Pecan Sticky Buns

These pictures aren't the best, so I'll apologize in advance.  I, in fact, almost didn't post these, but stuff happens in every kitchen so I thought you'd understand.  I made a southern favorite, Pecan Sticky Buns, last week to bring on our trip out of town. 

I made them in my kitchen, and baked them at my in-laws.  Which is where things went a bit awry.  You know how all ovens are slightly different?  You can adjust for an inexact temperature in your own kitchen pretty easily.  If you know that your oven runs 25 degrees hot, you just adjust the temp down 25 degrees every time you use it.  Well, my in-laws range is a dinosaur which they're planning on replacing in an upcoming kitchen refresh.  It's temperature is off by somewhere around 100+ degrees.

I preheated the oven to 375, read part of the newspaper, came back, opened the oven door and was hit in the face with a blast furnace.  I quickly turned the heat down, went away came back, and judged the temp by feel.  I literally placed my hand in the oven and didn't place the pans in there until it felt like it was about 375.  Not exactly the most accurate method of testing temperature.  Cooking is art - a little of this, a little of that see where the flavors take you.  Baking can be art, too, but first and foremost it's science - too little leavening and your cakes won't rise, too much fat and your cookies will spread too thin.  Rhome410 at Friday is Pizza, Monday is Soup just wrote a terrific post about what happens when your flour doesn't have enough protein.  And of course finally, messing with temperature affects the science of baking.

Enough about what went wrong.  Here's how I made these sticky buns which tasted good, but were a bit more done than I'd have liked.  I started with a batch of my brioche dough.  After the dough doubled in size, I gently turned it out onto my sweet rice flour dusted counter, and very gently rolled it out into a rough 11"x18" rectangle, and dabbed softened butter all over it,

 then folded it in half, dabbed more butter, and folded it in half again. 

I wrapped this quarter sized hunk of dough in plastic, and put it in the refrigerator and left it to slowly rise for another 8 hours.

Just before pulling the dough out of the frig, I prepared the pans.  In a saucepan over medium low heat, I combined 4 tbsps butter and 1/2 cup honey,  and divided the mixture between 2 - 9" round cake pans.  I sprinkled 1/2 cup brown sugar over the mixture in the pans.  I also crushed 1 cup of pecans in a ziplock baggie with my meat tenderizer.

I gently rolled the dough out into a more precise 11" x 18" rectangle, brushed it with melted butter(What, more butter? You bet,) sprinkled it with 6 tablespoons of cinnamon sugar, and the chopped pecans.  Notice how I didn't put any pecans on the one end?  The roll will seal better if you leave the end bare.  I then rolled it up starting with a short side, making a fat roll. 

I sliced the roll into 8 fat slices, and placed 3 pecan halves on each slice to pretty up the tops.

I placed the slices pecan side down in the pans, 4 to a pan.  Here is where I wrapped them up and placed them in a cooler for the trip to Rochester.

After baking in a 375 oven for 10 minutes, you should reduce the temp to 350 and bake for another 25-30 minutes.  Obviously with my temperature malfunctions, this didn't work out exactly right(note the burnt bits.)  Still they tasted pretty good, just slightly overdone and not as moist as they should have been.  After you pull them out of the oven wait for 5 minutes, then invert them onto a serving plate.

Here's a pulled apart piece on my fork.

Thanks for popping in for my {mis}adventures in baking.  I'm linking this up to Glute-Free Homemaker's Gluten-Free Wednesdays, Prairie Story's Recipe Swap,  La Bella Vita's Seasonal Saturdays, and Remodelaholic's Recipe Swap Sundays.