Ina Gartens Shortcut For Easy Homemade Cinnamon Buns

Name a better way to wake up in the winter than to the scent of freshly baked cinnamon buns wafting through the air; I’ll wait. My fantasy of warm, buttery, and spiced cinnamon rolls that are hot out of the oven on a cold morning is, unfortunately, one that usually takes a bit of planning to fulfill.

Most cinnamon roll recipes require two key things I don’t have: a stand mixer to knead the dough and time to let it rise multiple times. I’m not opposed to canned, ready-to-bake cinnamon rolls as an easy solution — I’ve already baked off a batch this fall — but during the holiday season, I’m often in search of something that tastes and feels a little special.

As usual, the solution to my cinnamon roll conundrum comes from Ina Garden. An expert at leveraging store-bought shortcuts to deliver elegant, delicious results, the Barefoot Contessa delivered again when she shared her simple hack for making easier cinnamon sticky buns on Instagram.

A layer of buttery caramel on top of each treat earns this dish the title of sticky buns rather than cinnamon rolls, but it provides the same flavor profile, cinnamon-infused swirl, and scent as they bake. To create that caramelized coating, Garten starts by mixing together room-temperature butter and brown sugar. (She uses a stand mixer to do this, but you don’t have to have one — just make sure your butter is soft enough to easily stir it.)

A dollop of the brown sugar and butter mixture goes into the bottom of each tin of a muffin panwith a sprinkle of roughly chopped pecans on top. You can omit the nuts if desired, or swap them out for your preferred variety.

Next, it’s time to get out your puff pastry. (Any frozen puff pastry will work, but if you can find Dufour Puff Pastry, which is made with an all-butter dough, it’ll deliver the most incredible depth of flavor.) Unfold the pastry and brush the top half with melted butter. Sprinkle a generous amount of brown sugar and cinnamon over its surface, leaving enough room at the edges to roll up the dough.

Garten chooses to incorporate raisins into the filling for the cinnamon rolls — simply adding them on top of the cinnamon sugar — but you can also swap these out for other options. Pistachios, chocolate chips, hazelnuts, dried cranberries, candied citrus, or shredded coconut would all be excellent. Want something like a classic cinnamon roll? Skip the extra add-in entirely; the cinnamon and brown sugar will provide plenty of flavor.

Carefully roll the dough lengthwise into a tight log, with a spiral in the center. Slice the log of dough using a very sharp knife into rounds about one inch thick. (You’ll want to coordinate the number of rounds you slice with the number of muffin tins you have. If you need to make each round a little thicker or thinner to do this, that’s fine. Some puff pastry packages will come with two sheets of dough, so you may need to make two smaller logs.)

Place each round of dough horizontally in one of the muffin tins, on top of the butter and pecans, and bake them at the recommended temperature for your puff pastry dough until golden brown. After the buns have finished baking, it’s important to let them cool briefly.

However, you want to remove them from the muffin tins before the melted sugar and butter become too thick; after about five minutes, carefully remove each sticky bun from its tin, using a spoon as needed to remove any extra caramel.

If you want to go the extra mile, feel free to whip up a quick glaze with confectioners’ sugar, as Ina Garten does, but these buns will have enough sugar as-is to make them delicious. And regardless, as the Barefoot Contessa notes, “the kitchen will smell amazing!”