Cheap Bastid's Cinnamon Roll Debacle

It took the better part of an hour of mixing dough, mixing cinnamon and sugar, rolling dough into a “jelly roll” and baking to get the photogenic results of my cinnamon rolls.



And it only took one bite to come to the conclusion that something had gone fundamentally wrong. I’m still scratching my head over it but I think I’ve figured out what went wrong—for the next time.


If you’ve read any of my recent Cheap Bastid posts you’ll know that recently I went from baking biscuits to baking yeast risen pretzels. My most recent biscuit baking (Friday morning) was fantastic—everything worked and they were perfect. So I said to myself, “Self, there’s got to be a way to do cinnamon rolls with regular biscuit dough.”

Well, self was right. There are plenty of recipes and photos online about using ordinary baking powder biscuit dough to make cinnamon rolls. The techniques are by and large the same from recipe to recipe so I said to myself, “Self, let’s give it a try Sunday morning.”




It wasn’t that hard to do. The main thing was rolling out the dough, spreading some margarine down on the rolled dough and then covering it with a layer of cinnamon and brown sugar. They looked good. I even came up with a way of making my own powdered sugar in order to do the icing on top of the rolls.




Sounds pretty good doesn’t it. They looked good too. Looked good all slathered with cinnamon sugar. Looked good rolled up. Looked good in the pan going into the oven. And looked really good coming out of the oven.

Except for one thing.



They tasted crappy.

Now I’m sure that top foo-foo foodie chefs mess up often enough. They might even mess up spectacularly. I know I rarely make anything that I would consider to be a “perfect” dish. There’s always something I could do better. But this was a “crash and burn”. Let’s put it this way, I don’t think that cinnamon rolls are supposed to be crunchy.



So, what did I do wrong? Not much. I overbaked them. My mind was telling me golden brown when it should have been telling me “hint of color”. Golden brown is the color of cinnamon rolls that are fried like donuts. And by the time these got golden brown, they also got to the consistency of burned toast. You almost had to gnaw on them. So what I did wrong was baking them too long at too high a temperature. Easy enough.

So, I’ve got to try again. And I will. Maybe. Pretty soon. I think. Then I can write the recipe.

But the pictures turned out purty!

That's the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good, Eat Cheap. Be Grateful!