Other spices are available

Today's Fiona's official birthday. She doesn't usually have an official birthday, but her real birthday is inconveniently close to the start of her new job, so she's decided that this year she's having an official birthday. In celebration, I'm making cinnamon rolls, but in the spirit of experimentation, I decided to try out some other spices too. Half of the batch (6 rolls) is just straight up, classic cinnamon, but we're trying out nutmeg, cardamom, mixed spice and chilli powder (separately). But of course I'm lazy, so rather than making four different butter-sugar-spice pastes, I did it as normal for cinnamon, but just made plain spiceless butter-sugar paste for all of the experimental rolls and then sprinkled the spice over the top.

Left: cinnamon. Right, top-to-bottom: nutmeg, cardamom, mixed spice and chilli powder.

...And I've already forgotten which was which. The right hand 6 are definitely cinnamon, and the one in the very top-left corner is chilli, but I absolutely can't remember the rest. I'm sure we'll figure it out when we eat them!

I had a bit of a nightmare getting these to prove, as it was so cold in the house for most of the day. In the end, they had about 6 hours to rise, and still only really got going in the final hour when I threw in the towel and put them in the oven set to about the lowest setting I could (well below the lowest marked temperature). Certainly not an ideal rise - you can see some of the butter paste has melted out from me having to whack it into the oven...

And this is as close to a finished picture as you get this time around - the glaze is still in the saucepan that you can see behind, but I got a bit too excited once the buns were glazed and forgot to take a final finished photo. But really, can you blame me? Cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven are really hard to resist! They came out alright in the end - I had thought I'd let them brown too much initially and ended up turning the oven all the way down to 160C instead of 180C, but I got away with it.

The cinnamon rolls were lovely as always- but what about the experimental ones? Well, the chilli powder was very meh in the end - you could feel the heat and it gave a pleasant warmth, but really it wasn't worth the effort. It was still nice, but honestly I'd say it was a waste of what could have become a cinnamon roll. The cardamom was actually really quite good - for once I managed to make a cardamom flavoured pastry without overdoing it - but definitely still not as nice as cinnamon. Good as a change though! Sadly though, both the nutmeg and mixed spice ones were vastly underspiced, and were incredibly subtle. From what you could taste, I think both seemed promising, but it was rather hard to tell!