Carrot Cake Cinnamon Rolls Recipe

This might be the closest you can get to having cake for breakfast without crossing a line. While we happily endorse a slice of carrot cake in the morning, it's more fun to add cinnamon rolls packed with the spices and ingredients for your favorite carrot cake to the menu. The dough for these cinnamon rolls is a standard and reliable sweet roll recipe, but with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and orange zest rubbed into the flour to create an aromatic and flavorful dough surrounding the sweet sticky filling. Mix instant yeast, sugar, and warm milk together to allow the yeast to activate before the dry ingredients are added. Only kneaded for a few minutes, the dough becomes smooth and doubles in size over the course of an hour. The filling for these cinnamon rolls is sweetened with brown sugar and coconut while shredded carrot adds moisture, color, and flavor. Finely chopped pecans or walnuts add a toasted nutty taste and heartier texture, and cinnamon mingles with all of these ingredients to make for a syrupy cinnamon roll filling that is easy to spread across the dough before its rolled. Once rolled, cut the log of dough into 12 rolls that are evenly spaced in a baking dish. These rolls expand to fill the pan and the moisture in the carrot seeps out of the rolls and caramelizes with the sugar at the bottom of the pan. That makes them extra sticky and delicious. Of course these carrot cake cinnamon rolls are best with a slathering of cream cheese frosting.