Blueberry Rolls – Breadmaker Style

My wife got poor kid free breakfast in school, which usually consisted of cinnamon rolls. She mentioned that she loved them, so I started making them. Blueberries are also her favorite, so that’s how this was born.

The blueberry rolls are kind of like if a Danish at a coffee shop wasn’t a flat dry mess, and got its shit together to be actually tasty. Sorry not sorry. I am not a Danish fan. I basically make cinnamon rolls with a different filling.

I like to make a recipe, and then redo it, until I have it perfect. Then I write it up in my notes so I always know how to do it that way. I started making cinnamon rolls (and all sorts of other rolls) a few months back and I have been working on my recipe. This means we have been having them on the weekends more often than not.

I don’t normally do anything with yeast or kneading unless it has a bread maker involved. I have a collarbone that is not fixed in place and kneading dough hurts. However, if I leave the heavy kneading of the dough to a bread maker, then I can do it.

My current recipe for cinnamon rolls came from my Breadman Ultimate Breadmaker manual, with a few adaptations. That manual actually has a lot of great recipes in it. I found it online years back, and have used it for all my subsequent bread makers.

As an aside, that Breadman Ultra machine, which was my first bread maker machine, was one I found at a St. Vincents second hand shop for $4. I had to buy a new paddle for $7 or so online, and get the manual PDF, but that was the best money I could have spent. I make pretzels, bagels, and now cinnamon rolls in additional to bread on occasion. If I didn’t do it this way, I could not knead the dough.

Ingredients – Rolls

• 1 large egg at room temp (Important!) plus enough warm(!) water to equal 1 cup.
• 3 TBSP Oil
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1.5 TSP salt
• 3.5 Cups Breadflour (See AP flour to bread flour conversion below)
• 2 TSP Active Dry Yeast (See Yeast discussion below)

Converting All Purpose Flour into Bread Flour
For every 1 cup of AP flour, remove 1.5 TSP of flour and replace with 1.5 TSP of Vital Wheat Gluten. For this recipe you will need to replace a total of 5.25 TSP of flour with Vital Wheat Gluten. I tried it without doing this, and they just didn’t have the right texture. The Vital Wheat Gluten lasts forever and makes a huge difference, so it’s worth buying a small bag to keep around.

Yeast
Active dry yeast is not the same as instant yeast. If you have instant yeast, you need to use 1.25 times the amount listed. I also found this out the hard way. Now days I buy a giant Costco sized package of active dry yeast and keep most of it frozen until I need it, but sometimes we buy the wrong thing, and I had to figure out how to convert it.

Blueberry Filling

• 8 oz cream cheese
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 cup blueberries. (If frozen rinse a bunch and dry carefully to avoid the blue dough look.)

Frosting

• Leftover cinnamon cream cheese filling from above
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• Enough milk to get to a smooth consistency. Go slow. Try 1 TBSP at a time.

Directions

1. Add all the ingredients in the order listed into the bread maker, and add the yeast on the very top. You can mix the salt into the flour so it doesn’t mess with the yeast. The water egg mix needs to be room-ish temp. It can’t be ice cold. Yeast don’t like to be cold.
2. Put your machine on a dough cycle, and go for it. It takes about 1.5 hours in my machine.
3. While that is working, let the cream cheese sit out and soften until the dough is done, then right before the dough is done, mix in the sugar. You can microwave it for a few seconds if you forget. LEAVE BLUEBERRIES SEPARATE! 
4. Once dough is done, place on lightly floured surface and roll into a 12 X 6 inch rectangle. You don’t want to make it much bigger than that, because thin dough makes kind of thin lackluster rolls.
5. Spread about half the cream cheese/sugar mix filling on the dough then add blueberries on top. 
6. Roll longways into a log. 
7. Put your roll on a cutting board, and cut into 12 1-inch slices. This is going to get messy. I use a paper towel and wipe my knife between cuts. This cream cheese filling is way messier than the cinnamon roll filling. However, it won’t matter. It all cooks up just fine, even if you make a mess of them.
8. Place on their sides in a buttered glass casserole dish, or whatever you have around. If you put them on a silpat on a cookie sheet they spread out, and not up. Still good, but kind of weeny in size. I like the glass casserole dish because they seem to rise really well in it.
9. Preheat oven to 350F.
10. Cover and let rise in their cooking vessel for 30 minutes until double the size. It helps if your kitchen isn’t freezing for this part because again, yeast hate cold.
11. Bake for 25-30 minutes. 
12. While that is baking, mix the frosting ingredients together.  
13. When rolls are done, let them cool for like a half hour or so, then coat them with frosting. 

I bought my wife this silpat roller thing on Amazon because we have a textured IKEA countertop that is really not optimal for this kind of thing, and it works really well. Rinsing the blueberries and drying them with paper towels really kept the blueberries to themselves. You can see the non rinsed handful at the top, and the rest I rinsed and dried below. I got the cleanest dough to blueberry situation ever doing that.

These are my best rolls to date. They just feel like cinnamon rolls should. Honestly, I would make half of these because there is only two of us, but I can’t split down to less than 1 egg on a recipe, so I guess we will just have to eat them all. Oh, the tragedy!

I was just going to add the extra cream cheese as frosting, but I didn’t have enough. I was out of cream cheese for more, and too damn lazy to go out for it. My wife, who is a good baker, suggested I add powdered sugar and milk. It’s kind of a royal icing and cream cheese icing combo.

This was a happy discovery as cream cheese frosting is not my fave, and the royal icing glaze I was using was too thin. Together it’s perfect. It has body, and a bit of cream cheese tang, but it’s not overwhelming to me.

I think next time I will add some cinnamon to the filling because that works well with blueberries. I am also measuring how much flour I am using by weight so I can come up with a consistent amount by weight. Scooping flour has an annoying variability that I don’t like, and the recipe does not have a by weight option.

I have to say, again, having my own home, and not a tiny rental kitchen, really lets me make bigger things like this. It’s just so much easier when you have the room to do it. I am so grateful I get the chance to own a home and do this.