You might be shocked to learn that in all my years of cooking and baking, I have never made cinnamon rolls from scratch before. It is one of those elusive breakfast/desserts (bressert? deakfast?) that I love, but was intimidated by the amount of work potentially involved.
Making the Dish
The cinnamon roll recipe I used came from none other than Claire Saffitz via the New York Times Cooking app (sorry to the non-subscribers!). Between the amount of steps involved and the fact that it is a recipe that calls for yeast and proofing, I was definitely intimidated – I ended up self-sabotaging by starting the process on Sunday and since the dough needs to sit overnight in the fridge, I was not able to finish filming until today.
Making the dough was not difficult, just very involved between “scalding” the milk and running the stand mixer for awhile to make the dough. Using a stand mixer is a must given that I could literally feel my stand mixer heating up from all the hard work it was doing!
The unique part of this recipe is the use of Biscoff cookies in the filling. Claire explains that it gives the filling more body to it rather than just straight up cinnamon and sugar. This also meant an extra step of using a food processor to get the fine texture needed for spread-ability. Blunder alert: I misread the recipe and thought I was supposed to fridge the dough after spreading on the filling, so I was literally sweating from trying to carefully slide parchment paper under my huge rectangle of filling-adorned dough. My dough ended up looking less like a rectangle and with some cracks in the filling that I used my offset spatula to flatten out. I read the recipe again only to realize that I was supposed to fridge it after rolling the dough.
Cutting the spirals was so much fun! As the recipe directs, you can use unflavored dental floss, fishing line or baker’s twine. I was only able to find cooking twine at H-E-B which still did the trick. I would recommend indenting the dough with a knife to show where you want to cut so you can end up with more even rolls.
Eating the Dish
Let’s just say I devoured my first cinnamon roll before you could say the words “cinnamon roll.” They were soft with the slightest crunch on the outside and the addition of Biscoff cookies to the filling makes these so sumptuous – my mouth is watering just from typing this! I wish there was more filling because it was such a lovely, creamy contrast to the roll and tasted amazing, so I might recommend amping up the recipe slightly.
Summary
I would 100% recommend giving cinnamon rolls from scratch a try – the ones from a can just do not compare to the fluffy, delicious goodness that these rolls delivered. I would recommend starting the dough the day before like Claire suggests so that you can enjoy these rolls the morning after (although I feel like you’d need to wake up pretty early to enjoy them at classic “breakfast” time).