Have you ever been personally victimized by food?

In the words of my roommate, “fall starts when Starbucks starts their pumpkin spice season.”

Which isn’t an untrue statement. Why not jump on that bandwagon and buy into the pumpkin spice clout?

After finding a can of pumpkin that I impulse bought last year, I decided to try making pumpkin spice cinnamon rolls, using the recipe from Bravetart for the pumpkin spice variation of Stella Parks’ one-bowl overnight cinnamon rolls.

However, this was not just a simple try at a new recipe.

This was a story about revenge.

Why Cinnamon Rolls?: A Story of Personal Trauma

To give some context, I am not new to cinnamon rolls.

The first time I tried making cinnamon rolls was back in 2016 and it was so awful that I never tried it again. Until today.

To paint the scene, this was junior year, fall semester, dead week, the week before finals. I was in a baking class and this week’s assignment was to make something with yeast–naturally, I chose cinnamon rolls. I thought Cinnabon was pretty dope.

Anyway, I found a nice recipe on Allrecipes and got to work. I first proofed the yeast in some warm milk but noticed there were no bubbles but figured that wasn’t an issue (Red Flag #1) I did not have a stand mixer so I remember making the dough and kneading it by hand. I had no idea how I would knead a ball of dough that looked like below.

Y’all, this thing was not able to kneaded. It was physically impossible to knead this “dough”.

I could press my upper body weight into this dough ball and it would not give–that’s how stiff this ball was. Ignoring Red Flag #2, I resorted to slamming this dough into the counter a couple of times before letting it rest in a bowl for the first rise (1.5 hours)

So it did not rise. Again, I chose to press on past Red Flag #3.

Using a Hydroflask as a makeshift rolling pin, I rolled the dough to a makeshift rectangle but the gluten in the dough was so tense that the dough kept shrinking back into itself…almost like I didn’t knead it well (Red Flag #4) What followed was an intense period of fighting with this dough for 45 minutes with a Hydroflask rolling pin.

I was Sisyphus and this dough was my eternal boulder.

The process was tedious and so long that it caught the attention of one of my roommates who was staying up that night to study for a math exam and came over to say, “If I were in hell, I’d be doing what you’re doing now.”

For context, time check, as noted here was at 1:54 AM.

Eventually, after giving up, I pressed forward (against my better judgement) and spread the filling and rolled it up into a large log that cut into 14 pieces and placed it into a baking pan, saran wrapped, for a second rise.

A half day later, it looked exactly the same. I popped the rolls in the oven and hoped for the best.

So, the best did not come.

As you can see in the photo below, these rolls did not spread or rise at all. In fact, it was a chore, trying to physically remove a cinnamon roll from the pan. I had to pry and yank it out with a spatula.

So this roll was so rock solid that it hurt my teeth when I tried to bite into it. Resolving to put this dish out of its rock-hard misery, I tossed the rest of its contents in the trash. No need to inflict that sort of sad, toothache-related pain onto people.

It was that day when I realize that the line I would never cross for baking was cinnamon rolls.

Six Years Later: A Story of Redemption?

Fast forward to 2022, after undergoing some Claire Saffitz-themed therapy to overcome my yeast-associated trauma (making her brioche-based recipes), I reached an adequate enough mental state to give cinnamon rolls another try.

I was excited to make this but with the given caveat that if this turned out to be a bust again aka 2016-disaster style, I will hurl my failure at the nearest wall.

In other words, I was in a good mental place, going into this.

So, like all good ideas, dessert inspiration/motivation hits me best between the hours of 10PM – 2AM. I kicked it off by making quick work of blending some cream cheese together with some powder sugar in a stand mixer until reached the characteristic icing consistency. After briefly feeling giddy over the fact that I didn’t have to clean my stand mixer bowl in-between, I dumped in my filling ingredients, creaming the butter with brown sugar and spices until it became light brown and lighter in texture. I then folded in 6 oz of pumpkin puree.

So, this is where I hit my first potential snag. Upon the addition of the pumpkin, this filling was really wet, with some traces of pumpkin liquid here in there. It also did not look all that great. In the words of a roommate who gave it a passing glance, “Oh wow! That looks…gross.”

I’ll let your imagination speak for itself on what this looks like.

Moving on, I started making the dough, putting the dry ingredients in the bowl and melting some butter on the stove before mixing it in with some milk and pumpkin puree. I let the wet mixture cool to around 88F before adding it with the dry ingredients and mixing it in until it became a shaggy dough. As I was mixing the wet ingredients in, yeast-associated paranoia of dead yeast came up for me again but I had confidence that the yeast was alive when I noticed some CO2 bubbles emerging from the dough as I stirred. This was a good sign. Then, I attached the dough hook and let the stand mixer knead it on low for the next 25 minutes, resulting in a soft and elastic looking dough, with a somewhat tacky feel.

Stella mentions that a dough is adequately kneaded enough when it passes the windowpane test. When I took my dough out of the standmixer, wasn’t quite elastic enough to pass the test when I stretched it. It was also around 12:30AM and I really didn’t want to keep stand mixer going this late at night if I didn’t have to. After hand kneading the dough for the next 1o minutes, I said, “good enough” and moved onto proofing it for the next 90 minutes. After taking a nap on the couch, I woke up to find my dough expanded twice the size.

This dough was pretty easy to work and roll out to a 13″ x 13″ square in a matter of minutes. It was a bit airy so I noticed that I was pushing out air bubbles as I was rolling it out. In hindsight, I probably should have punched the dough to expel any air out before rolling. However, much to my pleasant surprise, this was nothing like last time, where I spent a good 45 minutes trying to force the dough to roll/stretch to the same size.

I then spread the filling across the dough and sprinkled some toasted pecans on top. Then it came to the point of rolling the dough up. So this is where the wetness of the mixture posed an issue. For a brief timecheck, it’s around 2:15 in the morning at this part and I am feeling…not great. The dough feels so soft and fragile and as I’m rolling it up, there’s gross looking pumpkin mixture bursting at the seams and it is getting everywhere. I am really glad that this mixture smells and tastes great, otherwise my mind would be trying to form other ideas about it at this point. Through some careful maneuvering of dragging my cinnamon roll log across my workspace, I ended up successfully getting it into a log like position, seam down, at the expense of smearing pumpkin mixture everywhere in my general vicinity. I won’t be showing a picture of that here because it was gross.

Then came the next hurdle of cutting up my rolls. So, typically, to prevent squishing your rolls, you don’t want to use a knife to cut your rolls, you need twine or unflavored dental floss.

I had neither.

So I used what was most available to me.

It took a bit of work to shimmy the ribbon underneath the roll and cut it. Because the filling was so wet, some of the filling squeezed out from the roll as I cut it through with the ribbon. Since the ribbon was fatter than twine/floss, it wasn’t as “sharp” so it squeezed the roll a bit more but I was able to adequately slice up 10 rolls, placing 7 in one 9″ x 13″ pan and 3 in a smaller 8″ x 8″ pan. I called it a day after covering both pans with foil and placing it in the fridge.

I didn’t know what to expect from the second rise so I was a bit disappointed to see that the shape of these rolls did not seem to change much at all after twelve hours rest. Alas, I pressed on with both pans and baked them. I kept them covered for about 45 minutes (though in hindsight, I think I could’ve baked them for less as I was handling darker colored pans) and then uncovered for 15 minutes.

It smelled delightful and the heat ended helping the rolls expand even more while it was baking. Though clearly some rolls were bigger than others and filling was threatening to spill out of the spiral rolls, this is where cream cheese icing saves the day–by covering the rolls with the icing, it was harder to see the awkward/deformed parts of the cinnamon rolls.

Overall, it turned out pretty good, despite being a tad overbaked and having brown or very dark brown bottoms. I could have baked this dish for less time, or at least for 30 minutes covered and 15 minutes uncovered. However, I thought it was a decent dish and the cream cheese icing wasn’t too sweet, which I appreciated. I could taste the pumpkin and the spices, which made me think of fall/Thanksgiving. The texture was also soft and edible and not solid rock hard like last time. Yet, for the amount of work I put into it, I realized that I didn’t actually like cinnamon rolls all too much, especially considering the fuss work that went into it.

I think I’ll stick with cinnamon rolls at Cinnabon from now on.

…

I don’t think I’ll make cinnamon rolls again.