22 COOK’S COUNTRY • FEBRUARY/MARCH 2019
Photography:^SteveKlise;^ Styling:^ Cecelia^ JenkinsNaysayers said not to
mess with a good thing.
We love proving naysay-
ers wrong. by Cecelia Jenkins
STICKY BUNS—SOFT, YEASTED
spirals of dough dripping with gooey
caramel and studded with crunchy
nuts—are already a perfect sweet treat.
But as far as I’m concerned, perfection
is just a starting point. I wanted to take
these over the top with chocolate.
First, some context: Like cinna-
mon rolls, sticky buns start as buttery
dough rolled into a log with cinnamon
sugar inside; the dough is sliced into
buns and allowed to rise before being
baked in a rich pool of caramel. Once
they’re finished, you invert them like
an upside-down cake, so the gooeyness
drapes over the buns and sinks into
their coils.
I’m not the first person to try adding
chocolate to the mix; I found a hand-
ful of recipes in my research. They
ranged from relatively austere (with
just chocolate chips rolled up inside) to
more daring (melted chocolate in the
center, cocoa in the dough). But none
had the perfect balance of sweet, gooey
caramel and luxurious chocolate over
soft, pull-apart dough.
For the dough, I turned to a
bread-making technique that some of
my coworkers have used for ultratender
buns. The method, called tangzhong,
produces a superhydrated dough, so
the buns stay moist. And it’s remarkably
simple: You just microwave a portion
of the flour and milk to form a gel-like
paste, which locks in moisture. Once
the paste is incorporated, the dough
becomes very easy to handle. And it
yielded soft, tender buns. Tasted next to
buns made the traditional way (which
were also delicious), we chose the more
foolproof tangzhong route.
On to the chocolate. I assembled
every variety: cocoa powder, barchocolate, and chocolate chips; semi-
sweet, bittersweet, and milk. Then I
got to experimenting.
Cocoa powder in the dough was the
first casualty; it turned the dough dry
and chalky. I moved on to bar choco-
late, creating a simple ganache (melted
chocolate with cream or butter)
in the microwave to spread
(once cooled) onto the dough
before rolling it up. I loved
the complex flavor of bit-
tersweet chocolate for the
ganache, but it wasn’t sweet
enough. After spreading it
onto the dough, I sprinkled milk
chocolate chips across the surface;
once the dough was rolled up, cut, and
baked, these made for delightful pock-
ets of sweet, creamy flavor.
I was ready to tackle the chocolate
and caramel topping, which starts out,
of course, on the bottom of the pan.
While caramel traditionally involves
cooking sugar on the stovetop—a
notoriously fussy affair—I knew I couldsidestep this process by simply stir-
ring together the caramel ingredients
(brown sugar, corn syrup, butter, and a
bit of water and salt) and pouring this
mixture into a 13 by 9-inch metal bak-
ing pan before adding the buns on top.
In the oven, the mixture transformed
into a sweet, sticky caramel sauce;
the moisture from brown
sugar and corn syrup (a
liquid sugar) kept it soft and
pliable even after the buns
cooled. To really seal the
deal on the chocolate flavor,
I returned to my can of cocoa
powder, adding a tablespoon to
the stir-together caramel.
When I inverted this final batch
out of the pan, the buns glistened with
drippy, dark caramel. A sweet bak-
ery aroma saturated the air, drawing
coworkers from the farthest corners of
the kitchen. Once in a while, there is
a recipe in the test kitchen that leaves
our entire company begging for left-
overs. This was it.There’s
no need to fret,
caramel lovers: There
is still plenty of sticky,
sweet goo adorning
the tops of these buns—
it’s just infused
with chocolate
flavor, too.