Breadsmith cinnamon roll

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Jeff| Comments Off on Breadsmith cinnamon roll

The short:

The best one so far. 7/10

The long:

This is a great roll.

Unlike the others, it doesn’t have thick cream cheese frosting, but the icing/glaze that it does offer provides the right touch of sweetness.

The cinnamon flavor is delightfully strong.

The spiral layers of the roll are easily separable for incremental consumption.

The size is perfect: not too large, not too small.

Breadsmith cinnamon roll

Breadsmith cinnamon roll. (Camera phone photo; sorry)

The only downside is the consistency of the bread.  It’s a bit on the overmoist/gummy side.  I would have preferred an ever-so-slightly drier interior.

Still, overall, very good.  Perhaps the best one so far.

Key stats:

  • $2.25 + tax  per roll
  • Icing, like a glaze.  Didn’t appear to be cream cheese based.

Where to find it:

Breadsmith

1579 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN

Posted in Uncategorized

French Meadow Bakery cinnamon roll

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Jeff| Comments Off on French Meadow Bakery cinnamon roll

The short:

Yum! Unfortunately, a bit stale by the time it was sold to me. Overall good, especially because of the frosting. 7/10

The long:

The French Meadow Bakery bills their cinnamon rolls as “giant,” and they aren’t kidding: one of these monsters fills an entire plate and weighs in at close to a pound.  And boy oh boy, is it good.

French Meadow Bakery cinnamon roll

French Meadow Bakery cinnamon roll

The texture of the bread is soft and tender.  It yields to a fork quite nicely, and you’ll want to use one: cramming one of these rolls in your mouth is a recipe for both a sore jaw and a frosted nose.

Oh, the frosting.  Wonderful.  A nice cream cheese base, heavy on the butter.  Sweet, but not too sweet.  Lots of structure.  It’s even strong enough to hold up a fork!

Frosting so dense, it will hold up a fork

Frosting so dense, it will hold up a fork

The downsides to this otherwise excellent example of a cinnamon roll are that they start going stale by mid-afternoon, and they are ungodly unhealthy.  I’m not sure about the exact calorie count, but a rough estimate puts it somewhere around 2000 calories per roll.

Enjoy the roll, then go for a run.  A long, long run.

Key stats:

  • $3.95 + tax
  • 440 g mass (almost a pound!)
  • Cream cheese frosting (very good)
  • Time since baked when eaten: most of the day(?)
  • Temperature when eaten: ambient

Where to get it:

The French Meadow Bakery Cafe

2610 Lyndale Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN

Posted in Bakery rolls

Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Jeff| 39 Comments

The short:

Yuck.  Why did I buy these? 0/10

The long:

Pillsbury cinnamon rolls from a tube promise warm, sticky goodness on nearly a moment’s notice.  Good idea, bad execution.

Pillsbury roll

Pillsbury cinnamon roll. How do they make the icing so white?!

Let’s start with the size.  These things — I hesitate to call them “rolls” — are about 30% the mass of yesterday’s Byerly’s rolls.  Three or four bites, and they’re gone.  Let me put it a different way: these rolls are so small that they have roughly the same mass as a slice of sandwich bread.

And are those tasty bites?  Heck no!

The texture is unappealingly homogeneous.  I’m not sure what sort of trickery Pillsbury employed to make these things rise while they’re baking, but the chemistry seems to have contributed to them coming out as one big lump instead of a multi-layered delight.  You know how much fun it is to unroll each layer of a cinnamon roll and enjoy its segmented goodness?  Can’t do that with these.

Pillsbury roll with bite

A Pillsbury roll with a bite. Note the lack of layers/spirals

Things really go downhill once you get a tiny piece in your mouth.  The taste is like… something… hmmm… a chemical factory?  It’s bad.

Very little cinnamon flavor.  Horrendous artificial “cream cheese” icing — no actual cream cheese, just partially hydrogenated oils and god-knows-what chemicals.  Seriously, that icing is really, really awful.  It’s about as close to real cream cheese frosting in flavor as watermelon Jolly Ranchers are to real watermelons.

You might think you’ll be saved if you stop after that first bite, but how wrong you’ll be: that fake-as-a-politician taste will linger longer than your unemployed college buddy surfing your couch.

Fortunately, I had a roommate to pawn these off on, thus saving my palate from chemical doom.  (Thanks for taking one for the team, Rob!)

Key stats:

  • 40 g/roll
  • $2.69/8 = $0.34/roll + tax
  • “Cream cheese” frosting (artificially flavored)
  • Time since baked when eaten: fresh from oven
  • Temperature when eaten: warm

Where to get them:

Don’t.  Ok, you really want some?  Why?  And are you seriously asking me where to buy refrigerated ready-to-bake cinnamon rolls in a tube?  Sheesh.

Posted in Home baked rolls