Cinnamon Bun Cookies

Ok, so I saw these one day – maybe on Pinterest, I’m not sure – and I thought they were super cool looking. And, I love me some cinnamon bun. So I did some research and discovered that cinnamon bun cookies are in fact “a thing”, so I decided I needed to learn to make them myself. So, I played on the interwebs a bit, tried to incorporate the best of what I found, made some tweaks, and came up with this recipe. I think they look kind of awesome, and they turned out to be amazing.

One of the things I love about cinnamon buns is the frosting. Usually, I’m not a huge frosting guy – a little goes a long way for me. However, with real cinnamon buns they are usually fully coated in a glaze. However, if you look at most recipes out there, they recommend drizzling the icing on. I agree that it looks nice, but I’m sorry (not sorry), I want my cinnamon buns – and cinnamon bun cookies – coated with glaze. So that’s what you’re getting here.

One hint – the “dough” part of the recipe is really just a sugar cookie recipe. So, if you have a particular recipe you like, feel free to use that. This one’s pretty good, though.

Difficulty: easy to medium (depends on how good you are at rolling)
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Ingredients

Dough

· 2 ¼ cups flour

· 1 t salt

· 1 t baking powder

· ¾ cup butter, softened to room temperature

· ¾ cup sugar

· 1 egg

· 1 T vanilla

Filling

· 1/2 cup butter, melted

· 1 cup dark brown sugar

· 4 t cinnamon

Glaze

· 1 cup powdered sugar

· 3 T milk

· ½ t vanilla

Directions

Ok, first off we’re making the dough.

In one bowl, whisk together the flour, salt and baking powder and put that bowl to the side for a moment.

In a separate bowl, put the butter and beat it with your hand mixer until its smooth – say, a minute or so. Add in the sugar and beat that in until it’s well blended, which is probably another couple minutes. Next, add in the egg and vanilla and beat until that is well blended.

Grab your flour mixture and pour half into the butter mixture, blending with your hand mixer until it’s fully blended. Then take the second half and add that, again blending until everything is fully combined.

Now you need to refrigerate. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for 1 – 2 hours, so that the dough hardens enough for rolling. Take this time to reflect on the choices you’ve made in your life and….ah, just kidding! Have a beer or a cocktail.

Don’t leave it in there too too long – you want it stiff enough that you’re able to actually roll the dough, of course, but you also don’t want it to start getting stale, which it will do fairly quickly. So, just an hour or two.

Divide the dough in half. Place each half onto a piece of wax paper, and roll each one into a rectangle, about a quarter inch thick.

In a bowl, mix the filling ingredients – melted butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. You can do this with a fork.

Take a brush and liberally cover each of the dough rectangles with the filling mixture – you can also use the back of your fork or even your fingers. If you have a little filling mixture left over, that’s ok – just put it aside for the moment. (If you don’t, don’t worry about it – you’re fine either way). By the way, when you’re done, rinse off your pastry brush because you’re going to need it again in a little bit.

Now comes kind of the tricky part. You need to roll each of the rectangles into a log, kind of like sushi.

Next you’re going to cut slices from the logs, about a quarter to half inch thick, and place them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Here’s where you can use the leftover filling mixture if you have any. Take a little dollop and plop it onto the tops of the cookies. It actually doesn’t look great because it hides the nice swirl you made, so it’s not my choice – my choice is to use all of the filling actually in the cookies.

Bake at 350 for about 10 minutes, or until the cookies start to get golden brown. Take them out of the oven, let them cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes and then transfer them to a wire rack that you’ve put wax paper or a newspaper underneath (to catch drippings from the icing you’re going to be putting on shortly).

To make the glaze, whisk together the powdered sugar, milk and vanilla until well blended. Take your pastry brush and brush the tops of each cookies with the glaze. Feel free to make more glaze if you’re so inclined – these are cinnamon bun (cookies)! More glaze = more fun.