Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

It seems that Peichi had decided that I wasn’t allowed to make another batch of shortbread cookies. She considered last weekend’s batch a tad bit salty and buttery. Of course they were, I made them that way. Silly gal… I miss rich food once in a while.

Anyways, Saturday morning we had a little discussion as to what I could make and cinnamon rolls were the winner. Given we have a lack of major baking supplies, little oven space and I’m a lazy baker, I made a 1/3 recipe of The Rural Route 2 Cookbook’s Homemade Cinnamon Rolls.

While living here in Linkou, I’ve taken to preparing my baking supplies by weight than straight volume measurements. Therefore, it seems that getting repeatable results are much easier. You can check out  Conversions for U.S. and Metric and Useful weight conversions for additional help with standard to metric conversions.

Since you can catch the full recipe at the author’s site, here’s the 1/3 portion that I worked with. The recipe itself is pretty easy to work with through basic mixing of all ingredients and two raisings before baking.

Dough

• 157 g warm water
• 1 1/3t yeast
• 38 g sugar
• 1/3 t salt
• 24 g canola oil
• 260 g flour

Filling

• 28 g butter
• 38 g sugar
• cinnamon powder
  • I had very little cinnamon powder, so I used these as well
  • ginger powder
  • pumpkin spice

Directions

1. Mix water and yeast
2. Add in sugar and salt
3. Knead in oil and 1/3 of flour
4. Knead in rest of flour, 1/3 at a time
5. Let dough raise for 20 minutes
6. Clean up mess and wash dishes
7. Warm, but not melt the butter for the filling
8. Mix in the sugar
9. Add in spices to your taste
   • Though I thought I added enough spice to make my filling dark, once spread on the dough, I ended up adding more spices.
10. Roll out the dough into a rectangle
11. Spread the filling onto the dough
12. Slice the dough into 1.5 ” or 4 cm slices
13. Roll the dough slices up into buns
14. Place rolled buns loosely into baking dish
    • My first baking dish was too tight with 5 buns, 4 buns would’ve had more room to puff themselves up in.
15. Let the rolled buns raise for another 45 minutes
16. Clean up and wash the rest of your dishes
17. Heat the oven to 350 F or 175 C
18. Bake the rolls for about 25 minutes or pleasantly browned on top

While these buns aren’t ooey and gooey like Auntie ‘Ems, they’re still pretty darn better tasting to my Western senses than the locally bought sponge cakes.

Next time, I’m thinking to toss fresh sliced mangos and nuts into the filling.

Thanks Rural Route 2 for the recipe.

Related Posts

• A Taste of Life in Taiwan
• For Sale: 2009 Bike Day Giant LTD
• Biking Taiwan: Taoyuan and Hsinchu Coast
• Life in Taiwan: Week of May 24, 2010
• Michael 0 Linkou 1 – Pothole Crash