Adventures in Making a Giant Cinnamon Roll

Today I tried making a giant cinnamon roll! There are various recipes out there, but I didn’t want a yeast dough, so eventually I found this recipe.

The original recipe calls for an 8″ cake pan, and that didn’t seem very giant to me, skillet cookies take up an entire 12″ frying pan, so I doubled the recipe before printing to pdf, thinking that it would then fill a 12″ pizza pan. The dough turned out rather dry and hard to knead, and with my record for adding more moisture to wheat dough, I didn’t, or I’d have wrecked the gluten royally! So I figured out how to get it rolled out to 10″x14″ in two sections because my work surface isn’t very big.

The cinnamon filling recipe called for way more than I was comfortable with when I saw the amount in my cereal bowl (recipe called for a small bowl). I didn’t add the oil/butter to that and decided to brush it on instead, then sprinkle the sugar blend over it. I used our pumpkin spice blend, and threw in almost an equal amount of dutch-processed cocoa powder we have in a jar (we prefer non-irradiated, so this was an excuse to get rid of it), blended that up and shook it over the oiled dough. After prepping both rounds and getting them all onto the tray, I had a heck of a lot of dry “filling” left over!!! Somehow, maybe I should have made the strips smaller, the roll still measured roughly 8″ across before baking. That’s a 12″ pizza pan this is sitting in and it didn’t fill the pan.

The giant cinnamon roll went into the oven and I turned my attention to the icing/glaze.

For the icing/glaze, I wanted to make the blackbean chocolate dip recipe that appeared in one of the issues of Alive Magazine last year,. Knowing what I know now about paraquat being used on most bean crops, I drained the aquafaba from the beans, measured out what I’d removed, and added that amount of water back in. I dumped in the remaining sugar/spice blend, and suddenly had very watery blackbean puree, it was SO thin! Apparently, removing the paraquat that leaches into the water from the beans also removes the starch that leached into the same water.

I added 4 egg whites, another half cup of sugar, more cocoa powder, and more olive oil, and it was STILL runny! I dumped it all into a pot, put the pot on the stove on medium heat, (you don’t want anything with olive oil on high heat) whisked in some flour and coconut shavings, and before long, it had thickened up nicely.

I spooned that over the giant roll almost half an hour after it came out of the oven as you can see above. I put it back in the oven to warm before serving.. Here is how it looked after cutting it into serving slices. Family feedback is that it is lightly sweet, and the “icing” adds to the dessert.

If I make this again, I may use heavy cream instead of yogurt, as the yogurt I had was greek yogurt which is quite a bit thicker than perhaps what the recipe author had in mind.

I still have a small jam jar’s worth of black bean spiced pudding in the fridge now.

REMEMBER!  Don’t diss your pumpkin spices anymore!!!

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