French Bread Cinnamon Rolls
Homestyle Cinnamon Rolls made with a crusty French bread recipe.
Earlier in the week I made French bread to go with our soup dinner. My recipe makes two loaves; and even though my little family of four could easily devour two loaves of homemade French bread without a problem, I decided I wanted to use half of the dough for something else. Something sweet.
My mind first went to cinnamon swirl French bread. Which I’ve done before. So then I thought… cinnamon rolls! I figured Chris and I could sneak in one or two sweet rolls fresh from the oven during our TV time that night and save the rest for breakfast in the morning. Perfecto 👌🏻.
If you’ve never made homemade French bread, you absolutely must do it ASAP!
It’s very, very, surprisingly simple. Yes, there is some wait time involved. But that’s hardly a big enough deal to stand in the way of homemade French bread, am I right?!
And while you’re making that recipe, you might as well do what I did and save half of the dough for these sweet rolls, because they are ah-mazing.
Imagine French bread… perfectly crusty exterior with steaming soft insides. Now imagine that plus a gooey, buttery cinnamon sugar filling and a vanilla icing that will make your heart pop. ❤️
The ingredients you’ll need are pretty standard for any yeast bread: flour, water, yeast, sugar, salt…
What sets French bread apart from other yeast breads are two things:
1) you’re going to punch down the dough every 10 minutes for almost an hour while it rises. Don’t worry, it’s really not as bad as it sounds. I keep mine in the KitchenAid stand mixer the whole time under a kitchen towel. Set the microwave timer for 10 minutes (and start a tally to keep track of rises), and come back to turn on the mixer for a minute when the timer goes off. Not that bad at all.
2) You roll french bread into a loaf. It gives the bread a little swirl inside. And it probably does other fancy things at a molecular level with the air and the yeast and all that. But I’m going to leave that to some other food geek to spell out. All I care about is that it tastes like French bread. And French bread is tres bon! 👌🏻
Lastly, let’s talk about shaping your cinnamon rolls into hearts. It’s not necessary, but why wouldn’t you want to eat food shaped like a heart?!
You’ve probably seen this a million times all over the internet, but in case you haven’t– here’s a brief synopsis of the process.
💕 After you’ve sprinkled on the sugar and butter and cinnamon, roll up the dough jelly-roll style like you would normally do for cinnamon rolls.
💕 Slice them, like you would normally do for cinnamon rolls.
💕 Unroll the spiral, and then roll the ends towards each other meeting in the center.
💕 Pinch the bottom to make the point of the heart. Easy!
Enjoy :)
