My Favorite Cinnamon Rolls Have a Secret - No. 115
My Favorite Cinnamon Rolls Have a Secret - No. 115
It makes them easy to assemble and helps them stay soft and gooey for days. The Good Stuff
When you write about food long enough you come across quirky offbeat recipes like melted ice cream cake, chocolate sauerkraut cake, and cinnamon rolls that start with a cake mix.
I shared the ice cream cake in my first Cake Mix Doctor book and also A New Take on Cake. The chocolate sauerkraut cake I wrote about in American Cake. It was that old German recipe that incorporated what you had—sauerkraut—which helped the cake stay fresh for days. But cinnamon rolls with cake mix?
Why on earth would you do that?
The recipe was given to me by Lois Lee in Minneapolis. Lois was a career home economist with General Mills and after she retired, she was my media escort on book tours. As Lois drove me to TV stations for appearances and we stopped for coffee along the way, we inevitably chatted baking and favorite recipes. This was hers.
And it seemed crazy to me at the time because Lois had all the flour in the world to use in a recipe, but she chose to use a mix of cake mix (to keep them moist) and flour (for structure).
Fearing they would taste like cake mix, I was hesitant to bake them. But once I did, I saw what Lois saw. The cake mix sped up the process, especially if you were making these for a crowd. There was less measuring, which means you could throw them together in a flash. And they still tasted from scratch. Yet better.