Soft Cinnamon Roll Cookies from Divas Can Cook

Soft Cinnamon Roll Cookies - made June 12, 2024 from Divas Can Cook 

Cookies

3/4 cup granulated sugar

2 tablespoons butter-flavored shortening

2 tablespoons butter, room temperature

1 egg, room temperature

1/4 cup buttermilk

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/8 teaspoon salt

Cinnamon Sugar mixture

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 tablespoon cinnamon

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Cream Cheese Frosting

2 ounces cream cheese, room temperature

2 tablespoons butter, room temperature

1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons powdered sugar

2-3 teaspoons milk

splash of vanilla extract

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together sugar, butter and shortening. Mix in egg, buttermilk and vanilla extract.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
3. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix on low speed until a soft dough forms. Place dough in a plastic bag and flatten. Refrigerate for at least an hour or up to overnight.
4. Cinnamon-sugar mixture: in a small bowl, stir together brown sugar, cinnamon and melted butter.
5. When ready to bake, mix together 1 tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon powdered sugar. Generously sprinkle over a nonstick work surface and over a rolling pin.
6. Remove chilled dough from refrigerator and roll into a 12 x 9-inch rectangle about 1/4" thick. Brush surface of dough with melted butter.
7. Immediately sprinkle the brown sugar-cinnamon mixture into an even layer, pressing down gently int the dough.
8. Starting with the longest side, gently and quickly roll dough into a tight log. Roll log in plastic wrap and place on a tray.
9. Freeze for 30 minutes or until roll is firm enough to cut without squishing when cutting.
10. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and line baking sheets with parchment paper.
11. Slice log into 1-inch thick slides using a serrated knife and evenly space 2 inches apart on lined baking sheets. Pinch the ends of the cookies together to prevent roll from unraveling during baking. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool on wire rack.
12. Prepare glaze: combine cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar, milk and vanilla.
13. While cookies are still warm, brush with glaze, allowing the glaze to melt down into the folds of the cookie. Let glaze set and cookies cool completely.

This was a half-success, half-failure. And definitely better suited for making in cooler weather. Of course, I didn't know that until it was too late. But part of trying new recipes is making these discoveries, lol. I followed the recipe exactly as laid out and that might've been my first mistake. The dough was too soft and sticky when mixed and could've used more flour. I didn't add more though and instead hoped the chilling process would make the dough easier to handle. 

The easiest way to make a roughly square-ish shape of dough is to roll it out while in a gallon-size ziploc freezer bag.

That definitely helped when rolling out the dough as the plastic bag protected the rolling pin from the sticky dough. But - you guessed it - the dough was too soft to come out of the bag and still maintain its shape, even chilled. I cut the bag open and gingerly peeled it off but the dough threatened to tear and fall apart, even after being chilled for almost an hour. I had to use a lot of flour on the parchment paper the dough sat on during rolling, on the rolling pin and on the dough to make it even close to manageable.

As with cinnamon roll dough, then you sprinkle the cinnamon-brown sugar mixture over the cookie dough into an even-ish layer then you roll it up into a log. This was the comic portion of the process as the dough was too soft to roll properly or tightly, which is what you need to make a decent-looking semblance of a cinnamon roll. Plus, there was so much filling, it made it difficult to keep the dough in a tight roll.

I froze the log for several hours but that still didn't matter, as you can tell from the cut cookies. The log of dough was still soft and still refused to roll into an actual round shape but remained flattishly oval. Oy.

At this point, I assumed these would spread spectacularly given how soft the dough stubbornly remained. So I put a few in cupcake liners as an experiment and baked the rest as intended to see the spread.

Surprisingly, they didn't spread as much as I expected given the softness of the (frozen) dough. And they even looked more cinnamon roll-ish than I expected. Yes, still janky but recognizable.

But the swirl of the "cinnamon roll" didn't matter as these were meant to be covered with cream cheese frosting. And that's the next place these went awry. As you can tell from the picture, I didn't beat the cream cheese enough to get the lumps out before adding the rest of the frosting ingredients. Sigh. Rookie error.

So then I tried to cover my frosting sins by sprinkling some Penzey's cinnamon over the top. LOLOLOL.

The bottom line, after all my baking mishaps, is these cookies weren't bad. Not quite a snickerdoodle but a good sugar cookie, liberally flavored with brown sugar. Which was the biggest drawback as I found the brown sugar filling a bit too sweet. There was too much brown sugar in the filling so I would cut that back and let the cinnamon in the filling come out a bit more. I'm not going to say "next time" as I don't know if I would make these again. If I did, I would definitely add more flour and cut back on the brown sugar in the filling. And beat the cream cheese properly for the frosting.