When great expectations bomb...

When I got the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, I thought their recipe for Cream Cheese Crumb Buns (try saying that three times!) looked delish.  The one drawback about this cookbook is the lack of photos, so it was also a leap of faith guessing what the final product would look like.

After making them yesterday, I'm not a happy little baker.  The last time I made anything so tasteless was two years ago with Martha Stewart St. Patrick's day recipes.  The ingredient list for the buns looked good, but in hindsight, there was nothing with any defined flavour in the recipe.  The other thing that irritates me today - it took three prep bowls!

Here's the recipe, if anyone is willing to try it:
Cream Cheese Crumb Buns from Magnolia Bakery

The quantity was listed as 16 "large" buns.  When my batter was mixed and I used my large scoop to measure them out, they only totalled 12 muffin cup sized "buns".  Maybe I measured too much batter?  The instructions called for 10 minutes of baking, followed by 1 tbsp of cream cheese filling added to the top, to be "pressed" into the buns with a tablespoon.  When I tried this, the filling ripped!  I decided to top each bun and lightly spread it out.  I topped this with a generous amount of the crumb topping and held my breath.  Usually, when you bake a crumb topping, the result is a lovely, toasty brown.  That's what you get when you mix brown sugar and butter, melted at a high heat, right?  Not so this time.  The crumb was cooked, but not toasty enough.  I think the recipe called for waaay too much flour in the mix.

Because I expected to take them to my office, I used muffin liners in the tray.  They were cool enough after 15 minutes to lift out and I gave one a try.  I'm guessing that because it was still warm the taste wasn't too bad.  When I packed them up later in the evening, I tried another one, which to me had little or no flavour!  Buns, meet my green bin!  Here they are, in all their beige glory, right before they become future compost.

If I'm going to spend an hour baking something, I'd like it to have a great taste when I'm done, especially after using an 8 oz package of cream cheese and 1-1/2 sticks of butter!  I'm not even going to bother tweaking this to try for a better outcome.  It's just time to take the post-it note off that recipe page and move on to something else.