Cinnamon croissant rolls

I was craving cinnamon rolls, so I decided to make them at home. Before I started I realised my mother doesn’t really like cinnamon rolls, so I decided to make half the batch into cinnamon rolls and the other half into chocolate-coffee rolls. The first thing I looked at was the dough. Now I could be boring and make a basic cinnamon roll dough, but I honestly find them to be kind of dense, so for the dough, I made a croissant dough. At this point, I also decided to make it from the same whole wheat bread flour I use(TWF flour X). At that point, I didn’t realise that there’s a fundamental difference between bread flour and whole wheat bread flour. The issue is that because there is less gluten in whole wheat flours, the dough tends to become much more firm and less spongey. That works in some cases, like pasta, where I actually like the springiness of a more firm dough. In croissants, however, I’d recommend using normal bread flour OR mixing in some pure gluten into the dough. As for the butter, I used European butter. Basically, normal butter has 80% fat. This makes it more crumbly, which is perfect for some dishes like a good crisp cookie. In croissants, however, the butter has to basically be rolled out and folded with the dough. That’s much harder to do with normal butter, so you use European butter, which has 82% fat and is much more bendy and elastic. The downside to this butter is that 2% more fat (at least in India) costs 100% more money. The rest of the process was the same as the recipe until we got to the filling.

For half of the buns, I made a cinnamon roll filling with golden brown sugar, dark brown sugar, vanilla extract, orange zest, a bit of nutmeg and quite a bit of cinnamon. There’s no real recipe for this, I just did it by taste, because I prefer more spice to sugar. For the other half, I made a filling with golden brown sugar, cocoa powder, a bit of cinnamon and a bit of orange zest. I used dutch processed cocoa powder, which was extremely chocolatey without the risk of burning in the oven. Again, I did it by taste, and not with a recipe. Then the proofing and the baking were the same as any croissant recipe. For the cinnamon buns, I made a basic Cinnabon cream for the normal cinnamon rolls, and I added in a bit more superfine orange zest just to kind of bring that acid out a bit more. As for the chocolate buns, I added the sugar and cream cheese but substituted the milk and vanilla extract for pure decoction. I also added quite a bit of cocoa powder here too, so that it wouldn’t get too liquidy.

Honestly, the flavours were perfect. Super rich, not too much sugar and just the right ratio. My problem was just the dough itself. I suspect that me using a 1:1 conversion for bread flour to whole wheat bread flour was to blame, because it didn’t come out quite like a croissant. However, the dough actually did come out quite nicely, a bit lighter than a regular cinnamon roll but not quite a croissant yet. Based on how light you want it, I’d actually recommend a mix of normal bread flour and whole wheat, with more whole wheat for a denser roll.

Croissant recipe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJxaVD6eAtc