When it comes to indulgent treats, there’s nothing tastier than a cinnamon roll. Made with enriched dough (which contains fat), these sweet bread-based snacks are filled with butter, sugar and cinnamon, and topped with a rich cream cheese frosting.
As an avid baker, these are some of my favorite pastries to make, even if they take a lot of time. Although you can buy ready-made dough at the grocery store, I prefer to make my own, but the rising time required to make dough from scratch and the 30-minute baking time means that in total, making cinnamon rolls takes almost three hours.
While there’s nothing I can do to shorten the rising time for homemade batter, air fryers are great for creating an evenly browned crispy finish, often in a shorter time. This left me wondering if cooking them in an air fryer might offer a better result than my traditional method of cooking? While a stove top can evenly brown the top of a cinnamon bun, the sides are often pale, even if crispy – unlike the ones I buy from a bakery.
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Read on to find out what happened when we baked cinnamon rolls in an air fryer, or if you’ve already decided to invest in an air fryer, check out the best prices now:
Here is the bit of science
When baking bread, medium temperatures are best because they ensure that the cinnamon rolls cook completely, so they are soft and chewy rather than raw and dense. It also ensures that the crust is crispy and evenly browned, without burning.
In my conventional stove, using a temperature of 356 F / 180 degrees is perfect for the cinnamon rolls, but as mentioned before, they take about 20 minutes to bake. On top of that, there are another 10 minutes left for the oven to reach the desired temperature. While they’re still delicious, they’re often not as brown and crispy as those bought from a bakery.
Air fryers have a smaller cavity than traditional stovetops, which means hot air circulates more evenly around food while cooking and they also heat up faster than conventional ovens. Together, this means they can crisp and brown food more evenly and faster than if using traditional cooking methods.
I have the Instant Vortex Plus, which currently tops our list of the best air fryers, and can bake, roast, reheat and dehydrate as well as air fry. However, when the cook mode is used, the hot air does not circulate as quickly as in the air fryer mode.
This means the finish isn’t as crisp and crunchy and brown – which is great for softer bakers, like a Victoria sponge – but in the case of the cinnamon rolls I want crunch and dark brown instead only soft and lightly colored, so in this case I was content to use the device as an air fryer. All that remained was to cook.
let’s cook
Over the past few years, I’ve tried several different cinnamon roll recipes and found that while some aspects of a recipe work, others don’t. So I opted for my own hybrid method, which uses the dough enriched with this BBC Good Food recipe.
However, if you are short on time and can plan ahead, it is possible to prepare and rise this dough in advance, then put it in an oiled plastic container and freeze it.
Take out of the freezer a few hours before you need it and let it thaw at room temperature. Then follow the steps below to fill and cut the cinnamon rolls.
As for the buttery, lightly spiced filling, after much trial and error I settled on using 2.1 oz / 60 g of soft butter spread over the dough, then sprinkled with a mixture of 3 oz / 85g dark muscovado sugar and 1.5 tsp cinnamon.
I combined the ingredients for the dough and let it rise for 1.5 hours, then rolled it into a rectangle 15.7 x 9.8 inches / 40 x 25 cm (lxw) wide and spread over filling.
Using the long edge of the rectangle, I rolled the dough into a long sausage shape (similar to how you would roll a Swiss roll) and cut it into 11 equal portions (I always slice each edge to m sure the rolls are neat before cutting into equal sizes, which means I get 11 rolls rather than 12). I then left them to proof for another 30 minutes.
Once the cinnamon rolls were ready to bake, I turned on the air fryer and set the baking temperature to 356 F / 180 degrees. I used my previous experience of cooking in an air fryer – for example when I found out about this game changing hack to make fries even better in an air fryer and when I made fried chicken to compete with KFC in an air fryer, coupled with researching air fryer cinnamon roll recipes (all of which used pre-made batter, by the way) and settled on a 10 minute cook time – exactly half the time it takes to cook in an oven.
However, when I went to place the cinnamon rolls in the air fryer, I encountered my first problem – the air fryer basket was not large enough to fit all 11 cinnamon rolls. I managed to fit seven rolls comfortably on the crisper of the air fryer basket, setting the rest aside to cook on afterwards.
The Instant Vortex Plus has a shake reminder feature, which alerts you halfway through the cooking process so you can shake or turn the food in the air fryer drawer to make sure every inch is crispy and crisp. However, as for the cinnamon rolls, they don’t need to be golden brown on the bottom as well as the top, just baked, so I just ignored that notification while baking.
Verdict
When it came to the end of the cooking time, I peeked into the air fryer and was extremely impressed. The cinnamon rolls were crispy and evenly browned on top, but the sides were still as pale as when using a stove top. I pulled out the roll closest to the front of the air fryer drawer, to check that it was fully cooked inside.
When I sliced it, the dough was soft and spongy, indicating that it was cooked through. All I had to do was top them with the sweet, sticky mixture of powdered sugar and cream cheese and fill them.
As I started removing the remaining rolls for the air fryer, I suddenly spotted a massive error. Some of the spicy buttery filling had seeped from the buns and onto the crisper plate, with some dripping into the air fryer basket.
The crusty plate is dishwasher safe, making cleanup easy and requires the same effort as baking on a tray in the oven. The air fryer basket is another story – as on this model, it must be cleaned by hand (although some air fryers have dishwasher-safe baskets), which means there has been a little more time spent cleaning than I would have liked.
To make sure that wasn’t the case with the second batch, I positioned them on a round baking sheet and placed it on a crusty plate in the air fryer. This turned out even better than using an air fryer alone, as the metal tray reflected hot air off the sides of the rolls, creating crispy, evenly browned sides and tops.
I shared the pastries with my partner, who was very impressed and unaware that they had been baked differently than my usual method.
It’s clear that an air fryer can really improve cinnamon rolls by ensuring that the sides are crispy and evenly browned as well as the tops, without compromising their quality. I will definitely not be baking them again.
Although in the future I will always use an extra oven tray to hold the cinnamon rolls while baking to make sure I get the perfect result every time. If you like these sweets as much as I do, I highly recommend you go there too.
