Kitchen Blooper! Jamacian Buns

First, a confession, followed by an apology...

My goal in doing this blog is to recreate the food at Disney by using the actual recipes from Disney, preparing them accordingly, and then sharing the results.  But there are times that the food Gods do not cooperate and even somebody who knows their way around the kitchen get stumped by forces beyond their control.  

That is exactly what happened to the treat I was making today, Jamaican Buns from Caribbean Beach Resort.  Seeing as this is where I'm calling home in September and it's probably my favorite hotel, I was pretty excited to try this guy out.

So far, so good

First, I was going to have leave out the coconut due to allergy concerns.  I figured that wasn't such a big deal and I opted to add coconut extract instead.  Then upon raiding my pantry, I discovered that I had no raisins and what I thought was raisins were actually dried cranberries.  Fine.  I'd just substitute the raisins for the cranberries and make a note of it on the entry for this recipe.  From there, it just slid downhill.  I started mixing the batter, but the forgot about it (the convenience of a Kitchen Aid mixer is perhaps a little too convenient) so I suspect the dough was very over mixed.  Then I had to step away for a moment, so I threw the batter in the fridge to keep the butter from melting, and what started as a moment ended up being about 4 hours, so the batter got completely chilled...  Which should never happen with a bread dough, even a quick bread.  Then, for the first time as an adult, I actually broke the yolk of not one, but both eggs, getting a pretty substantial amount of yolk in the whites.  Finally, in the oddest problem I've ever had in a kitchen, I couldn't track down my cookie pan...  I swear, it was the most bizarre thing.  But with a hot oven and a now mostly room temperature dough ready to go, I had to come up with something.  And that something was foil on a wire rack over a pizza stone.  So basically, the most non-cookie sheet I could have possibly made.  So by the time all was said and done, I came up with a recipe that at its core is a Disney recipe, but fate turned it into something else.   


The end result was...  Interesting, to say the least.  While they tasted just fine, if not a little dense, I could tell by looking at them that this is probably not what Caribbean Beach serves to its guests.  

Where to start? They didn't brown, they spread out, the yolk on the whites burned, the tops split, and the foil gave an odd shape.

It was like a deflated, overly moist scone, when (as I understood it), it should have been more like a hot cross bun.  Even after cooking the buns for 40 minutes instead of the 20, all I got was burned edges.  A trademark sign that the dough was too cold and too overmixed.  The hint of a great flavor, the potential behind a great little dish, but in the end, they were completely inedible.  Bummers.

Burned at the edge, raw in the middle.  Can you believe they were in the oven for 40 mins?

My goal is to try and remake this sometime in the very near future, when either I or my kitchen is less cursed, and hopefully we can compare how it ended up this time to how it should have been.  LoL!


So, better luck next time!


Edit:  This recipe was apparently so cursed that, despite scheduling it to be posted yesterday, it never posted and had to be posted manually today.  LoL!