Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

Stop already.....I have half a cup of coffee and NO cinnamon rolls! Do you deliver?

Those look lovely? Do you use a wire cutter? Floss? Knife?

Dang! I've started drooling!

Wow!!! :-)))

Thanks, all! I just used a dough cutter/scraper to cut them into rolls. They were kinda squished, but they filled out nicely after they rose. I cheated and used my bread machine on the dough cycle to make the dough (as if using a mixer isn’t easy enough, ha ha!). Here’s what they looked like when I first sliced them into rolls - squished! I’ll probably use a knife to cut them next time.

Gotta run out and get me a can! I can't wait for one rise led alone two!

I bake mine in muffin pans, and I do not put any icing/frosting on top - they are sweet enough without that, but I do add chopped pecans or walnuts, preferably pecans.

When I make my bread dough for cinnamon rolls, I layer butter in the dough, similar to the way you layer butter in croissants, but not as many folds. I cut mine with a knife.

I haven't made them in a while, but I used to make them regularly when I worked at a restaurant that had a cold kitchen (in San Francisco). They always sold out very quickly.

If I made them today, I would have to freeze most of them, and I have limited freezer space. I should probably just make a smaller batch, as that would be more manageable. They are definitely fun to make.

They look wonderful! I love cinnamon rolls but not wild about the wait either. Can't stand the ones in the can.

I don’t like the ones out of the can either, but I can certainly understand being impatient waiting for the yeast to do its thing! The dough cycle on my bread machine takes two hours, which includes the first rise. Then I formed them and put them in the fridge overnight. The second rise still took 90 minutes Sunday morning; they didn’t rise at all overnight in the fridge. They were worth the wait, though! :-)

I'm just waiting on it to cool down to get back into some baking. I do mine overnight the same way.

Thanks for the just cut picture. They don't look very squished! Mine get squished! I've been thinking I should chill before cutting. Anyway, yours are gorgeous, and I appreciate the further details. Thanks!

I will try that recipe, they look delicious. Very nice blue Dutch Oven in the background.

They look perfect and delicious! I will save this recipe to try.

I didn't know you could buy canned cinnamon rolls - that sounds very odd.

LOL! Lars, it's Pillsbury doughboy. At least, I’ve seen the ads all my life. In school “Cooking” class, they made us use blobs of some kind of canned rolls dough, maybe biscuit, and roll it in butter, sugar and cinnamon, and bake it. I was horrified! I mean, how hard is it to make actual cinnamon rolls from scratch? Or even cinnamon baking powder biscuits, so they wouldn't need to rise? I guess this was supposed to show you that you didn't have to buy the can of cinnamon rolls, to make canned cinnamon dough lumps, but wouldn't it be better to learn how to make them out of flour? I found hungry boys who, at age 13 will eat anything, in my next class, to palm them off on.

My mom used to make the Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for my brothers for breakfast before school. I didn’t like them, so she‘d make me Cream of Wheat each morning. I think the convenience of canned rolls and biscuits probably appealed to working moms and dads who felt they were a bit more ”homemade” than Eggo waffles or cold cereal.

plllog, I think I made those in home ec. also! We flattened the biscuit dough and wrapped it around a marshmallow. Then rolled the ball in melted butter and in the cinnamon sugar. When they baked, the marshmallow would melt leaving gooey goodness inside each ”roll”. That was the first thing we learned to cook in that class, before moving up to French Toast.

My objection to the can was specifically for "cooking" class. No judgment on busy moms!

Lovemycorgi, that's much fancier than what we did. No flattening. No marshmallow. The butter inhibited the rise. The result was really disgusting. Maybe it was an "easy" version of the ones you made. It didn't look like food to me, though we had to taste them. UGH.

Many years a go I did once make donuts from Pillsbury rolls in a can. They were deepfried and not too bad if you ate them right away. I can't imagine that canned cinnamon rolls would be to my liking.

lovemycorgi, I did copy your recipe and would like to try it sometime. However, I have watched the 'baker' at Cinnabon make the rolls and did not see her pour cream over the top. She did however, use a very generous amount of "butter" on the inside. It is unusual tho' and plan to give that a try since I like gooey cinnamon rolls.... gooier the better.

Lars, I'm with you on adding in the pecans.

I was not allowed to take Home Ec when I was in 9th grade (which was Junior High when I was in school), and so maybe I did not miss out on too much. I did want to learn how to use a sewing machine, however, and I did not teach myself how to do that until I was 22. I did attend 4-H cooking classes when I was in 5th & 6th grades, but that was extracurricular. We did not use anything canned in 4-H cooking, except for tomatoes and sweetened condensed milk, that I can remember.

I’m pretty sure they don’t pour anything over the rolls at Cinnabon - I watched them through the window many years ago also! And yeah, I remember thinking the ”butter” was awfully yellow…it looked more like margarine or some kind of spread. But the cream poured over does make these rolls extra gooey! I think she has a youtube video if anyone is interested in the step by step process.

Elizabeth, thank you! - the blue dutch oven is a Staub, and was a Mother’s Day gift from my husband and college kids. They gave me a pretty apron that matches also. They clearly like having me in the kitchen, lol!

Lars, I’ve never made croissants, but would like to try sometime. When I make homemade biscuits, I fold the dough over multiple times (roll, fold over, roll again, fold over, etc), but the butter is already cut into the dough.

Ooo delicious looking!

Clarification, in case some misunderstood: When I said making cinnamon rolls was easy, I was referring to basic if you can make a yeast bread, you can make 'em type. Lovemycorgi's are, like, three or four levels higher. :)

Lol, plllog, they actually are pretty easy, just terribly time consuming! Working with yeast can be daunting, it was for me when I first started making yeasted breads several years ago, well into my adult-hood. Now the only thing scary about it is the amount of time I have to dedicate to making these homemade treats.

Lars, why weren’t you allowed to take Home Ec? I took it in 9th grade which was in the 80’s. They call it something else nowadays, my sons took it and enjoyed doing their cooking projects at home, making videos of their experiences to submit for grading. They made homemade pizza, from scratch cakes, stir-frys… classes have come a long way since canned biscuits and scrambled eggs, that’s for sure!

The recipe at the top of this thread sounds good and similar to ones I have tried in the past.

King Arthur Flour's Recipe of the Year is absoutely outstanding, squishy-good, and rich with cinnamon flavor. They hold well for a few days; they also freeze well and taste freshly-baked. It is well worth a try, and the instructions are so good even a new baker could make them.

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/perfectly-pillowy-cinnamon-rolls-recipe

LMC, those look delicious. I make cinnamon rolls regularly for my elderly mother, but I've never poured anything over top, I'll have to try that. She doesn't like frosting/icing on her cinnamon rolls, neither do I, so maybe the cream will keep the rolls moister.

Mine are good, I use Grandma's recipe because that's what Mother likes, but without frosting the cream might be good. I just use a knife for cutting, but mine get a bit "squished" and I have to make them round. Somehow, though, they always end up square. They also have no "sticky" stuff on the bottom, does the cream do that at all?

Alice, King Arthur hasn't steered me wrong yet, any of their recipes I've tried have been good.

Canned cinnamon rolls? Not for me, and I don't like canned biscuits either, they have a weird "fake" flavor, IMO. My granddaughter, Madi, loves both of those things, but she's 9. She puts the cinnamon rolls in the waffle iron and makes "waffles", which she then drizzles with the icing you get in the roll of dough. My girls were in Girl Scouts and they used to take pieces of canned biscuit dough, wrap it around a stick and cook it over the campfire. I didn't like those either, LOL.

I took Home Ec in 9th grade too, but that was 1969! No boys were allowed. Girls didn't take shop class either. In 1972 Title 9 passed. In 1973, when I was a senior, my Dad threatened to sue the school if they didn't let me take wood shop. He thought it would give us something to do together. The shop teacher quit because he would not teach a girl. His replacement tolerated me. The first semester I was the only girl. By the second semester of that year there were 9 girls in wood shop and 3 in auto shop. A couple of boys took Home Ec too, but they said it was because there was food and girls, LOL.

Annie

annie1992, yes, the cream adds some gooey-ness to the bottom of the rolls as it mixes in with the cinnamon sugar. It’s so good! I always use cream cheese icing with cinnamon rolls.

So fortunate the times have changed to ”allow” boys and girls to take whatever classes they’re interested in. I graduated high school in the late 80s, and took drafting all four years…my dad thought it would be a good precursor to my engineering studies in college. I was the only female in class, but thankfully found my teacher to be very supportive. My boys took their cooking classes in high school because of ”food and girls” too, lol, but ended up really enjoying it and learning some very useful skills in the process!

back in jr high we were on a semester system [late 60s] ... everyone got a semester of shop and a semester of home ec ....

Dave, we had neither shop nor home ec in Jr. High. I went to a 3 room country school until high school, which started in 9th grade. So we had Kindergarten/First/Second grade in one room with Mrs. Stevens. Third/Fourth/Fifth was in another room with Mrs. Lane and she had a paddle. Sixth/Seventh/Eighth was Mrs. Wheatlake who was also the principal. No gym, no cafeteria, no shop or home ec. Also no art or music. There were 10 people in my 8th grade class and I was related to 3 of them, LOL. I was the "best reader" so my job was to help another student with his reading. He had classic dyslexia symptoms, reading "was" for "saw", but we didn't have Special Education classes or a teacher for that. I'm not sure we knew what dyslexia was back then anyway. Oh, and we had no sports teams either, we just had "school".

Annie

Lovemycorgi, when I was in the 9th grade, it was in the 1960s in rural central Texas. All the boys were forced to take Vocational Agriculture (to teach them how to be farmers), and all the girls were forced to take Home Ec. I asked the prinicipal if I could take Home Ec instead of Ag, and he told me that I would need a signed note from my father (not my mother) in order to do this. My father absolutely refused, as he wanted me to learn farming and did not want me to learn sewing. He had very strict gender rules. Of course, once I was 18 and left home, his rules no longer applied to me.

I went to a high school in the next town, which was 7 miles away, and it had a population of 35,000 and therefore was not completely rural - it has 82,000 people now - and I had more choices in the 10-12 grades. Back then 9th grade was considered junior high, and at the rural school, boys were expected to take at least two years of agriculture, although it was offered also in the 11th and 12th grades.

I don’t do any yeast cookery but DS’s girlfriend made these for DD’s wedding brunch. https://www.ambitiouskitchen.com/best-cinnamon-rolls/ They were delicious. What’s more the dear girl had an emergency appendectomy a few days before the wedding but still produced the goods.

Here's a batch of sloppy cinnamon rolls I made using the recipe that the OP posted:

As you can see, they are not even square and have odd angles - this is because I did not roll out the dough and only stretched it. The two on opposite corners are from the ends of the roll - I refuse to discard the ends and bake them even if they are irregular. I think they are slightly better because of the other ones are too sweet, even though I reduced the sugar in the filling by 25%.

In the past, as I have said, I made the dough by layering in the butter like croissant dough, but I decided to give this recipe a try, since it is much simpler. I did add a cup of chopped walnuts to the filling, however.

The main problem I had with this recipe was that the dough was way too sticky and soft, and it stretched out before I could roll it out. I did substitute reconstituted powdered heavy cream for the milk in the recipe, as cream upsets my stomach less than milk. Also, I made a simple powdered sugar icing also with cream instead of milk + vanilla. I would not have made the icing except that Kevin wanted it.

I used unsalted butter in the recipe - there was plenty of salt in the dough already.

The rolls are a bit wet (even without the cream added before baking), and so I had to store them in the refrigerator in an airtight container. Fortunately I have a 9x9" plastic container.

I’ve never made them from scratch, mainly because I’d never go through a whole batch and scaling down seems like a lot of effort for just a few buns. Still, you’d never find a ”can” of cinnamon rills in my fridge. Never!

I've made them from scratch a few times and they were fine, but I really don't like them if the dough seems like bread dough. I haven't had one for probably 30 years, but I still recall the pillowy soft, delicate dough of a Cinnabon. That's what I want them to turn out like. I don't need to make any sweets but if I wanted to make cinnamon rolls, I probably would look for a Cinnabon copy cat recipe. Not sure what makes a yeast dough so soft and delicate like they are.

The recipe I made did turn out pillowy soft, like Cinnabon, but that is not what I prefer - I like for them to be more like croissants, which is how I've made them in the past.

The eggs, butter, and milk/cream in the yeast dough are what makes it so soft. Brioche dough is similar but has even more egg in it.

Thanks, Lars, good to know. I looked up copycat Cinnabon recipes and apparently you pour heavy cream over them before baking...that might be too decadent for me. But next time I want to make cinnamon rolls, I'll try this recipe.

FOAS, I think I see that can peeking out from the drawer, LOL. Kind of like "find Waldo", but it's "find the dough boy"!

Lars, those look just fine to me, we should have baked cinnamon rolls while you were here to give me tips!

Annie

I wasn't sure what brand of canned cinnamon rolls FOAS has, but it appears to be Pillsbury Grands! Supposedly, you can pour cream on these also, if you want them to be gooey - I do not!

Annie, it would have been fun to make cinnamon rolls with you - I think they are more fun when two people are making them - mainly for the camaraderie. For me, the part I have trouble with is rolling the dough tightly before cutting the roll into discs. When I made them in the restaurant, I would make six dozen at a time and used three muffin pans that held 24 each. I made the discs smaller to fit in the muffin pans. Because of all the butter in the dough, they did not stick to the pans, but for the ones I made last week, I lined the 9x13 pan with parchment, partly because it is an old pan and is no longer non-stick!

Oh Annie you caught me! ☺️

Lars - Thanks for mentioning the cream on these. I will definitely try next time as my daughter leans towards underbaking because she likes them soft.

Squished rolls. I have seen instructions to avoid squished rolls. You cut them with sewing thread. Using about 12 inches of thread, slide the thread under the rolled up dough where you want to cut,.Then just cross the thread across the top of the roll, pulling the ends across the top of the roll by switching the end from your right hand into your left hand, and the left hand thread into your right hand. Slowly pull the ends until the loop you have formed has cut through the rolled up dough.

I know the same trick using dental floss, which is slicker. I haven't mastered it, and still get squished, just multidirectional squished. So, I got an oversized cheese harp wire cutter for the purpose, but haven't had a chance to try it out.