Orange Breakfast Rolls

Judith Hannemann — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:23 +0000

Wake the family up for breakfast with these awesome orange rolls and the main ingredient just may surprise you!

Would you guess that these orange sweet rolls are made with humble frozen white bread dough? Well, they are and that’s what makes them so easy to make! They are perfect for breakfast too.

Using frozen bread dough eliminates any failures you may have had with making your own dough. All you do is defrost, make whatever you want, shape however you want, rise and bake.

These rolls are a hack of an old Pillsbury Bake-Off winner. I use to make them years ago because they are totally delicious and I love anything orange flavored. But making them with the old recipe involved making my own sweet roll dough, rolling the dough in a circle to make crescents and so forth–it was a real PAIN–but worth it because they were so good.

This time, I made the shaping much simpler by rolling into a rectangle, spreading the filling over and rolling up like a jellyroll then cutting slices much like cinnamon rolls are made. And rolling up jellyroll fashion also keeps most of the filling where it belongs–in the roll, not on your counter.

I recently was experimenting with frozen white bread dough and wanted to see what else I could do with it–besides just defrosting the pre-shaped loaf, rising and baking it. Oh yeah, I know you can cut it up to make rolls. That’s the way rolls other than Kaiser rolls are made in a commercial bakery. And I “made” plenty of “rolls” in my stint as a commercial baker.

Another thing I changed from the original glaze was adding orange zest, which I was surprised wasn’t included in the original recipe, and boiling the glaze for a couple of minutes so it was more like candy. Since you pour the hot glaze over the hot rolls, some glaze will settle at the bottom. When it cools, the glaze is like a nice pliable but slightly chewy candy. YUMMY!

I use a combo of toasted and untoasted coconut for the topping, but you can use all untoasted straight from the bag if you want to eliminate that extra step.

Frozen bread dough needs little prep work. I find it best to defrost it overnight in the fridge. I wrap it in plastic wrap that I spray with non-stick spray so the dough won’t stick to the plastic. The way the frozen dough is shaped makes it stupidly easy to roll into a rectangle too! This stuff is so versatile that I’m recommending it as a freezer staple!

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