Cinnamon Rolls, Reinvented: A Shortcut Version and a Pork-Filled Dim-Sum-Bun Take

Cinnamon Rolls, Reinvented: A Shortcut Version and a Pork-Filled Dim-Sum-Bun Take

Once you’ve discovered the secret to instant-gratification cinnamon rolls, why not add a similarly spicy dim sum-style bun to your repertoire, too? These recipes make it easy

By Sarah Karnasiewicz in the Wall Street Journal

JANUARY MAY BE for fasts and fresh starts, but February is for eating your feelings. At least that’s how I justified the baking jag that yielded a calorific but cheering addition to my morning routine: the lazy cook’s cinnamon rolls.

Purists, be forewarned. The rolls in the recipe at near right are irresistible, but they are not the yeast-leavened, sour cream-enriched rolls your grandmother pulled from the oven after church on Sunday. I love those (who doesn’t?), but it’s February and I’m tired.

So, when an itch for cinnamon rolls struck, I wondered: What if, rather than kneading and proofing and shaping, I cheated a bit? Over the years, I’ve concluded that frozen puff pastry can rise to almost any task. Why not this?

First I rolled a flour-dusted puff-pastry sheet into a large rectangle, then I departed from the script again by slathering on a layer of apple butter for jammy sweetness. Next came the flurry of cinnamon and brown sugar. Finally, I rolled the sheet into a log, sliced it into thick discs and nestled them into a muffin tin along with a smidge more butter and brown sugar to ensure each roll would emerge with a caramel-coated bottom.

They did just that and more, plumping up golden and glistening. Drizzled with icing, their curlicue faces smiled up at me like roses. I knew their bloom would fade fast—like all cinnamon rolls, these are at their best freshly plucked from the oven—but I needn’t have fretted. My family gratefully snatched them up in minutes.

Indeed, so giddy was their response I started daydreaming of other iterations we might incorporate into our February repertoire. But even my sweet-toothed loved ones would eventually tire of all that sugar. What about a savory option?

Around the world, cooks know that cinnamon’s mild burn harmonizes well with meat; consider chicken mole and fragrant lamb biryani. I’m particularly fond of pork stewed with the cinnamon-heavy Chinese seasoning known as five-spice powder. With that combo in mind as well as the dim sum parlors near my house whose carts are always stacked with plump buns, I knew what I wanted: a five-spice bun that was steamed not baked, studded with pork rather than raisins.

Admittedly, I’m a neophyte when it comes to Chinese cooking. So, I called on a friend who’d spent years in Yunnan, and she directed me to a classic primer, “Florence Lin’s Complete Book of Chinese Noodles, Dumplings and Breads.” Nosing through those pages, plus a little surfing of the web, yielded my game plan: Prepare a dough for mantou, the northern Chinese steamed bread, then roll it thin and stuff it with scallions, sesame seeds and spiced ground pork.

The yeast dough required a bit more time to put together than my puff pastry, though truthfully not much more effort, and I found that a wide nonstick skillet with a tight-fitting lid could pinch-hit ably as a steamer. So, before I knew it, there they were: the savory cinnamon buns of my imagining, succulent and sweet, spicy and tender. In other words, just about right for February.