The Oh Orlando kitchen has been back in action for this week’s blog trying to recreate another of our favourite snacks – cinnamon rolls.
Now we love anything with cinnamon in to be absolutely honest, we have cinnamon porridge at home, we always add cinnamon to apple pies and stewed apples to have with our pancakes. When we’re in Florida the cinnamon craziness reaches new levels! Cinnamon rolls feature quite heavily in our snacking, and in fact lots of places we love smell completely of cinnamon and we find that both comforting and very very American/Floridian. It’s one of those smells that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy and homely – and that is perhaps why we feel at home in so many Orlando locations – like Cinnabon (ooh what we’d give to be sitting outside there in CityWalk right now), The Christmas Shop in Disney Springs or Magic Kingdom, looking at pretty ornaments wondering if we can get them home all in one piece, Cracker Barrel, the restaurant when we know we’re about to eat something delicious, or the store part when we have armfuls of interesting and tasty purchases.
Have I (Tracey here today!) just waxed lyrical about cinnamon for a whole paragraph, yes I appear to have. Soooooo, back to the baking and cinnamon rolls in particular. Now these are available at lots of different locations in an around Orlando, and some of our absolute favourites are in the Disney parks. The delicious and quite large one at Gaston’s Tavern is absolutely to die for, gorgeous and fresh and chewy and super cinnamony (is that even a word – no, but I’ll leave it in). Covered in delicious white icing and you can even ask for extra icing and the pour it all over the top too. Big enough to share, its satisfying and definitely has enough sugar to get you through the next few hours of racing around the Magic Kingdom.
There’s also the Cinnamon Bun Bake at The Garden Grill restaurant, which you get as part of the Chip n’ Dale Harvest Feast breakfast. That’s the starting point of the breakfast – how delicious. I don’t know how we’ll manage to not fill up on this before the rest of the breakfast items arrive (we have this breakfast already booked for our next trip – ever the optimists hopefully this year, but if not definitely re-booking this breakfast for whenever our trip is moved to).
The most fun and giant cinnamon bun is the Warm Colossal Cinnamon roll at Kusafiri Coffee Shop and Bakery at Animal Kingdom. Colossal – tick, cinnamony – tick, warm – tick, sticky with lots of icing – tick and then……….the best bit – it’s Mickey shaped. Hooray. Can a cinnamon roll be any more perfect than being Mickey shaped, fun and tastiness all in one massive snack. We love it and our love of it’s inspired us to have a go at baking it.
I have had to learn how to make cinnamon rolls as a complete beginner, as although I bake quite regularly, I am not particularly good with yeast! The first problem we encountered was the lack of dried yeast available. The current Covid restrictions and lockdown has meant lots of people have started baking, and filled their time baking, which is no bad thing, but it did leave stocks a little depleted for some time. A very very nice lady in our local grocery store (Tesco) asked what we were looking for, and then explained that they were totally out of stock of it. She then went to the in-store bakery and asked one of the bakers if they could help and a lovely baker gave us quite a chunk of fresh yeast! How exciting and kind of them. There was enough for me to have several goes at the dough and also take some over for my dad to use as he bakes a lot too (I just dropped the yeast on their drive for them before you all start thinking I broke lockdown rules).
I got quite into the kneading of the dough – very therapeutic! To make the cinnamon rolls as authentically American as I could I used an American recipe and it was a great one, with the dough only needing one proving, so not too time consuming.
I made a batch of normal little cinnamon rolls (our waistlines are starting to expand a little too much during lockdown so didn’t want to make too many giant versions) and then had a little go at making a Mickey shaped one too. We didn’t make it as giant as the Kusafiri Coffee Shop one – see expanding waistline reference above – but it was Mickey shaped nonetheless. They proved quite nicely and almost doubled in size and then we popped them in the oven. The smell of the cinnamon and sweet bread baking wafted through the whole house. You’ll see from the photos that I got better at making the rolls and learned to roll them tighter with each batch we made.
Warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven and ready for the fun bit – drizzling the baked rolls with delicious white icing. Rob got involved with that bit too as you can imagine. And there we have it – tadaaaaaa! Sticky warm cinnamon rolls.
Were they delicious? Yes they were. Not quite Gastons Tavern or Kusafiri, but pretty good actually. I think they probably taste a whole lot better if you’re actually standing there in the Magic Kingdom, or Animal Kingdom, in the Florida sunshine checking your MyDisney App to see when your next Fastpass is or on CityWalk switching from Islands to Universal and stopping for a quick energy boosting snack on the way. But as a close second we’ll take it. It was fun to make them and it’s great to make a snack we associate with such lovely happy times – cheered us up at a confusing and difficult time.
We long for the day we will be back in the sunshine in Orlando, cinnamon bun in hand, be it at Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Garden Grill, Cinnabon or anywhere else that serves a delicious cinnamony snack. Cinnamon snacks are where it’s at! Maybe this year (insert big dollop of positivity and optimism here), maybe next – but whenever it is – Orlando and your cinnamon snacks – we are coming for you, clutching our dollars and salivating with excitement.
Until next time, whichever side of the pond you are on, stay safe, stay well, wash your hands and we hope to see you all real soon. Love to you and yours.
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