I never know whether to appreciate or scoff at all the “recipe” posts on random social media sites that are basically slapping together three pre-packaged ingredients and calling it dinner. On one hand, I’m not so much with the time-having and the chopping and dicing and the farmer’s-marketing and all that. On the other hand, some of it just seems kinda… gross. I mean, how much cream cheese can you possibly eat in a week, really?
But every once in a while one of them just sticks with me. One that just seems like a clever little idea that I’ve gotta wonder why it’s not A Thing. And who’s to say it’s not ‘real’ cooking? It’s food, innit? And I made a mess in my kitchen to get it, right? And a step above shoving a frozen pizza in the oven. Which is also cooking. DON’T JUDGE.
So here’s what you wanna do. Get yourself a package or two of those cinnamon rolls in a tube. You know, the ones the grocery store keeps next to the butter and eggs and stuff. Make sure you get the big ones, because you need them to unroll and the little ones are just indented on the top with a curlicue. (Trust me on this one. It’s not okay.) Also buy some nice bacon.
Cook your bacon to a point just below “crispy.” You want it to still be flexible, but cooked. Depending on how big your bacon slices are, you want one per cinnamon roll: if you’ve got a tube of five rolls, make five slices of bacon. I will let you do the math on multiples of tubes, and the reading to check each tube’s roll-count. There’s only so much I can help you with from this side of the internet, folks.
While you’re cooking the bacon, follow the instructions on the cinnamon roll package about preheating your oven and greasing pans and whatnot. Pop open the tube and pull out the cinnamon rolls.
Unroll the cinnamon rolls so the cinnamon-coated side is up.
Yes, they are no longer cinnamon rolls. They are cinnamon strips. Just go with me here.
When the bacon’s cooked as much as you can get it without crossing over into crispy, take it out of the pan and blot off as much grease as you can. Then lay one piece of bacon on top of each cinnamon strip, and roll the whole thing back up into a spiral.
You now have cinnamon bacon rolls.
Or rather, you will after you’ve baked them. Do not eat them yet! You must wait!
Put the cinnamon bacon rolls into your prepared pan and bake them as directed on the cinnamon roll package. Spread the frosting on top, because that’s what it’s for. THEN you can eat them. Though you may want to let them cool off a bit, but that’s on you.
THINGS I LEARNED:
- The bacon may be wider than the cinnamon roll. If you roll the bacon in so that it’s even with the bottom edge, some bacon will stick out of the top and get all nice and crispy. And it will look FANCY.
- When unrolling the cinnamon rolls, the cinnamon…stuff sometimes falls out in chunks. I will assume that’s because the delicious cinnamon sauce solidified whilst chilled… and not think about it too much.
- The bacon adds additional moisture (and obviously, fat) to the cinnamon rolls. Even if you like a soft cinnamon roll, you’ll probably want to let them bake a little longer than directed so everything gets cooked all the way through. Otherwise you’ll get mushy or raw-ish cinnamon rolls.
- Popping open tubes of cinnamon rolls is still fun.
- I can’t get this mashup out of my head, even though this is bacon CINNAMON ROLLS, not pancakes:
Let me know what you’re making in YOUR kitchen lab!
