Principles of a Cinnamon Roll



[Image: Landon Carter]

The perfect cinnamon roll is arguably a subjective notion, since what appeals to me is probably different than what appeals to you. To me, what counts as perfect is what comes closest to the cinnamon roll that I would eat as a child from the Cinnabon at my local mall. According to my memory, those Cinnabon rolls were huge, piping hot, gooey in the middle, and oozing with both cinnamon sugar filling and cream cheese frosting. Every time I eat a cinnamon roll, I inevitably compare it to the ones from my memory.

If I had to break down what baking my perfect cinnamon roll should look like, it would be a recipe that adhered to the following principles:

• Soft and fluffy bread throughout. Although I love the center of Cinnabon rolls, I distinctly remember avoiding the outer layer because it tended to be over-baked.
• Gooey filling that oozed all over the place. Seriously, who can resist melted cinnamon sugar and butter?!
• Cream cheese frosting that melted into a liquid-like consistency. The frosting needs to melt when it comes into contact with the hot roll without becoming completely runny. One of my favorite aspects of a Cinnabon roll was scraping off the frosting-cinnamon-sugar combo that pooled onto the bottom of the box to eat on its own.
• Single-bowl technique for making the dough. I want to be able to toss all the dough ingredients together into 1 bowl and let a stand mixer do all the work.
• Ability to freeze and bake later. I like the convenience of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls, where you can defrost whenever you want to eat and bake something ready-made.

In finding my way to the recipe I use today, I was optimizing for taste, nostalgia, and the ability to bake the resulting cinnamon rolls whenever I wanted.

Starting with sourdough

I didn't actually start out trying to recreate Cinnabon cinnamon rolls. My original intention was to see if I could make sourdough cinnamon rolls, since I was in a phase of trying to use sourdough starter instead of yeast for everything during the pandemic (despite what one might think, I started my sourdough journey prior to the pandemic). I started by doing a bit of research and comparing different recipes to understand what the rough ratios should be:



If you can't read my chicken scratch above, these were the recipes I compared:

• Sourdough cinnamon buns by King Arthur
• Soft Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls by The Clever Carrot
• Sourdough cinnamon rolls by little spoon farm
• Dangerously Addicting Sourdough Cinnamon rolls by A Chick And Her Garden

For the dough, it looked like I basically needed some combination of starter, milk, egg, butter, flour, sugar, salt and yeast. I ended up guesstimating at a ratio that intuitively made sense to me. I wish I had taken more pictures and notes of the process of making this first batch, but from what I could remember:

• It was hard to roll out and cut. I used a knife, and the dough was too sticky so the lines weren't clean
• The filling wasn't as gooey as I wanted (which subconsciously, was Cinnabon-level ooze)
• The sourdough taste was strong. I didn't mind it too much, but my sister wasn't a fan.
• The frosting was delicious, and melted according to my criteria. Using a simple cream cheese + powdered sugar + vanilla recipe (instead of adding butter) seemed to be the way to go.
• King Arthur recommended refrigerating the dough overnight, which definitely helped it develop flavor. As a nice side effect, this meant I could easily save unbaked rolls in the freezer for later.



For the second go around, I made some light tweaks to the filling and technique. To produce a gooier filling, I used softened butter instead of melted butter and dropped the flour. I borrowed the technique from Bravetart's recipe to use a stand mixer with paddle attachment to whip the filling together, essentially creaming the butter. For cleaner cut lines, I also utilized her method of using floss to cut the cinnamon rolls. The best way I can describe the technique in writing is to imagine a garrote.. but for a log of dough. Ignoring the metaphor, it was in fact extremely satisfying to divide up the dough this way.

I dug around in my recipe notebook and found the resulting recipe I used for this second round below. This is the notebook I use to iterate on recipes, which means it's mostly chicken scratch and shorthand (sorry, but not really):



Although the final result definitely looked cleaner, I found that if I didn't let the refrigerated dough fully come to room temperature before baking, the butter would separate from the filling. My sister also finally got fed up with me experimenting with sourdough and asked me to make a version that didn't use sourdough starter.



Back to basics

In ditching the sourdough, I decided to just find a recipe and iterate from there, since there are so many cinnamon roll recipes already on the web. I ended up starting with a recipe from The Woks of Life, since I liked how they figured out how to make a fluffy dough without needing to mess around with tangzhong. This satisfied both my fluffy bread and one-bowl-for-dough criteria. Starting from this base recipe, I made the following modifications, borrowed from my prior experimentation:

• Cream the butter and brown sugar together for the filling instead of just mixing everything together
• Add vanilla extract to the filling
• Use floss to divide the dough instead of a knife
• Roll the dough from the short side for maximum swirls
• Refrigerate overnight, and let the dough come to room temperature prior to baking.
• Use the same frosting recipe from the previous sourdough experiments

I wasn't terribly scientific about my modifications, so I honestly couldn't tell you what the difference was from the original recipe without making those tweaks. But I was pretty happy with the results, and like they say don't mess with a good thing:



The credit really goes to The Woks of Life for developing the base recipe, but if you'd like to use the variation in ingredients and technique that I use today, you can view the recipe here.