Serious Eats: Recipes
Fast Breads' Bottoms-Up Cinnamon-Caramel Pinwheels
As always with our Knead the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Fast Breads to give away this week. Enter the contest here.
The problem with cinnamon rolls is that you usually want them hot and fresh first thing in the morning, but a traditional dough needs time to rise. This means either you're going to be kneading dough at the crack of dawn or you're going to be munching cinnamon rolls for lunch.
One solution is to make the dough the night before and bake in the morning. This recipe from Fast Breads takes another approach—the dough is a biscuit recipe, so it doesn't need that rise time.
The resulting dough doesn't have the same chew as a traditional sweet bread. Instead, it's soft and fluffy like biscuits. It's an interesting idea and it gets your sweet rolls on the table in under an hour.
The resulting dough doesn't have the same chew as a traditional sweet bread. Instead, it's soft and fluffy like biscuits. It's an interesting idea and it gets your sweet rolls on the table in under an hour.
What Worked: This came together really quickly, as stated.
What Didn't: For my taste, this was too sweet. However, my other food testers absolutely loved them.
Suggested Tweaks: I'm not sure if the parchment paper lining was necessary. Next time I'd try it without the parchment, and maybe add some nuts to balance the sweetness.
Adapted from Fast Breads by Elinor Klivans. Copyright © 2010. Published by Chronicle Books. Available wherever books are sold. All Rights Reserved
About the author: Donna Currie has been cooking for fun and writing for pay since the days when typewritten articles traveled by snail mail. When she combined those talents in a food column for a newspaper in her area, she realized that writing about food is almost as much fun as eating. You can find her on her blog, Cookistry or follow her on Twitter at @dbcurrie or @cookistry.
