Hello I’m Eve and I used to be good at this.

When I was little my grandma still lived with us and I spend my formative years in the kitchen with her all the time. I made my first solo attempt at sweet buns around age 4 at the crack of dawn, got halfway through making the dough and then went to wake up grandma to ask for help.

My dough had red and black currants in it that I had already gone and picked myself at sunrise. Mind you this was the nineties countryside in Finland, doors weren’t locked and kids weren’t really that closely supervised at all hours.

It must have been quite the surprise when I woke up grandma to bake with me, but I’m sure she was happy to do so. We apparently made some exotic version of buns and took them with us later that day when we went on a roadtrip. I don’t remember any of this myself, but the story had been told to me many times.

From then on, I baked cinnamon buns on the regular, and most definitely got better at it. I made them so often that by the time I actually entered culinary school at 19, it was the last thing I ever wanted to bake, or eat.

In the past ten years or so I’ve probably made cinnamon buns less than once a year and it shows.

I wanted to make cute little ones and I thought I was doing alright but my errors showed up when I put the buns in the oven and they rose every which way and unraveled.

I think were I went wrong was:

1. too much yeast, even though I halfed the amount on the recipe written on the side of the flour package

2. too much butter on the butter-sugar-cinnamon mixture, which makes the layers slippery, though the taste is delicious

3. not cutting the triangles in wide enough angle, making them too narrow at the bottom and allowing to shoot sideways too easily

4. not allowing the buns to properly rise before putting them in the oven where they then rise way too fast and unpredictably.

I got a few good ones and they all do taste delicious, but this was pretty much a fail for someone that technically has both the knowledge and experience for making beautiful cinnamon buns. I’ll get back to practising as soon as all these ugly little things have been eaten!