We Tried BraveTart’s Wildly Popular One-Bowl Cinnamon Roll (We’re Not Sure It’s Worth the Mess)

Stella Parks — otherwise known as BraveTart — is a pastry chef, cookbook author, and recipe maven with a penchant for thoughtful versions of classic recipes. Seeing as she’s the queen of classic sweets, it only seemed appropriate to include her recipe in this week’s cinnamon roll recipe showdown. That, and her One-Bowl, Overnight Cinnamon Rolls are wildly popular.

One glance at Parks’ recipe and it’s clear she’s used nearly every trick in her pastry arsenal to create the tastiest, best-looking, and smartest cinnamon roll recipe out there. But would the final results reflect her efforts? Here’s my honest review of BraveTart’s recipe.

Get the recipe: BraveTart’s One-Bowl, Overnight Cinnamon Rolls

My first learning: A one-bowl recipe works really well for simpler baked goods like cake, but not as well for a multi-component recipe like cinnamon rolls. BraveTart’s recipe has you make frosting, the filling, and the dough all in the same bowl (the bowl of your stand mixer), but because you have to clean it out between each step, it sort of defeats the simplicity and ease of a one-bowl recipe.

BraveTart’s icing is a simple mix of cream cheese, vanilla, and powdered sugar, which makes for a pretty gooey mixture. Once it’s made, you’ll transfer it to a zip-top bag, then start the filling. You’ll cream together the ingredients for the filling — butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt — with an electric mixer, which makes it easier to spread and makes the rolls sturdier for slicing. It also makes for a better-looking roll, since the swirl is more pronounced.

To make the dough, you’ll whisk together the dry ingredients, melt butter on the stovetop, then stir in milk and yogurt. The yogurt gives this dough a lot of flavor, and makes for a more tender crumb in the finished rolls. You’ll add the yogurt mixture to the dry ingredients, then knead with the dough hook. The resulting dough is supple and easy to roll out.

The dough rises for 90 minutes at room temperature before you fill, roll, and slice it. There’s an option to add pecans to the filling, and while they add a nice texture, they certainly push the rules of what I’d consider a classic cinnamon roll. After rolling and slicing (BraveTart prefers to use unflavored floss for slicing), you’ll pop ’em into the fridge until morning. After their overnight rise, they’ll be puffed and fluffy, and will sit at room temperature for 30 minutes while the oven heats.

BraveTart’s cinnamon rolls had the longest bake time of the four recipes I tried. They bake at 350°F for 45 minutes covered with foil, and then another 15 minutes uncovered, which made them the brownest of the bunch.  

Despite the promise of these cinnamon rolls being a one-bowl feat, the recipe really stretched to accomplish this. An extra bowl for the frosting would have eliminated wasting a plastic bag, and the filling didn’t need to be creamed to make it delicious. True, both the filling and frosting were very photogenic, but they were fussy to make and neither delivered flavor that reflected the work put into them.

Although the dough itself was incredibly forgiving and rolled out with ease, these weren’t the soft, luscious cinnamon rolls I was expecting from the internet’s beloved pastry queen.

1. Go ahead and dirty a few bowls. All the extra steps required to make this a one-bowl recipe aren’t worth it. Instead, mix up the filling and dough as directed (back to back in the stand mixer), but mix up the icing separately and store it in a bowl overnight. This way, you can make the icing while the dough has its first rise.

2. Add a little butter to the icing. The all-cream cheese icing was too sticky for me. Adding just 2 tablespoons of room-temperature butter in place of some of the cream cheese would make for a more balanced frosting.

3. Check the baking time, and err on the shorter side. Nearly one hour of baking seemed to dry these rolls out. After the first 35 minutes of baking, check the temperature of the rolls by poking a thermometer through the foil into the center of the rolls, and determine total baking time accordingly. You’re aiming for an internal temperature of 200°F for the finished rolls.

Rating: 7/10

Have you tried BraveTart’s One-Bowl, Overnight Cinnamon Rolls? Tell us what you thought!