Cinnamon Roll Cake + Old Furniture = Happy Days!

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nothing beats fresh ground coffee in the morning

Cinnamon roll cake (recipe below)

I'm currently on a long sick leave from work, so I have plenty of time in my hands. Time to meet up with my amazing father, sit in the coffee table for four hours eating cinnamon roll cake and drinking fresh ground coffee. Time to finally, with the help from my dad, finish the 80 year old chair I've been working on since 2006. Time to finish my desk made out of an old sewing machine stand and a glulam board.

Look, I used to have a waist!

The chair used to belong to my grandfather and as my mom estimated, it's been in the family for at least 80 years. It has been black, white and all sorts of colors along it's life, but in 2006 I stripped it of it's layers of varnish and paint and oiled it to a more natural, rustic look. I just didn't have a seat cushion for it, so it was left in storage for several years.

When my parents moved house it re-emerged from it's slumber and was sent to my aunt, a retired upholsterer who kindly made a new seat cushion for the chair. How wonderful it is to belong to such a crafty family! As a small token of gratitude I in return sent her a rose embroidered pin cushion in a tin tartlet, handy for her many sewing projects and in a color I know she adores.

Me and my dad fixed the cushion into the chair and voilá! The chair is in use again :)

The Husqvarna sewing machine stand was found abandoned at a storage my parents used to have their stuff in. I saw it when rummaging through my parents' many a treasure and fell in love. It still had the sewing machine on it, but my crafty father took it apart and the stand has since been taking out space in our storage room. Yesterday, finally, we managed to screw on a glulam board and it was then ready to recieve the finishing touches; a layer of Maston WOODmix Wood Wax in shade of cognac.

When picking up the shade in the shop, we couldn't find a sample of the color, so chose it based only on the picture on the tin. ERROR! It turned out a lot darker than I imagined, only did one layer and it looks awafully mismatched with the chair. Goes to show decisions like this should not be made hastily. But as I say, only the victims of unavoidable circumstances have the right to whine, victims of their own choices are denied this right. So I'll just have to live with it :)

I'm not much of a baker, but now with all this time in my hands, I'm trying new recipes. This one I simply MUST share, the cinnamon roll cake turned out sooooo yummy and quite easy to make I simply gotta share it. (Or more accurately; I gotta write down the ingredients somewhere I can easily find them again to re-do this beauty some day)

Finnish Cinnamon Roll Cake 

(or as it is called in Finland; "Boston cake")

ingredients:

for the dough
250 ml water or milk (I used water though recipe originally was made for milk)
25 g fresh yeast

1 egg
1 tsp salt
100 ml sugar
1 tbsp ground cardamom

~800 ml all-purpose flour
150 g soft butter

for the filling
~50 g soft butter
~1 tbsp cinnamon
150 ml chopped almonds
1 tart apple coarsely shredded
for the icing
200 ml icing sugar
1 tbsp of luke warm water

Take ingredients out from fridge about 2 hours before starting to cook, all ingredients should be luke warm before baking. Crumble yeast into luke warm water or milk. Stir until the yeast has dissolved.

In a mixing bowl, add egg, sugar, salt and ground cardamom and blend well. Start adding the flour and stir until you have a gruel-like consistency, then work in the butter (this is easiest with a mixer with dough hooks). Knead in the rest of the flour (start off with a bit less than 4 dl and add as needed) until you have a nice elastic dough.

Cover with a kitchen towel or cling film and let stand until the dough's doubled in size. While the dough rises, ground the pealed apple into a bowl and mix with sugar, cinnamon and chopped nuts. The nuts will then have plenty of time to soften while the dough rises.

Once the dough is risen punch out the air from it gently. On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough to a ~30x40 cm rectangle. Spread the rectangle with butter and then the apple-nut mixture making sure to get filling right up to the edges. Beginning on the longer side, roll up to a log.

Cut the log into thick slices and arrange in a buttered pan (about 25 cm in diameter), cut-side up. They'll rise and spread quite a bit, so you need to give them a bit of space. Cover with a kitchen towel and let rise for half an hour.

Original recipe instructed to cook in 200°C for 30 minutes, but mine took a lot longer than that to cook. You can test if the cake is done by sticking a tooth pick into the cake, if the dough clings to the tooth pick, you need to cook it a while longer. Reduce temperature if after 30min it is still raw (we don't want the surface to burn).

Let the cake cool completely. Mix the icing sugar with water and drizzle over the cake. 

(thanks to deinin, I used her Spicy swirl cake - blog post as a source for translating my version of the recipe (lazy ass me). Check out her version too, sounds delish!)