How to Make the Softest Cinnamon Rolls Ever

Whee! Okay, here we go. I have no idea what's going to come out of my mouth at this point. So this is a happy moment for me. I'm happy you're here, I'm happy when I'm baking, and I'm also very, very happy when I'm baking for others. The anticipation of pulling something warm and fresh out of the oven and serving it, I love that. It's one of my favorite things to do. We are going to fill this 13 by 9 dish with homemade cinnamon rolls. We'll be using an enriched dough that makes these rolls soft and tender and pillowy to touch. They'll be filled with butter, sugar, and cinnamon, and topped with a delicious cream cheese frosting. So go ahead and print the recipe from the description below, and then you can just follow along with the video, however that works for you. Let's have some fun. First thing you want to do is take one cup of whole milk, place it into the microwave, and heat it in 20 second increments. Stir in between each time. Touch it with the back of your finger. You want to make sure that it's nice and warm. Think bath water warm, but not hot. If it's too hot, it will kill the yeast. So just make sure you're touching it for that nice warm temperature. So now that our milk is warm, this is whole milk. I'm using whole milk to have the extra fat, which makes the cinnamon rolls softer and more tender. This is 250 milliliters, and I'm going to go ahead and add one tablespoon of active dry yeast into the milk. Active yeast has larger granules, and so it needs to be placed into a warm liquid in order to activate it or bloom it. So I'm going to go ahead and just pour that onto the milk. This is nine grams, and then the other thing that wakes the yeast up is sugar. So I have measured out here five tablespoons of sugar, or that is 60 grams. So I'm going to go ahead and pour that in, and we're just going to give this a stir. I'm stirring it just till I can feel that the sugar that sunk to the bottom is dissolving. Okay, now I'm going to set this aside. This needs approximately five minutes, even up to ten minutes, to bloom and to activate. It will actually start to get bubbly. Once we see that it's bubbly, we'll move on. So I'm just going to put this over here. While that is activating, we will go ahead and start our dry ingredients. So while we wait on the yeast to activate, we're going to go ahead and put our dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. I'm using a stand mixer. If you're using a hand mixer, you'll just need a nice large glass bowl. We're going to go ahead and put three and a quarter cups of flour in. That is 410 grams. I'm using a scale for accurate measurements. So that's perfect. 410 grams, three and a quarter cups, and then I have this nice little scale that has six grams of salt, which is one teaspoon. I'm going to go ahead and put that in there, and we're going to whisk this just to make sure the dry ingredients are all mixed nicely together. So we're going to just check our yeast here, and you can see it is very alive and very happy and healthy. It has just become very bubbly and frothy. So we're good to go. I will tell you if you do not see this, that means for some reason the yeast did not activate. Dump it and start over. Much better to do that now. If it doesn't bubble like this, the yeast is not alive. It is not active and your dough will not rise. So just dump it, start over, and just kind of make sure that your water is warm enough to activate it, but not too hot that it might kill it. So just a little sidebar note there. This is active and happy, so we're going to go ahead and add two eggs into this mixture. These are at room temperature. All ingredients are at room temperature. So I'm going to go ahead and just put those right in this mixture. I'm going to give it a whisk until it's smooth, and now we are going to add this into our dry. I'm using a paddle attachment. You'll just use your regular beaters if you are hand mixing. I'm going to put this on stir or even just low speed and let this mix for about one minute. Now we're going to incorporate butter into it. We're going to add eight tablespoons of butter, or this is 113 grams. This is really soft and warm. I can squish it with my finger here. So one tablespoon at a time. You want to just drop that in there and let it mix. If you're hand mixing, you'll just be over your bowl a little bit here just mixing away. Once you get one in there, you want to just make sure you don't see any of the chunks. You want this to be incorporated completely before you add the next one in. This can take three or four minutes. So right now the dough is kind of soft and stringy. Once I make sure that all of the butter is incorporated, then I'm going to turn the mixer to medium low and I'm going to let it mix for five minutes. I'm going to go ahead and shut this off. The dough is shiny and wet and sticky. Right now it is not workable like it would stick to your fingers if you tried to use this right now. So this recipe has a couple really nice make-ahead options. This is one of them. If you want to make this dough ahead, you can chill this in the refrigerator for anywhere from two hours to up to two days. So if you know you have company coming and you want to get this much done, you can put this in the refrigerator and get it out and work with it up to two days from now. So what you want to do is take a large bowl and put some oil in it. I'm using olive oil. You want to generously grease because you do not want the dough as it's rising to stick to the sides. So we'll go ahead and scrape our bowl down and we're just going to pour this into our greased bowl. We'll let it rise in the refrigerator and we'll get it back out. Cover it up with some plastic wrap so it doesn't dry out. Off it goes to the fridge. Our dough has refrigerated for two hours. We're going to go ahead and make our sugar and cinnamon filling so that it will be ready. We have a third cup of granulated sugar. That's 65 grams. We have a third cup of light brown sugar and this is packed. This is 75 grams. We're putting a tablespoon of cinnamon in. That's 9 grams and a pinch of salt. Pretty simple stuff there. Go ahead and just whisk this so it's all kind of incorporated and will eliminate most of the brown sugar lumps hopefully. They all melt when we bake it anyways. Just giving this a good whisk and then we'll put it aside. So I just wanted to show you the dough. I just took it out of the fridge. It is gorgeous. It has doubled in size and when you touch it, it presses back. This is beautiful. It's going to make really nice rolls. So I'll be using my pastry mat. If you don't have one of these, I will put a link in the description. I think every baker should have one of these. They're so so nice. This actually has the measurements on it so when we pour the dough out onto here and we're rolling it out, I'm actually going to follow the measurements. I'm going to be rolling it into a rectangle probably about 14 by 24 and then you have this handy little markers on the side. So I'm going to go ahead and flour the surface and get this thing going. Pour the dough out. Everything I do, I'm going to be trying to just bring it into the shape of a rectangle. You can use your hands to start the process just pressing it. This dough is so soft. It's so nice to work with. Okay. Get flour on your rolling pin and just keep using flour as you go. We do not want this to stick anywhere. You want to roll it out nice and thin. Get it to about an eighth of an inch. So this is a little bigger than 12 by 24 but it is all good. The larger it is, the more roll that you have. So I think that's pretty good. About an eighth of an inch. I have the butter really really really soft. This is six tablespoons or 85 grams. You just want to be as gentle as you can so you don't cut any holes in the in the dough as you're spreading it and just work your way around. When you're spreading the butter, we're going to roll from this end up so you want to just leave a little bit of the edge right here with no butter. We'll use that as a seam. So just leave this little bit plain. So the butter is now spread on evenly. We're going to go ahead and sprinkle our cinnamon and sugar mixture on. This might look like a lot in the bowl but we need it all. Every bit of it. So once you get it all sprinkled on, I usually just take my hand and gently just kind of go glaze over the top of it to make sure that it's spread evenly. Catch any places that maybe didn't get any. I think that's pretty good. And then the last step is just kind of pressing it down with your hand. It just kind of embeds the cinnamon and sugar right into that layer of butter. It's looking pretty nice. Now we're going to start rolling and again we're going to roll from this end and go that direction. All right so what you want to do is just tuck the first edge up. Just work your way down both sides and just flip it over and basically just keep doing that. This dough is amazing to work with. It's so soft and nice. All the way to the point Okay and then I just take the edge this edge and just kind of pull it up like that and just pinch it. Just kind of creates a little bit of a seam to hold it together. There you go. Now we're going to move this down here where I actually have the marks and I'm going to go ahead and start to cut it. Now the the first thing you want to do is just kind of with your hands move it, squeeze it, shape it a little bit. This is really easy to work with and all I'm doing is trying to make sure that it's around the same thickness. So in the rolling process some gets fatter, maybe the ends are thinner. So basically we're just trying to make this so it's all about the same thickness before we cut. If the rolls are around the same size when they go into the pan then they all rise up together in the same shape and they all bake very evenly. So that's we're just trying to ensure a nice even bake. And that looks pretty good. So the next step is to cut the rolls. You either want to use a really really sharp knife. You don't want to push down on it because we've worked to make the layers of the cinnamon and sugar. You don't want to squish it. When we're done you need 12 even pieces. So I cut this in half, in half again, and then each section you need two cuts which gives you three, six, nine, twelve. Okay now I'm going to do some dental floss. Just slide this under the end, get right to the mark, and you just want to pull like this and it makes a nice even cut. And you're just going to do that 12 times. This is actually much easier than using a knife and look at the inside of that. Look how beautiful that is. It's so pretty. These are turning out beautiful. I am so excited. These are going to be so pretty. If you don't have dental floss you can use a sharp knife. When you're pushing down on the rolls it kind of squishes the the inside so you'll have to kind of, I don't know what the word is, unsmush them. But if you have dental floss this is this is the way to go. They come out just perfect. Just the two ends. I'm just cutting the very edge off. I don't want to cut too much off but this will help it sit flat in the pan. Now we use our pan that we have greased and we're just going to gently place these in. I'm leaving space in between each one so they have room to rise. They'll spread out. Now I'm going to cover them with plastic wrap and let them sit until they double in size and then we'll bake them. So these have been sitting in a very warm place. I cheated and it's very very warm outside so I put them on our sun porch. They have doubled in size. They look absolutely beautiful. I am so excited to get them in the oven. So we're going to go ahead and bake these for 30 to 40 minutes.