Some men just want to watch the world burn.

- Alfred Pennyworth, The Dark Knight

The Recipe

Cinnamon Roll Recipe: Better Homes & Garden Cinnamon Rolls

Filling: Nutella + brown sugar + cinnamon

Frosting Recipe: Vanilla Glaze

The Attempt

We're really rolling now. This was my second batch of rolls baked in a week, and my third batch of dough since I had to remake it in my last attempt after forgetting to add eggs to the first batch. I still have nightmares from that mistake. But my motivation for this new batch was to provide cinnamon rolls for a group to eat for breakfast while driving to Colorado the following day. The cars departed at 7 am, which was much too early to have breakfast beforehand in my opinion. So some travel cinnamon rolls made sense to me.

I decided to make Nutella cinnamon rolls because it was on my list of fillings to try, and my initial plan was to rely on the Nutella filling as a replacement to frosting or glaze on top since that gets messy in a car. The dough making process was simple and straightforward in this attempt. No eventful mistakes, except being a bit tight on time. The Nutella filling recipe I found called for just a layer of Nutella, followed by a coating of cinnamon. I was a bit skeptical of this though since I wasn't confident that the Nutella and cinnamon combination would pair well. So I tweaked it by first applying a layer of softened butter, then a layer of Nutella, and then a layer of a cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg, and ground cloves mixture. I thought the butter would help keep the rolls moist while sitting at room temperature in the car during the road trip, and the brown sugar would sweeten the rolls so the cinnamon and Nutella combination wasn't so strong. My only problem here was that I didn't have enough Nutella, so a couple rolls at the end of the log ended up being normal, non-Nutella cinnamon rolls.

After baking, I decided that rolls looked like they were just missing something without frosting or icing on top. Like Abe Lincoln without his top hat or Mario without his mustache, the rolls looked incomplete without a top coating. Also, the Nutella wasn't oozing out like I thought it might, so I thought some glaze would help the rolls remain soft during the road trip. So, I decided to make a light vanilla glaze with powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk. It would be a bit sticky and a slight pain to eat in a car, but not as messy as a frosting.

This review is a bit boring so far, so this is probably the right time to spice things up. (You'll appreciate some play on words in that sentence after reading this paragraph.) You may remember that I warned the reader in Attempt #2 that maybe someday I would add a secret ingredient. Well, there's no time like the present. I perused through my collection of spices to find something intriguing. I narrowed it down to chili powder or cayenne. I had more cayenne, so that was the winner. After I cut the rolls from the log, I selected one roll, unrolled it, shook cayenne into the filling, rolled it back up, and placed it in the pan with the other rolls. I wasn't sure how much cayenne to put on and I was worried the Nutella would coat over the cayenne and mask it, so I sprinkled a heavy dose of cayenne into the roll. There is a time and place for subtly, and this wasn't it.

I kept track of the laced cinnamon roll's location in the pan and baked all the rolls. I was worried that the cayenne would impact the other rolls in the pan, like if the butter melted in the roll and some of the cayenne would seep into nearby rolls. But there was only one way to find out. I separated the cayenne roll from the other rolls once they finished baking out of an abundance of caution with them sitting together overnight. I packed all the cinnamon rolls up into Ziploc bags in the morning, gave each car a collection of rolls (knowing that my car didn't have the laced roll), and the group took off on the road trip. It felt like being on the outside of a game of cinnamon roll Russian Roulette.

The Review

Things I appreciated about this attempt:

• Regarding preparation and baking, this attempt was very easy. I already had all the ingredients on hand, including the Nutella, so I didn't need to make a grocery store trip for supplies. I even had just enough mashed potato from the previous attempt which saved time in the dough-making process.

• I didn't mess up the dough this time, which was fun.

• I think I got the baking time in the oven just right this attempt. The rolls were a nice golden hue on top, shifting to a pale tan down the sides.

• I've learned to cut the cinnamon rolls in thick slices from the log, and these rolls were the size that I'm targeting.

• The cayenne-laced roll was a fun way to break people's trust in my cinnamon rolls.

Things I learned from this attempt:

• I wasn't a big fan of the Nutella filling. It was fairly mild and not bad, but the Nutella filling didn't beat the classic filling of brown sugar and cinnamon. There's a reason it's a classic. I'm also of the mindset that Nutella should have a more liquid consistency, and potentially used in a frosting, but not baked into the middle.

• I'm not sure if the vanilla glaze really added much to the roll. Pairing a vanilla flavor with a Nutella filling isn't the most natural, but it was all I had in the moment.

• I need to better plan my time when making cinnamon rolls. I started running out of time and the dough probably could have used another 10 minutes to rise.

• I think I've got this recipe down and have had some fun experimenting with fillings. It's about time to move on to the next recipe. The recent batches have been doughy, and I want to try to find something slightly less heavy.

What happened to the cayenne roll?

Well, I waited until after everyone had departed on the trip before I told my fellow passengers about the secret roll. I wasn't going to risk telling anyone about it until we had all split up, even though it was hard to keep secret or to avoid being suspicious. I hope this is a lesson to anyone who thinks that I cannot keep a straight face. My car's passengers waited to see if anyone would message in our group chat to ask why a roll was spicy. We drove through Nebraska and Colorado and no message came. I started to wonder if the spice wasn't enough to be clearly obvious that something was different with the roll. Maybe someone just thought that I was bad at making cinnamon rolls?

We eventually arrived at the condo and I found a bag with a couple uneaten rolls, and the cayenne roll was one of them. I stuck all the rolls into the refrigerator and waited, assuming that someone would eat the roll in the upcoming days. This finally happened after the last day of skiing as Sarah was the lucky person to grab the roll as a snack. I was only a couple minutes away from the condo at this time, but thankfully Sammy let me know it was happening. It was probably a good thing I wasn't there, since that really would have tested by ability to keep a straight face. Shout out to Sammy for keeping it under wraps.