Today on The Stay At Home Chef
I'm showing you how to make The Best Cinnamon Rolls Ever.
There are hundreds of fantastic reviews on my recipe for the best homemade dinner rolls ever,
along with tons of questions on whether or not you can use the same recipe to make cinnamon rolls.
So I thought I'd make it easy for you guys and show you how to make my amazing cinnamon rolls today.
They really are the best.
You'll start out with 1 cup of warm milk.
I've just measured it out and popped it in the microwave for about 30 - 40 seconds.
You just want it to be warm to the touch like a baby's bathwater.
So we'll go ahead and pour this into our stand mixer,
and then we're going to add in 1 tablespoon of instant yeast,
2 tablespoons of sugar,
1 teaspoon of salt,
1 egg,
and 3 tablespoons of softened butter.
Now if you don't have a mixer, don't worry.
You can still make these.
They'll just require a little more hard labor and muscle.
You'll stir all the ingredients together in a bowl and then start adding in flour.
Once it gets too thick to stir then you start kneading by hand.
That's where you'll need the muscles.
But we're using our mixer today because I don't have a lot of muscles,
and we're going to start adding in 3 cups of all-purpose flour,
and you'll want to make sure you're using all-purpose flour for this and not self-rising flour or anything like that.
Now flour measurements in bread making are always an estimate.
It depends on a variety of factors like the size of the egg that you used,
how accurately you measured your liquid ingredients,
the weather,
there's just a lot of factors.
You're really just going to go by feel for this.
So we're going to start at mixing, and see if 3 cups was enough,
and if not we'll add a little bit more.
You'll want to keep it mixing until the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl.
See how it's almost cleaned the size of the bowl?
That's when we know it's time to check it.
You'll see that the dough doesn't stick to my hands,
but it's nice and tacky and soft,
and that's exactly the texture we're looking for:
sticky but not tacky.
So you want to be able to hold the dough ball like this.
If you need to add more flour go ahead and add more flour.
It doesn't matter, it's all just an estimate,
and you're going for texture, not exact measurements on the flour.
We're going to transfer this to a lightly greased mixing bowl
and turn it over so that some of the oil gets on all of it.
Then we'll cover it with the towel and let it rise for about 1 hour until it's doubled in size.
Once your dough has doubled in size it's time to prep the filling ingredients.
You'll need 1/2 cup of melted butter, as well as the cinnamon sugar mixture to sprinkle on top.
I like to start with 1 cup of brown sugar,
and then I add in 2 tablespoons of cinnamon and stir that together.
It's a little easier to stir them together rather than sprinkle them on separately.
Once you have that all ready it's time to roll out our dough.
So I'm going to take the dough out of the bowl and put it on a clean counter top,
just roll it out into a giant rectangle.
I like to do...oh about 12 inches wide,
maybe 18 inches long,
it's all just an estimate.
Then once you have it all rolled out it's time to pour on your melted butter and brush it out.
You may not use all of the butter if you don't feel like it,
or if you feel like it's too much that's fine,
it's just always nice to have extra in case you rolled yours a little bigger.
Then we're going to sprinkle on our cinnamon sugar mixture.
You want to make a nice even layer of the sugar.
Now it's time to roll up our dough.
You want to make sure you're rolling it fairly tightly.
The butter will smooth on out and squish out and that's fine.
It makes a little bit of a mess.
Now it's time to cut it into cinnamon rolls,
and for this I actually prefer using unflavored dental floss.
It works amazing wonders.
If you don't want to do that though or you don't have floss sitting around for some reason,
you can always just use a sharp serrated knife to cut them.
Just slide it under the edge,
wrap it around and pull it tight,
and it'll cut right through the dough.
Now we'll transfer all these sliced cinnamon rolls to a lightly greased 9x13 pan.
The end piece I make sure I put the cut side up so that it's nice and pretty.
Then just put them all in the pan.
You should get about 12.
I think I only got 11 today.
Whoops!
I do rows 3x4.
Cover and let these rise again for about 45 minutes until they're double in size,
and then you'll bake them in a 325 degree oven for about 12 - 14 minutes until they're just lightly browned on top.
While they're baking we'll go ahead and put together a quick cream cheese glaze to go on top,
and for that I have 4 ounces of cream cheese here in my bowl.
I'll add in 1/4 cup of salted softened butter,
and we'll whip this until it's nice and creamy.
Then we're going to whip in 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract, and whip that in real quick,
we just want a quick combine on that,
and then we're going to sweeten things up with 1 1/2 cups of powdered sugar.
Once that powdered sugar starts to combined with our butter and cream cheese,
we can go ahead and pour in a little bit of milk in order to thin it out and give it a more frosting light consistency.
You'll use between 1 and 2 tablespoons of milk,
and that's it.
Once our cinnamon rolls are out of the oven we'll go ahead and frost them up,
and just scoop the frosting on,
drizzle it over,
and spread it out as it melts from the heat of the cinnamon rolls.
You can enjoy them right away, hot and warm, which is how I personally love them best,
or you can cool them and store them in an airtight container.
They'll stay good for about 5 days unless you eat them all first,
which is much more likely to happen.
Thanks for watching.
I hope you enjoyed these cinnamon rolls as much as we do.
They are seriously the best we have ever had.
You can find the full written recipe in the video description,
as well as a link to the printable version.
Be sure to subscribe to my channel and check out the rest of my videos,
where you can find hundreds of restaurant quality recipes
you can easily make at home.
See you later.