Tweaking Two of My Standard Recipes

I do like to mess around with recipes, even my standard recipes I've made for years.  It's one of the perks of my job as a cookbook editor to get ideas from other peoples' recipes and then there's Pinterest, where I collect recipes that I'm curious about (and I do have a board, Recipe Verdicts, where I make notes on my results).

In this case, I was thinking of other ways to flavor sticky buns, which I usually make caramel pecan. I decided to see if I could bring in the flavors of cardamom balls, sort of a baklava-type profile.

I used my standard sweet roll dough and method (recipe in this post).  When the dough was rolled into a rectangle, I spread it with 3 Tbsp. softened butter.  I sprinkled on 1/4 cup shredded unsweetened coconut, 1 cup finely chopped walnuts, and 1 1/4 tsp. ground cardamom mixed with 1/3 cup brown sugar.  I rolled up the dough and sliced it into rounds.  I placed the rounds in a pan that was buttered with 2 Tbsp. butter with 1/3 cup honey drizzled evenly over it.  I followed the baking method for the recipe I linked to above.

Genevieve was very impressed that I was making up a recipe - she thinks this recipe could make me famous, bless her heart.  She was worried that I wasn't writing it down as I went along, so she got a paper and pencil and recorded the measurements and ingredients as I went along (I wasn't really measuring - I was guessing for the sake of her efforts).

Her book at breakfast, however, was much more fascinating than the buns.

Delicious!  I might try adding a sesame presence next time - either toasted sesame seeds in the dough, or perhaps some tahini spread inside the buns with the other goodies.

Then I took Jennifer's raves about Ruth Reichl's cherry pie to heart.  I made my standard sour cherry pie, but I used Ruth Reichl's fabulous crumb topping instead of the traditional pie crumbs I use.  Amazing!  I think I will be trying Ruth Reichl's crumbs on some other fruit pies as well.