Carrot Cake Cinnamon Rolls to welcome in Spring

Why you’ll love carrot cake cinnamon rolls

1. Spring feels: After wintery baking recipes of all spice all the time, it’s nice to have a recipe that has a little spice but also the bright happy colors of Spring and a little brightness from the lemon.
2. Less mess, less work: Classic carrot cake is a good, homey, anytime kind of cake, but not every day is a cake decorating kind of day. Sometimes you don’t want to deal with the mess or the extra steps. On those days, you can make these rolls or carrot cake blondies.
3. So much texture: The raisins give some chewiness, the dough bakes up into pillowy softness, and the pecans bring the crunch in these gooey rolls. There’s a lot going on here, and it makes these rolls much more interesting than a plain cinnamon roll, which are still good, by the way.
4. Bakery style, not bakery price: It’s much much cheaper to make flavored cinnamon rolls like this yourself at home. Your most expensive ingredient here is butter, which even if you’re buying fancy butter won’t cost much divided amongst 12 rolls. Making them at home, you know precisely what’s going in your rolls too!

The one secret to these rolls you must not skip out on (and why these rolls took me a couple cracks before getting right)

You MUST squeeze the extra juice out of the carrots. Here’s why:

1. Dough hydration: Free water hanging around (in this case from the carrots) in a dough messes with the structure of the dough. In my first batch, the rolls internally slumped in the pan because the carrot had no where to go. The bottoms of the rolls never baked, leaving me with a soggy mess at the bottom of the pan and raw dough throughout even after 20 minutes extra bake time. You can see in the cross-section above that the dough is fully baked with soft spongy air holes you see on a good sweet roll.
2. Soggy filling: Because the carrots go in the dough and the filling, having too much wetness in a filling (again from the carrots) can also prevent the rolls from baking correctly. That’s why I add starch to my lemon blueberry rolls, to thicken the free juices of the blueberries, which could otherwise sog up the bottoms of the rolls. Freshly grated carrots don’t look as juicy as a blueberry, but when they hit a hot oven, boy howdy does that water make a mess of the filling if the carrots aren’t first squeezed out.

And hey, you can drink the carrot juice you press out! It’s delicious on its own!

Process for making carrot cake rolls

1. Grate and squeeze the carrots: Grate the carrots (a Microplane ribbon

   (Affiliate)

   grater is perfect) over paper towels or a piece of cheesecloth. Squeeze as much of the juice out as you can. You should be able to get about 1-2 tablespoons out.
2. Make the dough: Dissolve the yeast in the water with a pinch of the sugar. Melt the butter and add the milk just until the milk is warm. Break in the eggs and mix them with the milk with the sugar, lemon zest, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, and salt, and half of the carrots. Dump the milk mixture and the yeast into a stand mixer bowl with the flour with the dough hook. Run the mixer until the dough makes elastic strands that form around the dough hook. The dough will be sticky, but almost all of the stickiness will go away during chilling. Cover the dough with plastic wrap and chill it overnight in the fridge.
3. Roll and fill: Roll out the dough on a lightly floured kitchen towel into a large rectangle. Mix the butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar into a paste. Spread the sugar paste over the dough, and then scatter over the rest of the carrots, most of the pecans and the raisins.
4. Cut the rolls: Roll the dough over itself on the long edge into a tight roll. Cut the rolls with a serrated knife into 12 pieces.
5. Rise: Cover the rolls and set them aside the rolls to rise for 1 hour.
6. Bake: Bake the rolls for 22-25 minutes until the edges are just starting to brown and the rolls are firm to the touch.
7. Frost: Mix the frosting ingredients together. Spoon over a layer of the frosting, and then top the buns with the rest of the pecans.

Pro tips for making the best cinnamon rolls with carrots

1. Squeeze out the carrot juice: In case you missed it, this is the critical step for success. Less juicy carrots means for rolls that will bake properly without sogginess.
2. Use a serrated knife: I’m a fan of cutting my rolls with dental floss for nice clean cuts, but here, the knife does a better job because of the sticky raisins and the crunchy nuts.
3. Check the baking time: These take a full 25 minutes in my oven consistently vs. the closer to 20 minutes on a standard cinnamon roll. The extra moist filling needs that extra time to bake out and make a roll that is moist but not soggy. Don’t be afraid to poke your rolls. If they look underdone, they probably are. Fully baked rolls will be brown around the top edges and the middles will be well-risen. If the middles are sinking or pale, they probably needs more oven time.

Print