Make & Bake: Sticky Lemon Rolls with Cream Cheese Glaze

These sticky dollops of lemon deliciousness are amazing and the cream cheese glaze adds just right amount of tartness to the flaky bread rolls.

I found this recipe about two years ago and then lost the recipe! Disaster. But thanks to some google snooping and trawling through my emails I’ve been re-untied with it. Hoorah. Credit for the recipe goes to the wonderful thekitchn.com. These make a great brunch and although there are a lot of steps to the recipe it’s all pretty straight-forward and easy and a great excuse to spend some quality time in the kitchen so turn on the radio, grab your pinny and let’s get cooking.

To tempt you a little more, I just handed one to my boyfriend and his exact words were “Oh my god, these are bleeping amazing”. That’s a pretty good review.

You will need:

3 large lemons

2 eggs

4.5 cups of flour

1 cup of caster or granulated sugar (with an additional extra 1/4 cup for the dough)

1 cup of icing sugar

1 pack of dried yeast

3/4 cup of milk

1/2 cup of very soft butter (plus a little extra for the filling)

4.5 cups of plain flour

120 grams of cream cheese

2tsp of vanilla extract

salt

ground nutmeg

ground ginger

Get Making:

It’s best to think of this recipe in three parts all of which use the lemons so let’s start with them. Zest and juice all three and split the zest into three equal parts and the juice into two equal parts and we’ll use these at various stages through the recipe. So with that sorted we are ready to go!

Dough

Warm the milk (but not so it is hot to touch) and put that in your mixing bowl with the yeast sprinkled on top. Wait for a few minutes and the yeast should start bubbling a little then add the soft butter, sugar, vanilla extract and 1 cup of the flours and mix. Now you can add the salt, nutmeg and one third of the lemon zest and mix. Then add the eggs and enough of the remaining flour to form a soft and sticky dough. If you have one of those fancy kitchen mixers you can use your bread hook to knead the bread otherwise empty the dough onto a floured work surface and take out your frustrations on the dough (this is my favourite part). Once the dough is smooth and springy you can put it back in the bowl with a little oil to coat, cover with cling film and a tea towel and put somewhere warm for an hour or so until it doubles in size! Like magic.

Once it’s done it’s rising thing pat the dough out to a rough rectangle (20cm or so wide) don’t roll with a rolling pin – you should be able to persuade the dough with your hands.

Filling

Take the cup of sugar and mix the nutmeg, ginger and another third of the zest until it starts to clump together slightly. Now half of the lemon juice (just enough to make it into the texture of wet sand – if you got lots of juice out of your lemons don’t add the whole half)

Spread the extra tea spoons of butter over the rolled out dough and then spread the sugar mixture over so it covers evenly. Now roll the dough up as tightly as possible and cut the roll into 12 equal parts.

Put these into a greased baking tray and allow to rise again for about an hour. Or you can chill or freeze the dough at this stage. Perfect for breakfast if you make them the night before, just let the dough rise before baking.

Once the rolls have risen put them in the oven at 170 degrees C or 350 F for 35 minutes or so.

Glaze

Whisk up the cream cheese until it is light and fluffy, add half of the remaining lemon juice and a cup of icing sugar. You can then add enough of the left over lemon juice to create a thick liquid glaze.

Once the rolls are cooked pour and smear the glaze over the top and sprinkle the remaining zest. Allow to cool for 10 minutes or so and these are best eaten warm. Yum.