Wednesday Window Shopping: Southern Plate's CinnaBuns

Some people enjoy window shopping for clothes in their spare time.  I enjoy window shopping for recipes.  I will spend hours on a Saturday perusing websites for recipes that look tasty and easy to prepare.  I have a folder in my favorites just for recipes and I think I have about 80 different recipes saved.  I save the recipes with the idea that one day I will try them out, but I never do, until now.  I will try out one recipe a week and share with you if it is a success or a failure and if it is worth trying.

Our inaugural recipe comes from Christy Jordan's site Southern Plate.  I discovered this site a few months ago and I love her recipes.  This recipe for homemade CinnaBuns looked so mouthwatering, I couldn't wait to try it.  You can find the actual recipe here. I am just going to post pictures and share my experience.

The use of frozen bread dough really makes the cinnamon rolls easy to make.  You do have to plan ahead to make these rolls though.  It is well worth the effort. I recommend surprising your loved ones with these cinnamon rolls one weekend. They will sing your praises for the rest of the week.

One of pros of this recipe is that it doesn't require many ingredients.  The only item I had to buy was the frozen bread dough.




It took me over an hour to thaw the bread out.  Now for some reason I do not have rolling pin. I need to add one to my shopping list.  But I remembered my mom using a glass to roll out dough when she would make homemade biscuits, so I improvised.  I used a glass vase.



I felt like I got a pretty good arm work out rolling out the dough.  My theory is that I burned enough calories rolling the dough to not feel guilty eating the cinnamon rolls.



I misread the recipe and melted the whole stick of butter. You only need to melt half a stick of butter.  Brush the dough with the butter.




Hmm, brown sugar and cinnamon.



The dough was sticky so I did have a little bit of difficulty with rolling it into a log.  But I finally got the hang of it.





When I tried cutting the slices, it kept trying to come unrolled so I ended rolling them again after they were cut.





Now at this point you're supposed to place it in a warm place and let the dough rise or you can place in the refrigerator overnight. I prepped the night before so I placed in the refrigerator with the understanding that I would have to get up an hour before I wanted to cook the rolls to allow the rising to continue.  This is what it looked like the next morning.



Not too much differnce in the size. To allow it to to continue rising. I turned the oven on to the lowest setting and turned it off just as it started to get warm and left the rolls in the oven for about an hour.


I baked according to directions and though they don't look perfect, they do look yummy.



I started off only icing half the rolls just in case we didn't like the cream cheese icing.



They turned out as delicious as Christy promised.  Even though they are a little more time consuming than the ones you bake out of the can, I will never go back to the canned ones.  In my opinion these tastes so much better. The canned ones are always too rich for me.  These are the perfect level of sweetness.  Michael really enjoyed the cinnamon rolls too. We had to stop ourselves from finishing them off that morning.

I give this recipe a rating of 5 stars!