Salted Caramel Cinnamon Rolls
I was really scared at the idea of making cinnamon rolls. It seemed so daunting. And actually.. it was kind of hard. This recipe took me 3 tries! It was fun and I enjoyed the challenge but I wouldn't say this is really easy. Any recipe with yeast is always tricky. You can kill yeast so quickly without even noticing it. And even if you don't kill it, you can affect the yeast so easily without even noticing it until you bake it and the texture is off. I've tried to simplify this as much as possible. The key here is to be careful with your yeast. And bread flour is a must!! I tried this with other flours and it's just not good. Have fun with this-- You can use dulce de leche instead of the salted caramel. Maybe add some nuts! So good.
Ingredients
Dough
- 1 cup Milk you can use almond if you need
- .25 ounce Active Dry Yeast its one single packet
- 1/3 cup Sugar
- 1 Egg
- 1/4 cup Salted Butter
- 3 cups Bread Flour
- 1 tsp Salt
Filling
- .5 Sugar regular or brown works
- .5 cup Salted Caramel Sauce I like the Trader Joes one! Feel free to use regular caramel or even dulce de leche.
- 1.5 tbsp Cinnamon
Frosting
- 4 oz cream cheese, softened
- 2 tbsp Salted Caramel
- 1 tsp Vanilla
- 2 tbsp Butter
- .5 cup Powdered Sugar
- 1-2 Splashes of milk
- .5 tsp Cinnamon
Instructions
Dough
- Pour your milk into a microwave safe bowl and heat it up for about 30 seconds. The milk needs to be 110 degrees F. You HAVE to test it. There's no shortcut around this. I didnt test mine the first time and it was light to the touch and still killed my yeast. You may need to put it back in for 10 seconds at a time.
- Transfer warm milk to your mixing bowl and add the yeast and sugar. Let it sit for 2 minutes. Add egg, salt and melted butter. Mix until well combined.
- Stir in your flour and mix together until a dough forms. If you have a dough hook, knead it for 8 minutes. Otherwise, use those hands!
- Dough should form into a nice ball. If it happens to be too sticky, add in more flour one tbsp at a time. Transfer your ball of dough to a well-oiled bowl and cover with a towel or plastic wrap. Place it somewhere lukewarm and allow it to rise for one hour. The dough should double in size. **Tip: heat up your oven to 150 degrees and then turn off. Let it be 90% cooled off. You can open the door to speed this process up. This makes for a nice humid area for your dough to rise.
- Once the dough has risen, transfer to a floured surface area to roll out your dough. You're going to want to shape it into a rectangle. Maybe 15" in long and 10" wide or so.
- Spread the caramel over the dough. You can leave the sides a little empty as we will cut them off
- In a small bowl, mix together cinnamon and sugar. Sprinkle over the caramel. Make sure to press it down and kind of rub it in there.
- Time to roll! You want to try to do this as tightly as possible. Tightly roll it up starting from the shorter side of the dough.
- Cut off the ends of the log by about 1 inch. They are likely dry and not full of much filling. You want to make it look uniform.
- Cut the log into about 9 sections. Each section should be about 1" wide. You can use the knife to lightly mark the dough first to space it out properly.
- Grab your baking pan and line it with parchment paper. Place your cinnamon rolls and cover with a towel or plastic wrap. Let it rise again for another hour.
- Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. It's ok if they look a little soft in the middle. Let them cool completely prior to frosting
Frosting
- In a mixing bowl, combine cream cheese, caramel, butter, vanilla, cinnamon. Combine together. Add your powdered sugar slowly. If its a little too stiff, you can add a splash of milk