Easy Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls

Looking for a sweet treat? Here is a simple recipe for sourdough cinnamon rolls made from active sourdough starter!

Is anyone else baking up a storm? Baking and cooking has always been a source of stress relief for me, so it should come as no surprise that I’m spending a lot of time in my kitchen right now 🙂 One of the projects I decided to take head-on is learning to make sourdough bread and part of that is having starter discard. You might remember the sourdough biscuits I shared last week, and today I’m back with cinnamon rolls.

Easy Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls

To be fair, I actually attempted this recipe following the same recipe I did for the biscuits, I just doubled it and added some milk and sugar to make the dough a bit sweeter. With baking, I feel like things are often hit and miss. Throw in sourdough starter and you really are just rolling the dice until you figure things out for sure. 

Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

While my cinnamon rolls were delicious, there were a few things I would have done differently. For starters, I thought my sourdough discard wasn’t quite at “active” status yet, more just “discard” status, but I was very wrong. My rolls rose in a way I was not anticipating, so it’s safe to say the fermentation process was much further along than I had initially thought.

Second, because I had a fear in my head of them rising too much (and also because I have no chill), I baked them after only about four hours of rising. 

I dug around on the internet a bit and came upon Baking Sense’s Sourdough Cinnamon Buns recipe and it’s all the same ingredients I used, but her measurements are more precise than what I did by throwing in a little bit of this and little bit of that. (face palm)

The one thing I will say is that for my filling all I did was swipe 6 tbsp of butter across the dough, then sprinkled on my mixture of 1/2 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 1 teaspoon Calicutt’s Autumn Harvest. I didn’t do an egg wash and it worked great!

I also enlisted the help of my mom on FaceTime, because this was my first time making homemade cinnamon rolls and I was honestly kind of afraid of messing it up. I’m SO glad she helped me, because 1. I was going to from the short end of the dough instead of the long end and 2. I had no idea how to easily portion the cuts. She walked me through both. Moms are the best, aren’t they?

If you need a good hack for making cuts, take your long roll of dough and slice it in half, then slice each side in half, then slice each of those pieces in half. Do this until you have cut each piece into 1-inch pieces. Easy peasy! Can you tell I was kind of perplexed by my mom’s method? 😉

I made sure to give the rolls enough room in the pan (or so I thought), but they definitely all rose together, which isn’t necessarily bad, just makes them a bit harder to pull apart post-bake. 

For the icing, I whipped 3 tbsp butter and powdered sugar with a little bit of Nutpods French Vanilla Creamer. The result was buttercream-like topping (it’s just what I had readily available – I’m sure cream cheese would have been good, too!) and I spread it on top of the rolls hot from the oven. 

Dane and I enjoyed them right away and it’s safe to say we will probably never buy cinnamon rolls at the store ever again. Because the icing was butter-based, re-heating them resulted in a buttery, gooey topping that I will 100% make again, because I think it helped the rolls themselves from drying out. 

Special thanks to Dane for helping me to capture this recipe and FaceTime baking lesson with my mom 🙂 If you make these delicious cinnamon rolls, I would love to hear what you think!