Bread Diary - Cinnamon Rolls

We're on to another installment of the bread diary! This is a much sweeter fare for today though. It's homemade cinnamon rolls! We've dabbled with cinnamon rolls before and shared them on the blog [pumpkin cinnamon rolls for Thanksgiving and birthday cinnamon rolls]. But we were a little more adventurous this last time when we made them and wanted to share these adventures in the newly minted bread diary on Whit's Kitchen! Have you seen the other bread diary posts? There were two sourdough bread entries - a Whitney one and a Patrick one.

We've made this cinnamon roll recipe before. It's Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Rolls and they are delicious. Last year when Patrick made them for my birthday we followed this "small batch" recipe that adapted Pioneer Woman's recipe and was on the kitchenMage blog. Basically that small batch recipe did the math to cut the recipe down to 1 pan of cinnamon rolls - Pioneer Woman's recipe makes 8 pans!

Well Christmas 2014 rolled around and we wanted to make lots of cinnamon rolls. Since they are so prep intensive (the dough rises and then the rolls rise) we wanted to make a few pans to share with friends and family and then some to freeze. We had decided that we wanted to make 4 pans. Unfortunately we started the cinnamon roll madness at around 8pm on Christmas Eve and in our frazzled state accidentally made the whole original Pioneer Woman recipe (for 8 pans) instead of halving that (which was our intention). I think we realized half way through our ideal that we were actually making 8 pans of cinnamon rolls.

Notice the clove stock reads "12:10" which would mean Merry Christmas!

While we were trying to figure out how many pans to make I was browsing Pioneer Woman's "Notes on Cinnamon Rolls" page which gives a lot of information and more details about prepping / baking / freezing the rolls. Certainly with an accidental eight pan cinnamon roll baking ordeal we knew that we would be freezing these. The original plan was to dabble in freezing but only one pan and not multiple!

After baking

So we baked all eight of the cinnamon roll pans. I hadn't bought enough cream cheese to make icing for all of them (because, ya know, wasn't thinking we'd make 8 pans). We iced the ones we would be sharing with family and friends over the holidays then put the rest in the freezer. We figured it would be best to make the icing on the day of eating the cinnamon rolls anyway.

Frosted and left for the neighbors as a thank you for feeding the cats!

Now I bet you're wondering how the frozen cinnamon rolls worked out, right?! I wanted to wait until we had tried them out of the freezer before sharing the post. My mom celebrated a birthday in January and I thought it would be nice to bring her a pan. They were a good first experiment - we forgot to set a timer and they got a little brown on the edges but still delicious!

Then it was on to my birthday a few weeks ago! Keeping with tradition (for two years now) we had cinnamon rolls! We took a pan of cinnamon rolls out of the freezer on Saturday with the intention of baking them Sunday morning. While they reheated in the oven Patrick made a cream cheese icing for them. What a special treat to have in the freezer!

Recipes

Pioneer Woman - Eight Batch Cinnamon Rolls

Cream Cheese Icing (we halved it)

Pioneer Woman has made several different variations of her cinnamon rolls - visit her Sweet Roll Central page to see them! I've got my eye on blueberry lemon rolls for the next adventure!

It's Always Caturday!

Adventuring in the clean towels

Do you fuss with homemade cinnamon rolls? If so have an easier one to share? Or do you just go with the Pillsbury canned ones which are hard to beat?!