Why I Only Make 4 Cinnamon Rolls

Did you ever eat too many cinnamon rolls because there was 12 rolls and only 2 of you? I've got the solution. Hi, I'm Gemma Stafford, a professional chef with over 20 years experience, and today I'm going to show you how to make a small batch of cinnamon rolls. Just 4 of them, perfectly soft, perfectly gooey, on the table in no time. No leftovers, no regrets. I've got some great cinnamon roll recipes on BiggerBolderBaking.com. This one is a little bit different, it's actually an enriched dough closer to a brioche dough so it makes a really buttery, soft, delicious dough. But it's only mini. So here I have some all-purpose flour, anytime I make any type of cinnamon rolls, I always like to use all-purpose flour, I don't need the extra gluten, the extra protein from bread flour. So just plain all-purpose flour is good. Into this I'm going to add in some instant yeast. If you've been watching a lot of Bigger Bolder Baking over the years, you know I exclusively use instant yeast because it can go straight into your flour just like any other ingredient, you don't have to think twice about it, and you don't have to activate it like you do active dried yeast. However, if you do use active dried yeast, I'm going to put a note on my website of how you can do that. In here I have some salt, not only adds flavor, but it strengthens dough so it's really important. And a little bit of sugar. In most of my cinnamon roll doughs, I actually have a very small amount of sugar. Because when you have the filling and all the other stuff, you don't often need too much. It's lovely, this is going to be nice and buttery. So speaking of that, here are our wet ingredients. Now the difference between a regular dough and enriched dough is that the liquid is often like rich ingredients, milk, butter, eggs, those kinds of things, and that's what you'll commonly see in a challah recipe and a brioche recipe. So here I have some milk, and I have some butter, melted, and I have an egg yolk. All very rich, very fatty, full of flavor. I'm going to whisk those together. A baker's tip is to have that liquid, that milk, slightly warmed, because it will activate the yeast. Sometimes what I do is I put cold butter into the cold milk, pop it into the microwave, and warm them both up at the same time. The reason you want to have it warm is because, think of yeast like a living thing, because it is a living thing, it needs warmth, it needs food, it needs love, all the things that we need as living things. So it has the sugar in there as food, it has the warm liquid in there to keep it warm and toasty, it has the love because we're going to take very good care of it. It also needs time. So here's the beauty about this dough, not only is it small batch, but you don't need any fancy equipment. So once you mix it together, you can do it with a spatula, I always like to use a big kind of a fork. Here's what I'm going to do, gather up my dough, it's a little bit sticky, but totally okay to handle, pop it onto my counter, get a little bit of flour, and give it a quick knead for around 5 minutes. Now if you wanted to put it on a machine you could, it is a small dough, so it might be hard for it to get traction, but honestly, just popping it onto the counter, giving it a quick knead also reminds you how to knead by hand, gives you a little bit of a workout. When I was young, and I mean like I was 12 or 13, when I made doughs in Ireland, I made them all by hand and I kneaded them by hand. Because my mum at some point told me that that's what they do in France, so I was determined that I was going to do the same thing in Wexford, Ireland. But you know what, it was good practice, I learned a lot. People often ask, is there a right way and a wrong way to knead? It's kind of hard to knead the wrong way. The one thing you don't want to do is rip the dough, remember we're taking care of it, it's a living thing. So you just want to work it in your hand, turn it over, push it into the counter, it's going to bounce back, it's getting nice and smooth, it's getting stronger. By doing this, it's developing the gluten. Doing the exact same job as it would have done on the machine, but you're going to do it by hand in just a few minutes. So there you go, what you'll end up with in the end is a nice, smooth, tighter ball than what you started with. Now is the proofing. Now to proof it, I'm going to pop it back into a bowl. I like to grease the bowl a little bit, so when it's proofing it can easily glide up the sides of the bowl and not have to struggle. Cover it nice and tight with cling wrap, remember, yeasted doughs love to be warm, and they don't like to get air on them because if it forms a skin, it can stop it from proofing. For me, I also like to put a little tea towel on top. I'm going to cover it up and I'm going to set it over to the side and let it proof. So an enriched dough does take longer to proof than a regular dough, they're a little bit more sluggish and it doesn't proof and grow that much, so I'm going to show you what that's going to look like when we come back. While our dough is proofing, we're going to get our cinnamon roll filling ready so it can kind of sit and firm up. Here I have some room temperature butter, just a little baby amount, because we're only making four rolls, which is the perfect amount for my family, because there's three in my family and then the baker gets an extra one, so that math works out. Cinnamon, a nice pinch of cinnamon, it's going to give us a lot of our flavor. Okay so sugar, this one is important, we want brown sugar, that has even more molasses, even more caramel flavor, already built in, super delicious. And lastly, salt. I also use salted butter to give you even more flavor. And then just combine those together, you don't even need an electric hand mixer, just do it in a little bowl by hand and kind of smush it together until it forms a paste. If you want to get this done in advance, you absolutely can, and just keep it out at room temperature so it's easy for you to spread, but this is what you're going for. Thick cinnamon butter paste, just like this. When everything is small batch, it's just so much faster to make, and you can do it all by hand. Lovely, so I'm just going to set this over to the side at room temperature and let's check to see if our dough has proofed. So I gave this dough around an hour and a half, it can even take up to two, just to be able to rise like this, it's super common with enriched doughs so don't worry about it at all. But this is looking good, it's nice and risen, smells really good. So I'm going to flour my surface and turn out my little dough. I often say when making rolls, don't flour your surface or just be light with it, but when you're making cinnamon rolls you do need to be able to move it around, so make sure you flour that surface. Now we are going to roll this dough out to around 5 inches by 15 inches. Five inches by 15 inches, that is 5 inches that way, a little bit, maybe I went a bit too far, bring it back down. And then 15 inches this way, kind of like a big long sausage-y log. There we go, that looks good. If you notice that your dough is pulling back too much, just give it a minute to relax, it's just the gluten pulling back, it just needs a moment to chill, then go back at it and roll it out. Now let me see, ruler, you always have to have a ruler on hand as a baker. That looks good. What do you think Joey? Great. Great? Lovely? Okay. So now it's time for our filling. Having the filling out at room temperature, make sure it's not melted, if it is pop it into the fridge because that will not help your cinnamon rolls, it wants to be nice and combined and kind of creamy, just like this. The easiest thing would be to use a butter knife, or even a little palette knife, to spread it. And just like with any standard cinnamon roll, we always say, spread it out almost to the edge, not fully, because you don't want all your filling to leak out, and you want a little bit of a protective barrier there. Try and get that filling as even as possible. You can see why I said it needs to be room temperature, because see the way it kind of moves the dough, so it needs to be nice and soft. So here's what we're going to do, we're actually going to roll the small side. So this is the 5 inches. Do a little twist, and roll. Make sure you're not leaving any gaps, because any gaps can kind of show up in your cinnamon rolls. So you want to just roll it up, pull your dough towards you. This is a very lovely, brioche doughs are such a lovely dough to handle and work with, so you shouldn't have any problem with this dough. Nice roly-poly, lovely. End on the seam. Once you roll up your dough, you're going to want to end up with something roughly around 6 inches, it might even go as far as 7, and then you're going to want to divide that evenly in four. You do not need to trim any ends, because those ends are going to go on the bottom, nobody's going to see them. Use a serrated knife, cut down the middle of your dough, and then cut each of those pieces in half, like so. One of my pet peeves, one of many, is when I see people online cutting cinnamon rolls with a chopping knife, and they go straight down through the dough. What you have to do, you don't have to do it, but you should do it, is use a serrated knife and carve. Serrated knives are for carving, and when you do that, you get this lovely, clean spiral, and not a mushed spiral. We have a little 6-inch cake pan, and we're going to pop in our cinnamon rolls. You see this bottom, don't worry about that, don't trim it, put it on the bottom, nobody's going to see it. And then our last one goes in. Pop them in, but give them each some space around them, because like any traditional cinnamon roll, yeasted one anyway, they are going to proof into each other, they're going to grow into each other, and then when they're in the oven, they're going to batch bake, which means they're going to bake into each other, and then we pull them apart. And that's what a traditional cinnamon roll does. We're going to cover them up with cling wrap again, cover them with a toasty towel, I will tell you that they will take some time to proof, because of the enriched dough, the sluggishness, but we're going to keep an eye on them, I don't want you to put them into the oven and make them go faster, because all the butter will come out. So we're going to be patient, we're going to set them over here, and let's make our cream cheese frosting. So for the cream cheese frosting, we just need a small amount of everything. Small amount of cream cheese, butter, vanilla, and powdered sugar. A secret when making this, especially when you're doing it by hand, make sure your cream cheese has been sitting out for like half an hour, you can even pop it into the microwave for a few seconds just to soften it, because you don't want any lumps, you want it to be nice and smooth, and cold cream cheese is notoriously lumpy. Here I have our butter, also look at this, nice and soft, room temperature, with our vanilla extract. Just with a little hand whisk, cream them until combined. If you see any lumps, make sure to get them out now before you add in the sugar, otherwise they're not going out of there. Okay, lovely. That's great. Now we're going to add in some powdered sugar, this has been sifted, we'll add in a little bit, do a little bit of stir, I'm kind of starting to regret my bowl size choices, but here we are. You slowly add in your powdered sugar, it's kind of easier to combine, but there you go, this is the consistency that we're looking for. And the nice thing about this recipe, it's the exact amount you need for a small batch of cinnamon rolls. None left over. So pop these in the fridge until the cinnamon rolls come out of the oven, and it can even be made in advance to save you some time. Here's a great tip to actually save you time and have fresh cinnamon rolls in the morning. When they're at this stage, pop them into the fridge, let them slowly develop and proof overnight and they'll get even more flavor. Take them out the next morning, proof them, bake them off. It gives them extra time, develops extra flavor, the texture gets even a little bit nicer, and just saves you time the next day. So they have proofed but I know they're not huge. They'll take around 90 minutes to get to this stage, it might take even a little bit longer, be careful not to zhuzh them up in the oven, all the butter will come out, but this is what we're going for. They will get bigger in the oven. As you can see if I touch them, they're soft, they're kind of springing back a little bit, the edges have rounded, that's a really good telltale sign when you want to check if a roll, cinnamon roll, a cut, kind of a yeasted biscuit or whatever, if they're ready, it kind of softens the edges, that's how you know when they're done. For my cinnamon rolls, I always love to just give them a bit of egg wash very carefully so they come out of the oven like really lovely and golden brown. That's it, this little tray is ready to go into the oven. Bake your little cinnamon rolls off at 375 degrees Fahrenheit, 190 degrees Celsius for roughly 20 minutes until they're a lovely golden brown. Now while they're in the oven, they don't take long, I'm going to answer some hotline questions. There's a lot of questions always around yeasted doughs and especially cinnamon rolls, especially when we get into the holiday season and everybody feels like making them. So can you make this dough overnight? Yes you can, you can make the brioche dough, bulk ferment that, you can roll out the cinnamon rolls, cut them, put them in the fridge overnight to save time the next day, extra time just like with sourdough, like with cookies, ice cream bases, the aging process yields you better flavor and better texture. So if you have the time, go for it, it also makes your life easier the next day. Next question, can I freeze them? I will tell you I'm a little bit hesitant to freeze any yeasted dough, frozen baked ones are not going to be as good as freshly baked, raw frozen dough for me never bakes up, proofs the same, so I would say bake them off fresh. Why are my rolls dry? Don't add too much flour into your recipe, when you're kneading the dough on the counter a little bit of flour to give it traction and make sure it doesn't stick, and then when you're rolling out the rectangle, not too much flour because it's all going to incorporate into your dough and you just don't need it. Okay that's it, those are great questions to make sure that you succeed in your cinnamon roll making. In no time at all your little cinnamon rolls will be coming out of the oven. They will have risen up, baked into each other and be lovely golden brown, and you'll see that butter sugar filling just bubbling up. With cinnamon rolls I always let them cool down for a few minutes, but I don't wait too long before adding on the cream cheese frosting. It's always a good idea to add your frosting on warm because it kind of soaks into the dough and really gets in there, rather than just sitting on top of your roll. I came up with this recipe because we're a small family, there's often times that I crave a lovely buttery cinnamon roll, but I'm not going to make a whole batch. This is perfect. Everybody gets one, there might be leftovers, probably won't be. This little recipe can be made with just a few ingredients, in no time at all, with no special equipment. And when the result is warm and buttery cinnamon rolls, fresh from your very own oven, well there's really nothing better than that. But remember just because this is a small batch of cinnamon rolls does not mean it's lacking on flavor or texture, everything is there. Remember you saw this video the next time you have a craving for cinnamon rolls. Thank you so much for watching, if you want to see more small batch recipes, I've got bread, I've got carrot cake, get comfy, there's loads more for you to check out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you back here again really soon.