Swedish cinnamon twisted buns, kanelbullar, made into a cinnamon, cocoa and apple star bread. Isn’t it so pretty? I’m amazed I was able to make something this pretty.

The star of breads
The star of breads, cinnamon star bread, or my interpretation of a cross between Swedish kanelbuller, cinnamon buns, and the twisty star bread made from layers of dough interspersed with chocolate, cinnamon, cardamom, pesto, cheese, sausage (made up the last one) fillings.
The Swedish buns are so much loved that they even have their traditional celebration day, 4th October. But the Swedes eat them all year round and who would blame them? Cinnamon-sugar filling in near-plain fluffy bun, prettily shaped with slash ‘n twist, with a glass of milk or hot cocoa must be one of the world’s most blissfully comforting feasts.
Slash/twist in wreath breads
The slash/twist technique is well known in babkas and all kinds of wreath breads. The incision is made through layers of pastry and the twist exposes colour-contrasting filling.
I have been in awe of those bakery artworks for ages and never thought I’d manage to create anything as neat and pretty. As those who read CF know, I do tasty; I don’t do pretty.
But lo! behold, it’s not so hard; surely not if I managed to shape and prove and bake it, retaining the beauty of the shape. The dough is brioche, the fillings are threefold: cocoa, apple-almond and cinnamon.
I found the brioche perfectly well-behaved dough when it comes to rolling out and cutting and my fillings are easy to put together. Above all though, the star passes my, most important, taste test: it’s unbelievably delicious.
Is it cinnamon bread? Is it a kanelbullar?
The name is somewhat ad libbed: it’s not technically kanelbullar because it’s not a bun; it isn’t kanelbrød because that tends to be shaped into a log and – well, duh! – has solely cinnamon filling.
Star bread is not actually what it is commonly thought to be, so I call this cinnamon twist star bread where the twist is both on cinnamon and on bread.
It's a star
But privately I just call it ‘star’. After the star of Bethlehem, because it makes a great Christmas table centrepiece; the star of the show, ditto.
Christmas star (poinsettia); A Star is Born; that old Nazareth track that nobody remembers; Mazzy Star; Death Star; Michelin star; Starsky and Hutch (all right – not the last one).
Star – because it’s my star bake of this season.