Today is Valentine’s Day, so by law, I am required to make a “romantic” post or else the goons at Hallmark will use my dough hook to gouge out my kneecaps. Therefore, you’re getting some pretty easy Nutella or cinnamon stuffed heart shaped rolls.
Since I’m single, and will therefore be eating these by myself at 2 in the morning while watching SyFy channel reruns, I made a small batch. If you want more than 16 rolls, feel free to double (or quadruple) everything.
BREAD:
¾ cup water
¾ tbsp yeast
¼ cup sugar (1/2 cup if you like your rolls sweeter)
½ tsp salt
1 egg
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp red food coloring
2 cups flour
FILLING:
2 tbsp melted butter
⅓ cup brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
– OR a heaping mound of Nutella
Start by mixing your yeast, water, and sugar. After ten minutes, your yeast should be celebrating their unexpected reanimation by throwing quite the bubbly party.
Add the sugar, salt, egg, oil, and food coloring. In retrospect, I should’ve used 1 1/2 tsp of red food coloring and 2-3 drops of blue to give it depth. Learn from my mistakes.
If you like your cinnamon rolls super sweet, this is the time to add more sugar. You can double it to 1/2 cup, or go wild and put in 3/4 cup. I like mine a little less sweet so the icing doesn’t make each bite overwhelming, but your tastes may vary. If you’re serving these to other people’s children, succumb to temptation and sugar them all the way up.
Add in the flour, mix it all up, and knead in a stand mixer for 6 minutes or by hand for 6-10. You want a pretty firm ball here, with about the same feel as challah dough.
Let the dough rise for about an hour, or until it doubles in size.
Punch the dough down. Spread out some flour to keep it from sticking then roll it into a rectangle. Slice your rectangle in half. Otherwise, much like your real heart after a good valentine’s day meal, your heart rolls will be so oversaturated with fattening fillings they’ll lose shape and threaten to explode.
Since I was making two types of rolls, I spread the left side with a nice layer of Nutella.
To create a heart shape, start by gently but firmly folding the edges inwards. You want to roll both sides towards the middle, keeping both sides roughly the same size.
Once you’ve achieved two linked tubes, cut off the scrap at one end. Now make neat, 2 inch slices.
Making these otherwise round things heart shaped isn’t that tricky. Pick each slice up by the top, at the most rounded part of the heart. Now pinch the bottom, where you want your heart to have a point.
You should end up with something that looks like this. As you can see, if you’d over-stuffed the hearts, the round upper parts would be too big and the pointy bottom would look like a confusing vestigial tail.
Instead, you want rolls that resemble a happy vagina with symbolic fallopian tubes inside. After all, Valentine’s Day is all about the lovin’.
Let your tasty lady parts rise for another half an hour. Right before baking, re-pinch the pointy ends to help the rolls keep their shape.
Bake the rolls for 15-17 minutes. You want to pull them out before they turn golden brown. We can pretend that’s so the filling stays moister, but really, it’s because red dough with a brown crust looks like it has some kind of unfortunate infection.
When they come out of the oven they look like full, lovely…agh! What happened in there?
Wait. Calm down. That’s just what Nutella does when it bakes. Your hearts didn’t pick up a crusty infection from the oven’s warm affection.
While what just happened in the oven is perfectly natural, we are going to hide the evidence under a layer of more Nutella.
Much better.
Remember the other half of your dough?
I don’t really recommend turning it into cinnamon sugar filled rolls instead of Nutella filled ones. Basically, here’s what happens after you slather the dough in butter and cover that in cinnamon and brown sugar.
Instead of the lovely lady parts achieved by the Nutella rolls, the butter and cinnamon ones end up disturbingly crunchy. For some reason, they also don’t inflate as much. I let them rise for a full hour and they never filled out as much as the Nutella ones did. The butter also made it a lot harder to get these suckers to stick together.
I think these came out looking more like a close-up nostril shot of an angry Star Trek alien.
However, they puffed up okay once baked at 350F for 15 minutes. As a ring, they’re actually kind of pretty. Individual, they’re crusty alien noses. That may come in hand some day, though.
To pretty them up, make a basic icing from 1/4 cup melted butter, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 cup water and copious amounts of red food coloring. Carefully move the whole ring to a serving plate, paint them up with extra sugary icing goodness, and try not to hold one up in front of your nose while making snorting noises. I failed at this last part, but maybe you’re a stronger person than I.
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Bitchin’ Bread Battle: Enter the Madness
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 1: Nutella Challah
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 2: Banana (Catan) Bread
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 3: Rosemary Garlic Bread
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 4: Ood Rolls
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 5: Not Quite King’s Hawaiian Rolls
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 6: Make it Dough
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 7: Wookie Pull Apart Bread
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 8-11: Settlers of Catan Bread Board
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 12: How NOT to Make a Sandworm
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 13: Valentine’s Day Anatomical Human Heart Pull Apart Bread
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 14: Nutella or Cinnamon Roll Hearts
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 15: Outback Copycat Bread
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 16: Return of the Sandworm
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 17: Vegan Popplers
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 18: Woodbury Bleeding Zombie Victim Loaf
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 19: Alien Xenomorph Pretzel Bread Eggs
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 20: Aperture Laboratories Bleeding Summer Strawberry Lemon Bread
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 21: Roasted Garlic Bread in Meatloaf Grease
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 22: Wonder Woman
Bitchin’ Bread Battle Day 23: Watermelon Bread