- Today on "Stephanie's Recipe Journal," we are making these darling pumpkin cinnamon rolls.

I'm gonna teach you how to make that pumpkin shape, and we have a bonus recipe using pumpkin seeds.

I love this recipe because it's so easy to make and it really doesn't take a whole lot of active time.

You're just waiting for the dough to rise a bit and look what you end up with.

So, grab a cup of coffee, pull up a chair, and come hang out with me.

(spirited music) (gentle music) The first thing we need to do to get our pumpkin cinnamon rolls going is add one tablespoon of active dry yeast, to 2/3 cup heavy cream and 1/3 cup milk that I have already just warmed up slightly.

Give it a little mix and set it aside while we're putting our other ingredients in the bowl.

So now, in the bowl of a stand mixer, I'm going to add four cups of all-purpose flour and to that, we have 1/3 cup of granulated sugar, a teaspoon and a half of salt, then our pumpkin.

Did you guys know that pumpkin has lots of vitamins and minerals?

It really is quite nutritious, but there are also over a hundred varieties of pumpkins.

Some pumpkins are better for carving, some pumpkins are better for eating, but frankly, the one that I use the most comes out of a can that I find on my grocery store shelf.

So, let's get our canned pumpkin, which is delicious, into our mix here.

We also need one egg.

Right into the bowl.

And one of my absolute favorite ingredients or spices is nutmeg, and you can get nutmeg already ground, but honestly, why would you?

It just smells so wonderful when you grate it fresh.

So, it's about an eighth of a teaspoon that we're putting in here.

And now just into the mix, we can go ahead and I think we, our yeast is starting to wake up a little bit, so let's go ahead and pour our milk and our cream with our yeast into our dough.

And now onto our stand mixer with a dough attachment, and all I'm gonna do is put this on low and just let it do its thing for 15 minutes.

The way we will know that we're ready is the dough will be pulling away from the sides, but still it will be attached to the bottom of the bowl itself.

You saw how we put everything just in the bowl.

We didn't even have to mix it up ahead of time, we didn't have to proof our yeast or anything ahead of time, so it really is just a totally fuss-free dough and really, really easy to do.

And now, see?

I mean, only after a minute or so, the dough is already coming together.

You can see it's pulling away from the sides, but we can still see some of that flour, so we're gonna let it keep going for a while and we'll come back and check it in a few minutes.

So, our dough has been mixing now for almost 15 minutes, and you can see that it's coming away from the top part of the sides, but on the bottom, it's still, there's a lot of dough on the bottom, so I'm just gonna add a tablespoon of all-purpose flour.

I'm just gonna go ahead and add that so that we can get it to the point where it just is pulling a little bit more up from the bottom of the bowl.

And we don't have to let this go for very long.

Just until we see that the dough is coming away, which it is.

All right, we're looking good.

It coaxes out pretty easy.

We're just gonna cover it up and put it aside, let it rise in a warm area of your kitchen, an hour to two hours, and while we're waiting for that, we're gonna go ahead and make the filling.

So now, to make our filling, which, again, is so easy to do, you guys, no mixer, just all by hand, we're gonna start with a half a cup of unsalted butter, and even though it's really nice and soft, I'm gonna pop it in the microwave for about 15 seconds.

We don't wanna melt it all the way.

We just want to soften it up even more.

Here it is.

I didn't melt it.

Just got it even softer than what it was, which is gonna make us so much happier when we're mixing everything in.

So, to our butter now, we are going to add 2/3 cup light brown sugar, and then we are going to add just a fourth of a teaspoon of ginger.

Not a whole lot, but it gives it a nice little warm flavor in there, and our star, cinnamon, we are going to add a tablespoon and a half.

A teaspoon of kosher salt, and once again, my absolute favorite spice ingredient.

We're gonna do about an eighth of a teaspoon of nutmeg.

(gentle music) So, I'm just gonna get it all incorporated and started with a fork, and it's looking pretty mashed up in there, so I'm gonna switch over just to my spatula so I can really get a good kinda mash and a stir.

Okay, so this is looking really good.

We are going to set this aside and we're gonna prep our pans and cut our strings to form our little pumpkins.

(gentle music) So, prepping our pans, easy peasy.

Just parchment paper on a baking sheet and then the strings, and I know for some of you guys, you're gonna be like, "Oh goodness, this is just."

Here's the fussy part, I guess, of the recipe.

Dough is easy.

Cutting strings is easy.

It just is a little tedious.

So, in order to make our pumpkin shapes, we're going to tie these strings around each one of our cut cinnamon rolls, and I like to do enough string so that I'm not like, "Oh my gosh," so worried and fussing about making the little tie, so I make these strings about 10 inches, and again, it's not exact, but I've got a little ruler down here just to help kinda guide me, and then once you have one, right, just keep going.

We need three strings for each roll, and then we'll get ready to roll out our dough.

All right, now look.

Our dough has risen.

It's been sitting out in a warm spot for a couple hours.

We're gonna roll it out.

So, I'm just gonna put a little bit of flour on our board to get these going, and then coax our dough out onto our flour.

(gentle music) Perfect.

And then just because, you know, we've got air bubbles in there.

It's from the yeast, which is exactly what we want it to do, I'm just gonna knead it a couple times, knock some of those air bubbles out, 'cause we want our dough to be nice and smooth and uniform so it will hold all of that delicious cinnamon butter ginger nutmeg filling.

All right.

And I always like to try and give myself a little headstart, and because we're gonna try and roll this out into a rectangular shape, give yourself a little headstart and shape it into a rectangle before you get rolling.

All right, so the dough is pretty easy for rolling, and I mean, you can do this, I mean, as thin as you like.

I like a little bit of dough with my cinnamon rolls and especially because this is pumpkin, I wanna make sure I get as much pumpkin-y flavor in there as I can, so I'm not gonna, like, make these paper thin, but I am gonna roll it out so it's probably, I don't know, like, 16 by 12 maybe.

Something like that.

So, we just keep rolling.

(spirited music) I just love it when a dough is easy and does what you want it to do.

Okay, next up, let's now put our cinnamon butter filling on, and this is easy.

We've got it in a really nice paste consistency, so I'm just gonna put all of it in, or on top of our dough, I should say.

We're just going to spread our filling evenly across our dough.

I'm just gonna leave about a half an inch on that end so our dough can kind of connect to itself when we roll it up.

All right, this is looking good, guys.

Now to roll.

So, I'm just gonna start from here and just start to roll just a little bit at a time.

You want to get this as tight as possible so that, you know, your cinnamon roll when it hits in the oven, it doesn't, like, not that there's anything wrong with it, like, coming apart because that just means it's better for the icing to kinda seep into the open areas, but because we're making these in the shape of pumpkins, we kinda want it to be as tight as we can get it.

So now, here is our open end.

We just wanna press that so that our roll stays together, and I'm gonna flip it so I can see it and then pinch it, just to make sure we stay as together as possible, and then I'm just gonna roll over it a few times, make sure it's nice and even.

So, to cut out our cinnamon rolls, you can use a knife, but if you guys have watched any of my other episodes where we've done something similar to this, I'm just using a piece of this waxed twine.

I'm gonna start by just taking a little piece of the ends off.

I'm still gonna bake these up, but we wanna get to the good action.

My dough is measuring, like, at 12 inches, so we should get at least six.

We might, depending on if my two inches are a little skewed, we might get seven.

These are two inches, but hey, if you're into smaller ones, by all means, you can do an inch and a half, you can do one.

You can do whatever your heart desires.

All right, we're going to tie up each of our rolls to make them look like pumpkins once they are actually baking, and to do that, we need our strings.

I'm taking one string and I'm just gonna form the shape that I want here on the mat.

So, since we're using three for each pumpkin, I'm just making my little star design there with the string like that, and then I'm gonna take one of my rolls, I'm gonna put it right smack in the middle, and I'm just going to start tying these up.

We don't need any fancy knots.

Just a simple little knot.

And don't tie the string too tight because remember, these cinnamon rolls are going to expand.

We're gonna let them rest and they're gonna rise a little bit before we put them in the oven, but once they go to bake, they're going to get bigger and spread even more so, so if we made the strings too tight, we would kinda lose them in the cinnamon roll.

So, here is my third string tied, and then because I like to make my strings a little bit on the bigger side 'cause it helps ease the tying process, you're just gonna gather your short ends of your strings here.

Where's my other?

There's my short end.

And just gonna not get, like, down to the knot, but just, you know, leave about a fourth of an inch of string, and there you have one done.

And then when you're placing it back onto your parchment sheet, then put your tied ends underneath.

So, let's do that again.

Place it in the center and just start tying.

I was looking online and I found some very interesting pumpkin facts that I thought I'd share with you all, and you know, you can take these to your next cocktail party.

So, did you know that over 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkin are produced each year in the U.S.

alone?

Man, oh man, that is quite a lot of pumpkin.

Another fun fact, and you may already know this, but pumpkins are technically a fruit, and that's because they have stems and they have seeds.

So, I thought that was interesting.

They are about 90% water, so officially that makes them a low-calorie food, so there you go, guys.

Eat up your pumpkin.

So, here they are all tied up.

We're just gonna cover them up and set them aside for about another 30 to 40 minutes.

While these guys are doing their thing, you can go ahead and preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

(gentle music) So, while we're waiting for our pumpkin cinnamon rolls to do their second rise, we are going to make some delicious pumpkin seed streusel.

It is so easy, it takes, like, next to no time, and it is out-of-this-world delicious.

So, what we're starting with are two tablespoons of melted butter.

To that, we're adding a half a cup of pumpkin seeds, a fourth a cup of rolled oats, a fourth a cup a brown sugar, a fourth a cup of flour, a half of a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a fourth a teaspoon of kosher salt.

Grab a spoon, spatula, whatever you got, and get those all nice and mixed together.

So, this is certainly yummy on any sort of pumpkin bread you're gonna make or muffins.

It is just out-of-this-world delicious.

So, all we're gonna do now is just spread this onto a parchment-lined tray into the toaster oven for five minutes.

And here they are fresh out of the oven.

You can just let them cool off for a while and then store 'em in a jar or however you'd like to store them.

That is, if they last that long.

(gentle music) Our cinnamon rolls are looking great.

They have risen and our oven has been preheating.

These are going to cook for about 15 minutes.

So, while our rolls are baking, let's go ahead and make the cream cheese icing.

What we need is two sticks of butter and a half of a package of cream cheese, room temperature, nice and soft, and I'm just gonna do this with a hand mixer, so I'm gonna get these guys blended together a bit.

That's good just to get it started, and I'm going to add, I mean, it's not so critical, right, that we measure out everything here for sugar, so this is really gonna be probably a cup and a half total, but I'm gonna do it in stages so I don't get powdered sugar, like, all over.

I'll just get it a little bit around.

So, this is about a half a cup, maybe a little bit more.

'Kay, let me add a little bit more.

(gentle music) Okay, I think that's about a cup.

This is probably gonna do me exactly to the point where I want it, but let's see.

(mixer whirs) Yeah, let me add a little bit of vanilla to this.

Maybe a half of a teaspoon, but you can eyeball it to what you like, and as with any icing, I always like to add just a little bit of salt, so I'm just gonna put a little pinch of salt in there.

Let's mix this up.

(mixer whirs) That is looking good, so now we're just gonna wait for our cinnamon rolls to get finished and we will finish 'em off.

Look at these!

These are some monster pumpkin cinnamon rolls, but I bet they're delicious.

We're gonna transfer 'em over and let them cool just enough that I can get the strings out.

Okay, they're cool enough now that I can handle them safely.

We need to remove all of the strings, so to do that, the easiest way is flip 'em over on the back end, and remember that's where you had all of the ties and the knots.

So, just get a kitchen shears or a scissors, whatever you have, and kinda work it under the strings, cut them through, and then follow them to the front, but be careful, hold onto your roll because you don't want your cinnamon roll to totally fall apart.

You just wanna remove the strings, and see, they come away pretty easy, but I am holding onto the structure of the roll itself so that we don't accidentally come apart, and if there's some errant string, just make sure you kinda move it off to the side so that it doesn't get mixed in with your cinnamon roll, but these guys, so I've loosened them from that end.

I could actually pull them out this way, but I'm gonna flip 'em over so you can see.

So here, we have our cut strings, I'm just taking them out, and there you have a wonderful little pumpkin-shaped pumpkin cinnamon roll.

Let's just ice 'em up.

They're still a little bit warm, which is what I like because then the cream cheese icing kinda gets melty and ooey-gooey in there, and I'm not gonna slather 'em too much because I still want everyone to see that wonderful pumpkin design.

Why did we go to all the bother of all the strings if we were just gonna cover it up with icing, but we need some of that icing there for that.

And we have one more crowning glory here 'cause every pumpkin, of course, has a stem.

So, these are just pecans, whole pecans that I cut in half, and we're just gonna insert them in the center.

All right, there we have it.

Aren't those darling?

So now, I just wanna show you one way that you could plate these up.

So, I'm just gonna put these around, just probably it looks like three will fit nicely kind of on the first row like that, and then we can take the others and just put them, like, a little bit on the side.

We don't wanna mush up the icing too much here from our other cinnamon rolls, but this way, look, they all fit nicely in here, they're nicely displayed, and just to gild the lily a little bit, let's take a little bit of that pumpkin streusel that we made before and just kinda cover the top.

Whew, just a little bit more, and let some of it kinda fall to the side.

Would make a lovely little presentation.

So, here they are, ready for serving.

Ready for your family, your friends, or just you.

I've got here alongside just some colorful napkins and just forks.

People can come as they please.

Pick one up, grab a fork, grab a plate, and voila, they will be one happy camper.

Thanks for hanging out with me today.

I hope you had fun watching me make these darling cinnamon pumpkin rolls, and hey, who knows what we're gonna make on the next episode, but I hope you join me then for another episode of "Stephanie's Recipe Journal."

(gentle music)