Maple and Pecan Cinnamon Buns

Since in recent times our shopping centres and high streets seem to have been increasingly infiltrated by sweet-dough bakes filling the halls with their delicious cinnamon sweetness, luring you in to their overpriced, but yummy goods (£3.50 for *one* bun? Are you kidding me?!). So of course, the only solution for an amateur baker is to try and make them at home, for a fraction of the price. I'm not one to name names about which companies are culprits, but here is a great recipe to get that real American cinnamon bun taste.
The real challenge for me in this recipe though, is that I routinely make all my bread dough in the bread machine. I've been awful at kneading bread since we started cooking lessons at secondary school, and was much relieved by the invention of bread machines, where you can just pop in all the ingredients, and an hour and a half later there is a soft, springy pliable dough. However, if I'm going to call myself any kind of baker, not knowing how to knead is definitely not an option. It's about time I faced this problem head on.

I have to say the kneading part was quite difficult, as I really had no idea how to gauge if I was done or not, having had little other experience. To help, I scoured the internet and YouTube for videos on how to do it, but was left feeling very confused because my dough regularly tore when I tried to fold it in half. I kneaded for a full 10 minutes, I was reliably told that bread doughs with a high butter or egg content requires more kneading than a regular dough. Although it wasn't sticky, it seemed very greasy, and the more I worked with it, the more it seemed to be seeping the butter out as it warmed in my hands! Afterwards, I found this guy who made it look very easy, and I think I'll have to give his method a try next time I do this recipe.
I wanted to give a lovely before and after proving to show how much the dough had risen, but either due to my poor kneading or my generally poor ability to manage the temperature of the bowl to make it amenable for rising in a cold flat, the pictures were not that impressive.
In the end, I became impatient and finally just rolled the dough out and hoped that it would rise nicely at the second proving. So I spread the delicious butter, sugar and cinnamon mix on the dough and sprinkled it with chopped pecans:

and rolled it and sliced it up and put it in the pan:

 Then I had the genius idea to put it in an oven that I'd switched off, thinking that it would be warm enough to speed up the proving process, however it just seemed like most of the butter in the filling melted and seeped out!

However, I was lucky and the buns rose really nicely during the cooking:

I was in two minds about making the frosting, but frankly, it was delicious, and a really good addition to the cinnamon buns if you're not minding your calories!