Almond Flour Cinnamon Rolls – Low Carb and Gluten-Free

 I think part of what makes someone good at developing new recipes is the ability to notice the properties of one recipe and translate it into a whole different recipe altogether.  This is a skill I seem to have developed over the past few years and I think I must have a mental filing cabinet in my head somewhere, where all the things I noticed while working with a particular recipe get tucked away, waiting to be useful again.  I will notice the way a particular dough crisps up, or the way a batter thickens or rises (or sometimes fails to rise) and I will think “huh, okay, that’s interesting”.  It’s the unexpected qualities of one of my baking experiments that are sometimes the most useful for future experiments.  I will then find myself, a few weeks down the road, realizing that I can use this quality to my advantage in another way.  And so it goes, I think, that I learn more and more how to coax alternative ingredients like almond flour and erythritol to do what I want them to do.

This recipe is really a case in point.  I have long despaired of having anything really resembling a good cinnamon roll after being diagnosed with diabetes.  I made one early attempt, with a combination of almond flour and coconut flour, back in the early days of this blog.  They were…okay.  At the time, I thought maybe they were the best I could do using low carb and gluten free ingredients.   A little later, I did attempt a sweet roll using carbalose flour, but that does contain gluten and I am moving further and further away from using any gluten products at all.  So for the time being, I gave up.  I was very pleased with my Cinnamon Roll Scones and thought that they were an excellent replacement in taste, if not exactly in appearance and texture.

And then, when I was making another recipe altogether, I recognized something about the dough I was working with that I thought might make a good cinnamon roll.  It was the way it both rose and spread during baking that caught my eye, and I thought that if I rolled it out carefully and filled it with melted butter, cinnamon and granulated erythritol, it might just do the trick.  Now I will tell you that these are cinnamon rolls of the biscuit dough variety.  I have never attempted a yeast dough with almond flour, or with any gluten free flour at all.  But traditional wheat flour biscuit dough makes wonderful cinnamon rolls and I knew that if I could just nail an almond flour biscuit dough, I could make a decent low carb cinnamon roll.  And so it was, a few weeks back, that a biscuit-y type recipe turned out well enough for me to think it might just translate.

The Results: I really loved these. They were tender and moist and perfectly cinnamon-y. Again, they aren’t like yeast dough, but very similar to cinnamon rolls made with biscuit dough. They don’t rise and spread all that much, but I am not sure I really care because flavour and texture were spot on. And my kids loved them too, which is always worth some bonus points in my eyes. To be able to have a cinnamon roll with my coffee in the morning was just heavenly.