Dear Tricia, My cinnamon rolls keep pooping out all their goo and I can't figure out how to make this stop. I tried proofing the hell out of them after rolling them wicked tight, but when I baked them, the dough kinda withered and the filling just spooged out all over the pan. Any ideas?
This is going to be one of those questions that ends up in my 2nd or 3rd book. My agent told me she sees this blog published as a series, so I'm going to make one of the books focus more on the advanced questions that I sometimes get in my email box. Because seriously, most people don't make cinnamon rolls from scratch. So good on you for that.
There's a few things we can trouble shoot here. First of all, the part where you roll them wicked tight: that's gotta go. Let me back up though. Here's what's going on inside the dough:
Yeast is this little, magical, live being that eats and poops, just like everything else on the planet. After it eats sugar, its main source of food, it leaves behind carbon dioxide and water as a waste product. (Fancy term for poop.) And the carbon dioxide bubbles are what make the bread rise when you proof it (for all of you non-bakers, that's when you let the dough rise before you bake it). When you let proof the dough, the carbon dioxide bubbles are forming, and when you bake it, the bubbles expand.
This is where the rolling it wicked tight part doesn't work. When the dough is getting bigger in the oven, the yeast needs somewhere to grow and expand. And if you've rolled it really tight, there's nowhere to go but up. So then you've got a cinnamon roll with the center popping up and out, possibly causing all of the filling come out with it.
Proofing the hell out of the dough is also something that you might want to change. I'm going to quote my favorite reference book, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. Even though he's not the expert when it comes to baking bread, he is the expert at explaining food science and chemistry, so what he says goes. "When poked with a finger, fully fermented dough will retain the impression and will not spring back." What over-proofing bread (what you're doing) will look like is a wobbly water-balloon looking thing that, when you poke it, has the potential to just collapse. It probably already does that, since you said its withering. So if you proof the hell out them and then bake them, the heavy filling is likely going to climb out on top of the cinnamon roll simply because the dough is weak enough to let it. And no one likes weak, girly-man cinnamon rolls.
Last thing: what's your filling like? Does it have a ton of sugar in it and not much else? In baking, there are 2 categories of ingredients: liquifiers and stablizers. Things like flour and eggs are stablizers, and surprise! Sugar is a liquifier. So if your filling has brown sugar and corn syrup and powdered sugar and all kinds of other sugars in it, it just wants to make the filling thinner and goopier, and melt when it bakes and make a mess and get all over everything. That's fine and dandy, but it contributes to your filling spooging problem. I don't want to re-write your recipe- there's probably a very good reason why you use that filling- but it might need more stablizers in it, even if its just nuts and a little bit of egg white. So if you have the creative freedom to do so, make a thicker filling that stays put.
So, you're going to need to proof the dough less to give the dough more muscle to support the heavy filling, and roll it looser to give the dough somewhere to grow besides up. If these don't work, try messing around with the filling to make it thicker. And then let me know how it works out because the suspense is already killing me.
For more blogging on liquifiers and stablizers, check out my post, "Damn you, Cream Cheese Frosting!" Also, if you're on Facebook, check out the fan page for Chef Richard Coppedge, my breads instructor in school. He's super smart when it comes to anything involving yeast, and he can also do the splits. (While you're on there, don't forget to become a fan of my facebook page too.)
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