Hooray, it’s time for Cinnamon Rolls again! This time with puréed pumpkin… I found the recipe on Pinterest even before our neighbour knocked on our door and asked whether we wanted a bit of a massive pumpkin. I took a slice, cut it up and roasted it with some sesame oil (it was the only type I had left). Then I puréed it and froze it in portions – two for these rolls, one for pie and the rest in an ice cube tray for soups and sauces.
I’ve actually had a reason this time for baking. Normally, as you know, I don’t need one but this time I’ve had a good one. We had a visitor who actually came to see Miss Meike’s Kitchen more than anyone else of us. Jessica was a student nurse on placement on the maternity ward where I went to have Miss. Jessica had only a week or so left and hadn’t actually been present at a birth yet so she asked whether it would be okay if she could be with me. Of course, it was, the more the merrier! Miss took her time though and Jessica went home at the end of her shift but had asked to be phoned so she could come back for the birth. She had just arrived home when the midwife called her. So she came back and all was going well. The duty doctor was called to attend the birth – and then Miss Meike’s Kitchen’s heart rate dropped. By the time the doctor got to the birthing suite, she found an emergency. The consultant was called and I ended up being wheeled into theatre for an emergency c-section. Miss Meike’s Kitchen had to be resuscitated as she wasn’t breathing when she was born and was, as per protocol, blue lighted to the children’s hospital. She spent two days in NICU but mainly due to the fact that they didn’t have a spare bed on the normal ward. But she has been fine ever since. This drama was the first birth Jessica attended, and it’s even more connected since the same thing happened when Jessica herself was born.
About eight months later, I spotted amongst the news from the registry office in our local newspaper that Jessica had got married. She had quite an unusual maiden name so that’s why I remembered. Since the paper publishes the addresses, I wrote the young couple a card and also sent some pictures of Miss Meike’s Kitchen. We’ve been in touch ever since and, so far, have managed to meet up once a year, around the time of Miss’s birthday. And for her, or rather the occasion of her visit, are the Cinnamon Pumpkin Rolls.
The dough is very soft and it would have been obvious if I had thought of checking it against this recipe, which has worked a treat before. The amount of liquids, not even including the pumpkin purée, seems too much. And since it’s hard to roll out a dough that is really soft and sticky, I think I’ll try next time to merge those two recipes because the flavour is great.
Here’s the pumpkin purée with salt, brown sugar and nutmeg:
I wish you could smell this! It’s the filling, brown sugar with cinnamon, cloves and allspice. It’s magical!
I left the rolls to rise in the fridge overnight. They didn’t do brilliantly, compared to my first overnight cinnamon rolls but they did rise while baking so they weren’t too bad.
The special occasion called for a frosting and I kind of used the maple-cream cheese frosting of the original recipe as a template. My problem with frostings generally is the amount of sugar that goes into them. I don’t have any maple syrup at the moment so I had to improvise anyway. I used 85g of cream cheese, 42g of honey and 2 tbsp of milk. For my taste, that was really sweet. And to think that the recipe called for double the amount of syrup plus extra icing sugar – no way!
They taste fantastic! Everybody loved them!
I also made a loaf of bread. It was a pure spelt bread, which I’ve made before. I remember that the bread ended up really spongey (but I don’t recall whether that was when the bread was a day or two old or when it was defrosted). I don’t know whether that’s a characteristic of pure spelt bread or whether that was due to the ridiculously large amount of yeast. This time I halved the amount of yeast and gave it time to rise and, boy, it rose like a rocket!
Ingredients (inspired by this recipe)
600g spelt flour
12g salt
2 tbsp olive oil
1 sachet of active dry yeast
ca. 500 ml water
Mix it all together. Cover. Leave to rise in warm place for about 2 hours.
The dough is very soft so instead of punching it down I patted it down with a wooden spoon before decanting it into a greased small loaf tin.
Cover. Leave to prove in a warm place for another hour – but do keep an eye on it. Mine rose so much, some of the dough ended up on the window sill…
Bake in a preheated oven ( fan, 220°C), with a bowl of water, for 25 minutes. Turn the temperature down to 200°C and bake for another 10 minutes.
Leave to cool on a wire rack.
Meike's Kitchen 