It’s fine if you like bland white people food. Just say that.
When you wake up in the morning to the sweet smell of cinnamon and baked goods wafting through your house, anyone would expect a delicious pastry in their near future. If the amateur cook in your household decided to make cinnamon rolls, you are in for a rude awakening.
Cinnamon rolls are decidedly the worst pastry in existence. Don’t get me wrong, I love cinnamon. I put it on everything. Cinnamon isn’t the problem — the problem is the sickeningly sweet icing and bland, dry bread.
A good pastry has at least one of two things: fun texture or good flavor. Cinnamon rolls have neither.
The texture of the roll is boring. If you don’t eat them right out of the oven, they are rock-hard or soggy from the disgusting icing. If you do eat one immediately, the texture is still a boring roll slathered with liquid sugar. It is not flaky and buttery like a croissant and it does not contain the interesting contrast of textures that a turnover or chocolate eclair have. Cinnamon rolls are just tough enough to be unpleasant and there is never enough cinnamon mixture between the layers to make the thing worth eating.
The flavor profile of a cinnamon roll works on paper, but it is severely disappointing when brought to life. The buttery cinnamon swirl is the highlight in this dreadful pastry. But as I always say: a buttery cinnamony swirl cannot save a dumpster fire. The majority of the pastry is still awfully bland dough. I assume the creator of the cinnamon roll wanted to course correct the pastry of poor Victorian children with a sugary load dumped right on top. The sweetness overloads the whole roll and it becomes one sodden, tooth-rotting mess. The icing doesn’t even add flavor, it accentuates the fact that there was hardly any flavor to begin with.
Perhaps this highly divisive treat can be redeemed with proper attention and care. But in my book, it is dead in the water. You will never catch me feeding my future kids a cinnamon roll.