get is closer to a soft sweet bread with cinnamon running through it than to a pastry.

These are the ones to have at breakfast without feeling that you have started the day with pudding. They are also better for children, who reliably leave cream cheese glaze on the plate anyway, and they hold up overnight better than the glazed rolls do.

If you cannot decide between the two, the rolls are a dessert and the buns are a breakfast.

Plyushki

From £32 for four, or £42 for six.

A plyushka is made by rolling the dough out, folding it, cutting through the fold and twisting the whole thing open, which produces a shape you cannot get any other way. It is done by hand, one at a time, and it is the reason these take longer than they look.

The dough is enriched and soft, closer to a brioche than to bread, and the tops are glazed so they finish shiny and slightly sticky. They are sweet without being heavily so, which is why they work at breakfast rather than only as a pudding.

These are a fixture of Russian and Ukrainian bakeries and almost unknown here, which is a shame, because the shape alone is worth the effort.

Strawberry vatrushki

Four for £32.

A vatrushka is a round of soft enriched dough with a well pressed into the middle. Traditionally the well holds sweetened tvorog, the fresh curd cheese that Eastern European baking runs on. Ours holds vanilla cream with fresh strawberries on top.

The dough is baked until just set so it stays soft, and the filling is spooned rather than piped, which is why no two look quite the same. They sit somewhere between a bun and a small tart.

They are at their best on the day they arrive and they do not hold past the following morning, because the cream gradually softens the dough underneath it.

Poppy seed buns

Four for £30.

Plain enriched dough, baked soft, with poppy seeds generously over the top rather than a sweet filling inside.

Poppy seed baking is one of the things that most obviously marks out an Eastern European bakery. There is no cream, no glaze and very little sugar, so what you taste is the dough and the seeds. That makes them the plainest thing in this part of the range and the one to have in the house rather than to serve at an occasion.

Good with butter, good with jam, and good the next morning.

Reheating any of them

The oven, not the microwave. This is the one piece of advice that matters.

A microwave heats the water in the dough, which turns the crumb soft and then, within another few seconds, unpleasantly tough. It also does nothing for the outside.

Five to eight minutes in a moderate oven, straight on a tray, brings back almost everything. If they have been in the fridge, give them ten. If they are frozen, twenty from frozen at a lower heat.

They all freeze well on the day they arrive, which is the best thing to do with any you are not going to eat within a day or two.

What to serve them with

Very little, is the honest answer. A well made enriched bun is a complete thing and the instinct to serve it with something is usually wrong.

Butter on the poppy seed buns, because they are plain enough to want it. Nothing at all on the cinnamon rolls, which already have glaze. Nothing on the vatrushki, which already have cream and fruit.

Coffee rather than tea, if you are choosing. Enriched dough and strong black coffee is one of the better pairings in baking, and tea gets slightly lost against the butter and sugar.

Ordering

Everything here needs 48 hours notice, which for a weekend breakfast means ordering on Wednesday or Thursday.

Delivery is £12 within SW3 and £15 across the rest of London and Surrey, with a £50 minimum on orders. Buns on their own rarely clear that, so most people combine them with something else, and a box of buns alongside a cake is a common order.