Cooking Kitten: Cinnamon Roll Heaven

I spent three and a half hours today creating blueberry cinnamon rolls from a recipe I found on Pinterest.com. Was it worth all the effort? ABSOLUTELY! I have to admit that I needed to really get my motivation in line with my desire for cinnamon roll goodness though. I have had all the ingredients ready to go for almost a whole week now but after reading the recipe on http://www.beantownbaker.com/2011/08/blueberry-cinnamon-rolls.html I was really intimidated by the time commitment considering my current trend toward having contractions just as soon as I get started doing something time consuming and then I have to down a bunch of water and go lay down. Today though, I decided that the blueberries wouldn't wait another day and got started on them rolls very first thing in the morning. I think I documented these better than I have anything else up to this point so I really hope you enjoy them too! Oh and a special thanks to Beantownbaker.com for my complete cut and paste of your recipe to my page. Here it is ladies and gents!

Ingredients (makes 24)

For the Dough

2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup sugar
2 1/4 tsp active dry yeast
4 cup flour
1/2 cup flour
1/2 heaping tsp baking powder
1/2 scant tsp baking soda
1/2 tbsp salt

For the Blueberry Filling

1 pint blueberries
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 teaspoons cornstarch
2-3 teaspoons lemon juice
3/4 cup water

Additional Blueberries for Sprinkling

1 pint blueberries
2 Tbsp sugar
4 Tbsp cinnamon
2 Tbsp flour
1 batch Cream Cheese Frosting (I used a can of cream cheese frosting from the store because I had it on hand)

Instructions

For the Blueberry Filling

In a small saucepan, combine 1 pint of the blueberries, sugar and cornstarch. Stir in lemon juice and water. Turn heat to medium and cook, stirring often, until mixture begins to thicken slight. Remove from heat and allow to cool.

For the Dough

Mix whole milk, vegetable oil and sugar in a pan. Scald to 150 degrees. Let cool until lukewarm (~45 minutes). Sprinkle in yeast and let sit. Then add 4 C flour, stir mixture together. Cover and let sit for one hour.

Add 1/2 C flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Stir mixture together.

Divide the dough in half. Sprinkle surface generously with flour and form into a rectangle, roll the dough thin, maintaining a rectangular shape. Spread half of the blueberry filling onto the dough. Sprinkle half of the additional blueberries for sprinkling on top. Roll the dough toward you. Pinch the seam to seal it. Grease foil cake or pie pans. Cut rolls 3/4 to 1 inch thick and lay in greased pans. Repeat with other half of dough and blueberry filling.

Cover the rolls and let sit for 30 minutes.

Bake at 375 for 15 to 18 minutes.

Generously drizzle frosting over warm rolls after they come out of the oven.

Dough recipe from The Pioneer Woman

I started with the dough first since reading all of the directions all the way through is not exactly my strong point LOL! Here's the milk, oil, sugar mix right after being scalded. It's VERY important to make sure the sugar is completely dissolved and having a candy thermometer is an absolute requirement to making sure it's not burned. DO NOT walk away from your pan or attempt to do anything else in the kitchen while you get to this point.

I made sure to have my yeast and my 4C of flour ready to go as soon as the 45 minutes of cool down time for the milk mixture was done.

Meanwhile back at the ranch.... I made the blueberry goo to go on the insides! The bit I would do differently would be to make sure I have the water and lemon juice ready to go before I started the blueberry, cornstarch, sugar mix on the stove. It looks kinda cloudy and gross right here but I promise give it some time on the heat and it starts to look like home made jam full of blueberry goodness!

See? Just like that! This is the starting to thicken stage where it does a glorious job of clinging to the spoon.

Time is up and from 150 degrees our milk mix had cooled to 100 degrees. Perfect for activating the yeast. So, sprinkle it in there give a good stir to get everybody in the pool excited and pour the contents of the pan into a large bowl with the flour in it and mix it up really well and..........

let it sit. For an hour. Now would be the perfect time to make that cream cheese frosting that was mentioned earlier if you felt so inclined. Personally, I decided that lunch was more important especially seeing as how I already had a can of frosting in the pantry just waiting to be used.

Make sure you mix the baking powder, baking soda, salt, and flour very well before adding it to your raised dough and knead it till it's all mixed in and the dough is gooey again. I chose not to cut the dough in half before rolling it out so I got a GIANT stretch of dough across my entire dining table. It was glorious! Just look at that beautiful berry filling!

I sprinkled the cinnamon sugar mix all over and our little girls claimed it looked magical. I have to agree!

The final layer of plump, ripe, blueberries and we are ready to roll!

It looks like a snake that ate a giant bag of marbles!

I was very concerned that the blueberry juice would stain my table after I cut the cinnamon rolls up but it cleaned right up with a damp paper towel. Yay!

Leaving some room for the rolls to rise into and fill is your better option and unless you want to ruin a good dish towel paper towels work just fine for covering your rolls while they rise.