Recipe for Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls with Dreamsicle Frosting

Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls with Dreamsicle Frosting

What’s your favorite part of a cinnamon roll? The frosting, the outside curl? I like the sweet spot, that very inner circle — the cinnamon roll navel, it might be called. It holds a moist, sweet dose of butter, cinnamon and sugar.

To create that sweet spot, spread butter, sugar and cinnamon right to the very edge of the rolled-out dough. The side you roll first is the where the sweet spot begins. Don’t leave a blank margin.

The sweet spot — my favorite part of a cinnamon roll.

To make this recipe, I used dough remaining from the Pumpkin Nutmeg Dinner Roll recipe. You can see from the photos that the dough bakes to a pretty vivid color.

Most cinnamon roll recipes call for a sweeter dough, but I like the contrast of butter, sugar and spices on bread that isn’t particularly sweet. There’s just 1/3 cup sugar in the entire recipe of Pumpkin Nutmeg Dinner Rolls, hardly enough to be called even barely sweet.

Brown-Is-Beautiful Brown Butter Scones

Brown Butter Scones

In her book Good to the Grain, Kim Boyce presents a thoughtful collection of recipes that showcase a variety of whole grains. Going well beyond whole wheat, she introduces grains that may be less familiar, situating them in recipes that highlight its best characteristics.

Her recipe for Brown Butter Scones features teff flour (of Ethiopian injera fame) and rolled oats along with unbleached all-purpose flour. I love the texture of a simple oat scone, but it was the brown butter that really attracted me, thanks in no small part to Boyce’s description.

This scone is about the journey and the destination. As the butter browns, it perfumes the kitchen with the aroma of toasted hazelnuts. The resulting scone, too, is infused with this nutty warmth and flavor. (Side note: Brown butter is called beurre noisette in French. Noisette is the word for hazelnut.)