Sweet Potato Cinnamon Buns

Who doesn’t love a hot, sticky, sweet cinnamon roll fresh out of the oven?  Crazy people, that’s who!  All joking aside, a hot batch of cinnamon rolls just makes you feel good.  Unfortunately, these little delicious pastries are not quite what you could call healthy.  But what if you could get a healthy dose of vitamin A in each little cinnamon-y bite?

Enter Vegetarian Times, November 2011 recipe for Sweet Potato and Pecan Cinnamon Buns with Maple Glaze (http://www.vegetariantimes.com/recipes/11745).   Ok, I’m not going to say these are healthy per se, but compared to those cinnamon rolls you get in the Food Court at the Mall, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.  The dough makes 12 good size rolls, but you could make 24 mini rolls and not feel like your skimping on anything.  Each regular size bun is 331 calories and 11g of fat  when you make the recipe as printed, keep in mind there are nuts, which is a contributor to the higher fat content. 

Everyone has had a Hamburger Potato Roll, a nice light texture that is more of a condiment soaker-upper than a flavor component.  Using sweet potatoes definitely kicks that flavor up a notch.   This dough, texture-wise, is just lovely.  The dough was very easy to work with and I look forward to experimenting with it a little more in some other applications.

This is actually a vegan recipe, but I used non-vegan ingredients.  I also omitted the pecans and made an orange cream cheese glaze instead of the maple (subbed a tsp of orange zest for the maple flavor and added a drop of vanilla extract).  I used 1 decent sized potato for the 2/3 c and there was just a little left over.  This is a pretty easy recipe but you do need to factor in the 1 hour and 45 minutes of proofing time (hour for the dough, 45 min after rolls are cut).  That being said, it is quite a quick recipe other than that.  Give it a try this weekend!

*If you don’t need 12 cinnamon rolls (remember portion control!) you can follow the recipe up until the final 45 min proof.  At that point proof the rolls you want to back that day and put the others in the freezer on a sheet pan and freeze them until solid.  Then put them in a Ziploc and label them.  When you want to bake them off let them sit in the fridge over night and bake them off in the morning.