How to Make Frosted Spudnut Cinnamon Bun Cupcakes – Cinnamon Roll Cupcakes
Do you start salivating when you walk through an airport and smell those Cinnabon desserts baking? It makes my mouth water and I have to apply great self control to just walk on by! Well now you can make those delicious desserts at home, where you do not have to pass them by and can bank some calories for a week or so beforehand – so that you can indulge!
It is not that difficult. Again I turn to Prepared Pantry to help me out the short and easy way. They have something called a Spudnut mix. And it is incredibly easy to make cinnamon bun cupcakes when using that mix – they come out fluffy and with terrific flavor as opposed to the ones I tried to make from scratch which come out doughy and hard.
The concept is simple: Make mini cinnamon buns and bake them in cupcake liners in a muffin pan. They’re cute and they’re a more modest size, just right for most of us. Remember all those calories you have banked? You could even have two!
Here’s how to make them. If you are using a bread or roll recipe, you may need to adjust the quantities in these directions.
Step 1: Mix the dough and let it rise.
Mix the dough according to package instructions. If you are using Prepared Pantry’s Spudnut Cinnamon Bun Mix, be precise in your water measurement. Your dough should be soft and almost sticky. The softer your dough, the lighter your buns will be.
Put your dough in a lightly greased bowl, cover it, and let it rise. We stick the bowl in plastic proofing bags but you can cover your bowl with greased plastic wrap. Because the dough is soft, it will stick to ungreased surfaces.
Let the dough rise until it is puffy. The tendency is to be in too big of a hurry. How long will depend on how warm your kitchen is. Yeast is very sensitive to temperature. In a cooler kitchen it may take an hour and a half or more. If you want it to rise faster, put it in a warmer place like a sunny window sill or on top of the refrigerator.
Step 2: Form the buns.
To form the buns, you want the dough rolled as thinly as possible and into a narrow strip.
Dust the countertop lightly with flour. We use a flour and sugar shaker to get an nice, light coating of flour.
Form a long log with the dough about an inch and one-half inches in diameter. With a rolling pin, begin rolling the dough lengthwise. If you are using our mix, it will have a lot of gluten and therefore springback—the dough will try to bounce back rather than stay rolled and thin. Be a little patient. You may need to press firmly and roll it for several minutes. It helps to let the dough rest for several minutes and then come back and put the finishing touch on your strip of dough.
Your rolled strip of dough should be about nine inches wide by 32 inches long.
Soften 1/3 cup of butter in the microwave but don’t melt it. It should be just soft enough to spread. Spread the butter evenly across the dough strip to 1/4 inch of the edges.
Take the cinnamon sugar packet from the mix and sprinkle the cinnamon sugar evenly across the butter. If you are not using our mix, stir cinnamon into 1/2 cup of sugar. Be sure to use a very good cassia cinnamon; the cinnamon will carry much of the flavor of the buns. You can use as much cinnamon as you want. If you are using a good cinnamon, you can use as much as two tablespoons.
Starting on the long edge closest to you, start rolling the dough pinwheel style into a log with the cinnamon trapped inside. As you complete the log, pinch the edges to the log to seal in the filling. Pinch the ends of the log to seal them. Form the log with your hands, stretching it or compressing it in places, to make in roughly uniform in diameter and 32 inches long.
Fill a muffin pan with paper liners. You will make 32 buns. You may wish to spray the insides of the liners with a baking spray so that the cooled buns do not stick to them.
Cut the 32-inch log into four equal pieces and slice each of the four pieces into eight pieces so that you have 32 cinnamon buns. As you slice them, place them in the paper liners. Don’t worry about the slices being too neat.
Cover and let the buns rise. Again this is easier with a proofing bag so that you can tent the covering over the rolls. Let the dough rise until it is very soft. An hour is not too long in most kitchens.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Bake the rolls for twelve minutes if you are using a dark muffin pan. Lighter pans will take longer. We have found that if we bake them longer, the buns tend to be crusty. Less and they’re a little gooey. But every oven is different.
When the buns are done, remove the buns in the liners to a cooling rack. Spoon frosting over them, partially covering the tops.
If you are using Prepared Pantry’s mix, you will find a frosting recipe. Prepared Pantry’s premade cinnamon bun frosting is perfect. You can use a recipe for a powdered sugar or cream cheese icing.
Serve these fresh. They are best when warm.
Suggestions for extra rolls
Most of us don’t have the three muffins pans necessary to bake all thirty plus rolls at once. Put the first dozen in your pan and the rest of the mini bun dough pieces in paper liners lined up on a baking sheet. Cover and bake the buns in batches fifteen minutes apart as you free up your muffin pan.
If you don’t want to bake all the buns the same day, cover the pan with a proofing bag and place it in the refrigerator before letting the buns rise. As the dough becomes cooler, the yeast will become dormant and the dough will quit rising. You can store your unbaked rolls for up to four days this way.
To bake, remove the chilled buns in the pan from the refrigerator, let the dough warm to room temperature, and allow the buns to rise. This may take several hours.
As another way to store them, baked but unfrosted buns can be wrapped and frozen. To serve, let them thaw and reheat them in an oven set at 250 degrees. Then add the frosting to the warm rolls.
What you’ll need
Try the Prepared Pantry’s Spudnut Cinnamon Bun Mix. Your favorite recipe will work but this mix is delightful.
Try these cinnamon bun mixes and make these cute buns the easy way » and here is the short cut for all those working parents who don’t have time to mess around making frosting.
The cinnamon bun premade frosting is the perfect complement, designed for cinnamon buns. It comes with in a tub with snap on lids so that you can use the frosting for multiple batches.
Get the cinnamon bun frosting here.
