Cinnamon Bun Cookies

Something that had long been on my baking "To Do" list were Cinnamon Bun Cookies. The name alone is enough to fill my nose with remembered scents of yeast, cinnamon and sugar. Ahhh Cinnabon where art thou?


But despite my fevered anticipation (or may be because of it), my Cinnamon Bun Cookie experience was not up to par. I had both assembly and baking issues, and honestly I just didn't think they tasted all that great. I thought there was too much cinnamon and the cookie part was kinda bland.

So now the recap:

The dough was easy to prepare. Here I am rolling it to 1/8" thickness between two sheets of waxed paper. Since discovering this method a few months ago I have never gone back to "floured surface" method. Using the wax or parchment paper eliminates the mess, the sticking, and the real hazard of adding too much additional flour to the cookie dough.


Here is the dough topped with its cinnamon-sugar filling. Notice how close I have the cinnamon-sugar to the long edge of the dough. Uh-Oh, this will come back to haunt me.


The rolling up of the dough was a little tricky. The dough got very sticky and tore in a few spots. I also had an issue with the center of the dough rectangle being thicker than the ends, so my log rolled uneven. This caused another set of problems during baking.


Here is the dough getting sliced. The center pieces looked really nice, all perfectly round and tightly rolled, but the pieces cut from the ends were lopsided and malformed (notice I didn't photograph them).


I take that back, I did photograph some of the deformed looking end pieces. To get rid of the gaps between the cinnamon-sugar and cookie dough layers I tried squishing it tight together. But ultimately my squishing didn't help.


Just out of the oven and Cinnamon Bun Cookie disaster! The outer ring of dough and cinnamon just kinda collapsed and fell flat. I was so disappointed.

With the second batch I squished the cookie rolls even tighter but the sides still fell over. Thinking about it now, I probably didn't leave a large enough sealing edge of dough. I probably scattered the cinnamon-sugar too close to the outer edge of the roll-up so there wasn't enough dough-to-dough contact to form a tight seal.

Poor little Cinnamon Bun Cookies how unlovable you look, but it is amazing how many flaws you can cover up with a little bit of icing.


So all-in-all not a very satisfying baking experience. The Cinnamon Bun Cookies tasted okay, but not good enough to warrant a second baking attempt.

If you want to see what they SHOULD look like, check out The Recipe Girl's version (and not mine).