How To Bake Cinnamon Rolls and Sticky Buns

I think that we should start off with the most potentially confusing aspect of this course: What exactly is the difference between a cinnamon roll and a sticky bun?

Don’t laugh. I know that sounds simple, but I thought it was rather confusing myself until I started doing the recipe research for this class. The reason that it’s confusing is that the two are very similar. In short, a sticky bun is a cinnamon roll that has been covered in sugary syrup rather than topped with icing.

The process for making cinnamon rolls and sticky buns is exactly the same until you get to the step of putting the sliced rolls into the baking pan. With cinnamon rolls you just go ahead and put the rolls in the pan. With sticky buns, you pour out a nice thick layer of syrupy sugar goo in the pan first and then nestle the rolls in.

Now that we’ve gotten that settled, let’s move on to the ingredients.

Ingredients: Cinnamon rolls and sticky buns are both traditionally made from yeast risen doughs. However, there is no reason that you can’t make them from a biscuit dough, especially if you go light on the leavening. I know that many of my readers cannot use yeast, so this lesson contains recipes for a yeast-risen dough and a baking-poweder risen dough.

Substitutions for Other Allergies
In fact, take a minute and pull up the two recipes in two separate tabs so that you can look back and forth between them. I’ve specially created these two recipes to try to give you as many substitution possibilities as I could. If you can’t use either one of the recipes as written, you should be able to pick and choose between the two recipes to create a custom recipe that works for you.

Let me explain in more detail. Both recipes include brown rice flour, salt, sugar and eggs. All of the other ingredients: milk, yeast, xanthan gum, guar gum, butter, etc. can be replaced with a substitute. The yeast-risen recipe will include one possible substitute and the biscuit recipe will include the other.

So, for example. The yeast-risen recipe calls for 1 Tbsp. of yeast while the biscuit recipe calls for 1 Tbsp. of baking powder. The yeast-risen recipe uses 10 oz. of milk + 4 oz. of water; the biscuit recipe uses 14 oz. of water. Here is a list of the possible substitutions to make this as easy as possible:

1 Tbsp yeast = 1 Tbsp baking powder
1 Tbsp xanthan gum = 1.5 Tbsp. guar gum
1.5 c. corn starch = 1.5 c tapioca starch
10 oz milk + 4 oz water = 14 oz. water
butter = shortening = coconut oil

A brief note if you need to make the butter/shortening substitutions. The amount of butter/shortening in the two recipes differs. I use between 2 and 4 oz of fat. Since the same weight of butter and shortening differ quite a bit in volume you can’t substitute Tbsp for Tbsp. However, the amount of fat in this recipe doesn’t have to be exact. In fact it doesn’t really matter if the fat is solid or liquid. If you choose to use a solid fat, then cut it into the dough. If the fat you choose is liquid, then you can add it in with the liquids.

Corn Free Notes
For those of you who are corn free, be sure to use tapioca starch and make your own baking powder. Baking powder is usually made with corn starch, but you can make your own with baking soda, cream of tartar and tapioca starch. See the note about this in the biscuit dough recipe.

Also, try using brown sugar to make the cream cheese icing. You won’t need nearly as much brown sugar as confectioner’s sugar, since the confectioner’s sugar contains a lot of corn starch. Just add the brown sugar to the cream cheese 1 Tbsp at a time until it is as sweet as you would like. (Note: I haven’t tested this – I’m just commenting on what I think will work and what I would do, or will do, when I test this)

The Secret Ingredient
I’ve made cinnamon rolls several times over the past seven years and it took me a long time to come up with a dough that I was truly satisfied with. I wanted the finished cinnamon bun to very tender and I found that to be very hard to achieve. Finally, I found the solution.

Potato starch.

Potato starch granules become very, very large when they come in contact with a liquid. These large potato starch cells in the dough help lighten the dough. If fact, if you replaced all of the corn or tapioca starch in these recipes with potato starch, you’d find that the texture of the cinnamon bun was somewhat reminiscent of cotton candy. Two tablespoons of potato starch was just the thing to take this cinnamon/sticky bun recipe from good to WOW!

(The incredible swelling potato starch cell is also the reason why you should not substitute potato starch for tapioca starch or corn starch. Tapioca and corn starch granules stay comparatively small when they come in contact with liquids.)

Tricks & Tips:
So, there are a couple of tricks and tips to making cinnamon rolls…or at least to making them without losing your mind. I’ll mention these again in the videos, but I’ll note them here as well.

Dealing with Runny Dough
First, if your dough seems too runny to work with after you mix it up, be sure to let it sit for 5 to 10 minutes. The dough will thicken up as the flours continue to absorb the liquids in the recipe.

Also, the biscuit dough in the video was still a bit to soft to work with. I went back and adjusted the flour amounts in the recipe, so the dough won’t be as soft as it looks in the video. Trust me, that’s a good thing =)

Never the less, if the dough seems to soft, let it rest before you add more flour. And rather than just adding flour, just knead the dough onto a floured surface until it gets to a texture that you think you can work with.

Rolling the Dough
Rolling the dough up in to a tube is often the hardest part of making cinnamon rolls. As you’ll see in the video, I cover my cutting board with aluminum foil, grease it, and then lay down one sheet of plastic wrap. I lay the dough on the plastic wrap and press it out into a rectangle with my fingers. Then I lift up the edge of the plastic wrap, which lifts up the edge of the dough – and then use the plastic wrap to roll the dough up into a tube. This is rather hard to describe in words; it will be much more clear in the videos. The aluminum foil only becomes important if you’r dough get’s off of the saran wrap. Then the foil keeps the dough from sticking so badly, and it makes for easy cleanup.

Equipment:
You don’t need any special equipment to make cinnamon rolls or sticky buns. You’ll need a baking dish (glass or metal), a mixing bowl, measuring cups and spoons, a pot for cooking the sticky bun syrup, and some mixing spoons. That’s it.

Alright, off to the kitchen with you. Watch the videos first and then make some cinnamon rolls. Your tastebuds will thank you.

Mary Frances

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