Pull-apart cinnamon–sugar bread

Once upon a time, about a quarter of a century ago, an aunt introduced me to toast sprinkled liberally with sugar and ground cinnamon. I couldn’t imagine anything tasting better than this ambrosia, and had every intention of never eating anything else when I grew up and could eat what I liked, except maybe liquorice bullets and Mint Slices and chicken-flavoured Twisties. But this passed, and I haven’t thought of cinnamon toast since I was a teenager.

Until now, thanks to a chance encounter with Joy the Baker.

This is cinnamon toast all grown up, with browned butter and rolled-out dough cut into squares and piled into a stack that goes not-too-evenly into a bread tin and is baked, so that its many points become crisp and its yeasty insides light yet moist and clingy as its warm segments are peeled away for breakfast. 

And it’s dead easy, as long as you don’t wake up of a morning and decide you want it then and there. A bit of pre-planning works well for the necessary risings. For example, say it was the evening before a public holiday, and friends were coming to have a late one and stay the night – the slices could be risen, the tin covered with Glad Wrap and bunged in the fridge to arrest further rising, then resumed in the morning. 

And should a guest decide to sneak back home at daybreak, before the fragrance of baking bread and cinnamon has a chance to waft through the house, well, they leave all the more for the rest of us. O Glenn – all this, all this could have been yours.