Strawberry Maple Buns
Tender maple buns filled with strawberry preserves and topped with maple icing. These decadent morsels are perfect for end-of-summer baking.
I love taking traditional recipes and mixing them up a bit to create something new and delightful. Today, we’re going to take a classic “honey bun” recipe and infuse it with maple and vanilla. Then we’ll stuff the dough with strawberry preserves, bake until golden, and finish the whole thing off with a drizzle of maple icing.
In many ways, this recipe is a riff on old-fashioned cinnamon buns and honey buns. Honey buns are usually made with honey (obviously), filled with cinnamon sugar, and then fried until golden. For this recipe, I decided to use maple instead of honey and preserves instead of cinnamon sugar. Then I baked the buns like cinnamon rolls instead of frying them.
The result was a decadent treat that’s perfect for late-summer baking. We may be past prime strawberry picking time, but I have jars of homemade jam and preserves just begging to be used. I’ll likely make these buns in winter too, when I want to add a bit of canned summer sunshine to my baking.
These buns are sweeter than cinnamon rolls and also have a slightly different texture - they are tender, but not quite as fluffy due to a shorter second rising time. That’s why when you compare one of these to my cinnamon rolls, the cinnamon rolls are taller. For these maple buns, we’ll even press the cut dough down a bit in the baking dish before allowing it to rise.
Feel free to experiment with different flavors. Instead of strawberry preserves, you could use blueberry, apricot, or even orange marmalade. Want to use jam? You can do that too, though I quite like the chunky bits of fruit you get inside each bun when you use preserves.
In terms of sweetener, agave would be a great option for sweetening the dough and glaze instead of maple. Honey, of course, works too. If I were to make these again with honey I’d use an orange blossom honey or maybe one made from prickly pear flowers - something a bit more interesting than regular honey.
Happy baking!
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This post includes step-by-step photos and a video. Here’s a sneak peek: