Sourdough Stories, Chapter 12: Cinnamon Rolls

I wanted to use some of my starter to make cinnamon rolls for Easter breakfast.  But not just any cinnamon rolls...AmyCakes cinnamon rolls.  Our friend Amy owned a bakery here in town up until a couple years ago when she decided to take a step back & focus on her family.  She's been sharing her recipes and tips on her website, including videos, which are so helpful and all of her baked goods are DELICIOUS (I took second place in an office-wide bake-off last year with her amazing coconut cupcakes.) I asked if she'd ever tried to make a sourdough version of her famous, award-winning cinnamon rolls, and she said she hadn't!  So I decided to take a stab at it.

I started with her mini-cinnamon roll recipe as my base, and read online you can convert any recipe to a sourdough version by replacing 1 packet of instant yeast with 1 cup of starter, and then subtract 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of water from the recipe, and then allow for double the rise times.

Y'all...WHEN OH WHEN am I going to learn that I need to use happy, fed, ACTIVE AND BUBBLY starter in my recipes?  Discard is fine for quick breads, but these are YEAST CINNAMON ROLLS.  But did I use fed starter? NOPE.  I gave this dough some starving, aggro Mandough and he just sat there and refused to rise.  Amy's recipe notes it should take about an hour for the dough to bulk rise.

This lump of pastry sat on my counter for 8 hours and barely grew at all.

*deep breaths* Okay...okay....fine.  This will be FINE, my inner narrative told me.  I prepped the brown sugar filling, sat out some butter to soften, and then popped the dough in the fridge to chill overnight.  I also don't have Instant Clearjel, which is one of Amy's secret ingredients for beautiful, stable, moist pastries & breads.  But, I figured I could manage without.

I woke up at 6am to finish prepping the cinnamon rolls.  The dough was nice and stretchy and rolled out easily. Aha! I said to myself (silently, because I was alone in the kitchen, everyone else was sleeping, and I'm not a crazy person), maybe this is still totally fine.

Next, I was supposed to spread a flour + clearjel + butter mixture across the dough.  BUT...I don't have Clearjel, and mixing butter w/just flour seemed weird.  So...I attempted to spread softened butter on the dough.  In little pats.  That then didn't actually want to spread around, so I was trying to smear it with my fingers.  This technique was moderately successful.

Now we add the brown sugar + cinnamon mix.  But...I think I made too much.  Not wanting to be wasteful, I did my best to use it all up, pressing it onto the dough + butter.  

Then it was time to roll it up into a giant snake, score it...

And cut it into 12 rounds, which were placed in a 9x13 pan. After brushing the tops with butter....I'm supposed to let it "rise" again for an hour.  During this hour, I had some coffee, did a crossword, played some SWGOH, watched my kid open his Easter basket...  The cinnamon rolls, meanwhile....did nothing.

At 7:30am, these went into the oven with a little prayer that they would be delicious and somehow magically poof up in the oven.  And they did, a little.  Nowhere near as gorgeous as Amy's, but given that we usually just have canned cinnamon rolls, they still felt pretty special.

To me & The Hubs, anyway.  To my son, who is 7, has no filter and zero appreciation for the effort it takes to MAKE FOOD FROM SCRATCH (or "scrap" as he would say)... that young man, who I birthed into existence, decided these were "yucky" and refused to eat them (at first).

But after 4-5 times of him calling them YUCKY at the top of his lungs...I took him aside into the bedroom to have a Heart Talk.

I told him that I had gotten up very early to make this special breakfast. I showed him the pictures on my phone (the same ones shown above), and talked with him about the process.  I told him it was hard and took extra time, but I did it because I love to make food for him and Daddy.  I asked him how he would feel if he spent a lot of time working hard on an art or science project at school, and then brought it home and I said it was "yucky" or "ugly".  He looked at me with big eyes and said, "Sad".  I said, "yes, it makes Mommy sad when you say the food I made is yucky, and hurts my heart".  He gave me a big hug and a kiss, and while it still took some prodding, he finished his cinnamon roll. We'll call that a win.

I will say...something about the way these turned out made them possibly tastier as leftovers? My best guess is that the excess brown sugar+cinnamon made them a touch too sweet that first day right after baking, BUT, when they're reheated in the microwave for 20-30 seconds, that excess brown sugar became nice and crunchy....sort of like the topping on a Panera Cinnamon Crunch bagel (which, coincidentally, is my FAVORITE bagel from Panera).  

I definitely plan to attempt these again with more active starter; I might also do a little less of the filling, and add a touch of vanilla to the glaze, as it's not in the original recipe and I really like how vanilla rounds out a powdered sugar glaze.