- Hey everyone.

I am so excited to share with you this recipe for pumpkin dinner rolls.

There's a little hint of rosemary in there, they're covered with a brown sugar cinnamon butter.

They're absolutely delicious and really darling too.

I think anyone would be happy to have this on their dinner plate.

So let me show you how it's done.

(gentle music) Here we have everything that we need to make these delicious and beautiful pumpkin rolls.

So let's get started.

The first thing we're going to do is, we are going to get our active yeast blooming.

So I'm going to take this one tablespoon of yeast and I'm gonna add, this is actually 1/3 cup of sugar, but I'm just going to take a little bit of the sugar and add it to our yeast mixture to get it going.

Yeast likes that little bit of sugar.

And we're gonna pour about 1/4 of a cup of warm water into our bowl.

Get it all stirred up and let that do its yeasty magic.

And while we're waiting for that to happen, we're gonna mix the rest of our ingredients without the flour at this point.

So let's start here with one cup of pumpkin.

And I just am using, right, canned pumpkin.

I'm sure if you're feeling ambitious and want to get it from a fresh pumpkin, you can do that, but that's never been my thing.

So into our mixing bowl goes our pumpkin.

(gentle music) And then to that, we have here 1/3 cup of melted and cooled slightly butter.

Add that to the mix.

We are adding the rest of our sugar, which was 1/3 sugar, 1/3 cup of sugar before I added it a little bit to the yeast.

In it goes.

Here we have two teaspoons of salt into the mix.

We are also going to add two eggs that I'm going to break in here so I can make sure that I don't get any shell into our pumpkin roll.

That's not tasty, and I've done that before.

So there's your heads up.

(gentle music) Second egg into the mix.

And here I have one tablespoon of chopped fresh rosemary.

You can leave it out if you don't like rosemary, but I just think it adds a little element of flavor.

It's not overwhelming, but it kind of gives you that little bit of oomph that, you're like, "Hmm, what is that?"

So into the mix it goes.

And then the rest of our water here also goes into our bowl.

And I'm just gonna get this started.

You could put it on your mixer.

You could use the dough hook at this point and get this started.

But I just think it's easier to just kind of get this all mixed up by hand, and it certainly is easy enough.

(gentle music) Doesn't really look very yummy, I'll admit right now, but you are going to love this.

It is so delicious.

The pumpkin gives it a certain creamy texture but it's not heavy duty pumpkin flavor at all.

So now it looks like our yeast is, I think you can see this is starting to bubble.

So the yeast is doing its thing and we're gonna add that to the mix as well.

Let's get all of that yummy yeast in there.

Okay.

Away that bowl goes.

And again, just kinda get it all incorporated and mixed in there.

(gentle music) Looking good.

And now in this bowl here, I have six cups of all purpose flour.

You may not need the full six cups, so we're only going to add a bit at a time to see what our dough's looking like at different points, and then decide if we wanna add some more or not.

But to get us started, before I put it on the mixer, I'm just going to put enough in that gets us a good start.

Sometimes the dough hook, it kinda misses some the flour as it's going around.

It'll eventually get it, but I'm just trying to ease our dough hook's pain, I guess.

All right, so you see, it's easy.

And you could actually do this by hand, although the dough itself is kind of a soft and little bit of a tacky dough.

So it might be difficult if you went to knead this dough.

You might make yourself a big mess, so I would recommend doing it on the machine.

So here we have the start of our dough, and I'm just going to put it on the mixer here.

It's hard doing this backwards, you guys.

Okay, there we go.

Put our dough hook down, give it a lock, and just start mixing.

(mixer revving) So we're not kneading it yet, we're just getting our ingredients combined.

We're gonna let this go just for a little bit.

It's looking like it's picking up most of the flour that's already in there.

So we're gonna lift up, we're gonna add a little bit of more, a little bit of more, a little bit more flour to our mixer.

Put her down.

Lock her up.

(mixer revving) And this is where I have from time to time, once again, thrown flour all through my kitchen because I get a little anxious and put the mixer on too high.

But this one seems to be working okay.

We're getting our flour incorporated.

I can turn it up just a little bit.

And I can tell just from looking at this that I'm gonna need more flour.

So let's do this process again and get more flour going.

(gentle music) Like I said, I'm not gonna put all of it in just in case.

I can always add this little extra at the end if we need it.

And the way that we're gonna know is that as we mix, see, see!

A little action, a little flour action going here.

As we mix this up, the dough itself is gonna start pulling away from the sides of the bowl.

So I'm gonna turn this slightly so you guys can start to see.

Woo!

You see the flour as it mixes.

Turn it up a little bit.

(mixer revving) I think you can tell it's moving away from the sides.

So just to check to see if I have enough flour or do I need to add this little bit.

It's probably a half a cup that's in there.

I'm gonna just take this up and I'm just gonna feel my dough.

And you can see it's still really tacky.

So I am just going to give it, mix the rest of this flour.

In it goes.

(gentle music) I'm gonna grab the rest of this little bit and that little guy, and here we go.

We're just gonna get that going.

(mixer revving) And now, so there's still some on the bottom that I can see that has to incorporate into the larger part of the dough.

So let me turn it up just a bit to get that going.

And I think you can see it's totally pulling away from the sides at this point.

And on the bottom we're looking pretty clean as well.

So now I'm just gonna let the machine do its thing and the dough is going to knead for at least five minutes, maybe six minutes, and then we'll be ready to take it out and go to the next step.

(gentle music) So here our dough has been kneading now for about five minutes.

We're ready to take it off of the dough hook.

And hands fingers are a baker's best tool getting all that goodness off of the dough hook.

And now, all right, so we're going to lift our bowl off.

Let me move this over to the side so you guys can see.

And so here is what our dough looks like, but we need to let it rise.

So in order to do that, we have here just a nice size bowl.

This is gonna rise probably twice its size.

So you want to make sure that you have a bowl large enough that it can do that.

And I'm just taking some cooking spray, putting it in our bowl.

And now I am not going to use my hands to get this out, but instead I am going to coax it out with my little spatula here.

And trust me, it will eventually come out.

But I think you might be able to see from this that the dough is still a little sticky and that's okay, because that's really going to give it its fabulous texture and a nice moistness and flavor.

So here we go.

We're all in.

Our grease bowl, I'm just going to give it a little flip.

So some of that cooking spray kinda gets all over our dough.

And now I'm just gonna wrap this up and I'm going to put it in a warm place.

It needs to rise for at least two hours.

With the addition of the pumpkin, it will make it basically rise a little bit slower than what you might anticipate.

So away it goes.

And of course you guys know that I have one already prepared.

So here, this dough has been rising now for two hours.

You can see how beautiful it is.

And we're just going to take it now, punch it down, and get ready for our next step.

(gentle music) Hey, everyone, so now we get to the really fun part, which is how we make these lovely little round dough balls look like pumpkins.

So to start with, what we need is just some kitchen string and I'm am measuring these out to about eight inches.

And we're gonna need a bunch of them 'cause every pumpkin roll needs four of them.

So I have some here in this bowl that I've already cut.

And what we need to do to these strings is we need to get some oil on them.

That way it helps to keep them from sticking to the dough itself and just makes it a little bit easier to get the strings out once we bake them up.

So I just poured a little bit of canola oil, vegetable oil on the strings, and then you just want them... Really, you can fix these ahead of time and just let them kind of sit in the oil and soak up, let the strings soak up the oil.

So while those are doing their thing and soaking up, we're going to now prepare just the dough balls themselves.

So I took a small amount out of our dough, our two-hour risen dough, and we're going to measure them into about 2 1/2 ounces each.

And I know that the amount of dough that we have here, if you do 2 1/2, you'll probably get about 20 of these pumpkin rolls.

But I'm only gonna show you a couple, so no worries there.

Alright, so let's just cut off a little bit of our dough and I'm gonna put it here.

Maybe you can see.

So sometimes I'm better at guessing this than others.

So this is four ounces, so it's a little too big.

So let's blop off a little bit.

2 1/2 or 2.6, good enough.

We're gonna just measure the dough that I have out.

And I won't measure all of this dough at one time because the dough will start to dry out.

So just kind of take it out in bits at a time.

So 2.3.

That's gonna be just a baby.

So let's 2.8.

You really can kinda play around with it.

(gentle music) And let's see what we have here.

Ooh, 1.9.

2.5 exactly, there we go.

All right, so we're just gonna do three of these guys to show you.

Now, what we have here, as you can see, is just a glob of dough.

So what I like to do that makes them kind of pretty on the outside is just with your fingers, just keep pushing kind of the crease underneath.

if you can.

Kind of then take it almost like a dumpling sort of effect and just kinda pinch, that's the bottom of your roll.

And then we're going to just take your hands and kinda make it very smooth on the outside.

To make them look like pumpkins, this is awesomely cool you guys, what we're going to do is we're going to take four of these oiled strings.

If there's too much oil, you can just rub your fingers down the string to remove any excess oil.

And then we're just going to place these strings in a star patterns.

So we need four all together.

We do one across that way and then we're gonna cross this way.

And I'm not sure if you guys can see, but I've just got this laid out into a star pattern.

And then all we're gonna do is take our dough and place it in the center.

And yes, it's just this easy.

We are going to tie the strings.

You don't want to tie them too tight because then as this dough rises, because we're gonna let it rise one more time, the strings will embed.

If you really make it tight, you're gonna have a heck of a time getting the string out.

And a light tie is all you need to get that pumpkin-looking creases in place.

And then as you can see, I'm just placing my strings to one side because we're going to trim these before we actually let them take their little rest and rise.

But yeah, you might be saying, "Oh my God, how long is this going to take me?"

But I will say that this little bit of time, it's easy, and it's going to produce the most darling-looking dough ball that looks like a pumpkin that you've ever seen.

We're going to now, after we finish stringing all of our little dough balls, just trim the strings off.

We wanna leave a little bit, but we don't need all of that excess string hanging.

And we're going to just place these on a baking sheet.

And we're gonna let them rise.

They need to rise for about an hour.

Cover 'em up, put 'em in a warm place.

And of course, you guys, I have some that have been rising for the last hour or so here.

And before we put them in the oven, take this off so you can see, and see?

See how good these are looking.

They've puffed up.

The strings have made enough of an indent so that they really do look like pumpkins.

And I just smashed my dough ball here, but that's okay.

We can redo that.

(gentle music) And so what I wanna do to these before I put them in the oven, and we're going to put them in a 375 degree preheated oven.

They're gonna bake off for about 20 minutes.

But what I wanna do before I get them in the oven is all this is is an egg.

I'm gonna put a little bit of egg wash on each one to make them nice and shiny when they come out.

So here we have our eggs, egg wash covering our pumpkin rolls, and I'm gonna put these in the oven.

And while that's baking up, we'll do the cinnamon brown sugar butter.

(gentle music) Compound Butters are a delicious and easy way to add flavor to any of your baked goods or even your savory dishes.

We are going to make today a cinnamon brown sugar butter, which is out of this world delicious and easy.

We're starting with two sticks or 1/2 a pound of butter, and it's at room temperature.

So I'm just gonna mash it up a little bit to make it a little easier to get us started here.

And to our butter, I have 1/4 cup of brown sugar.

(gentle music) and then I'm going to add 1/2 a teaspoon of cinnamon.

You can make so many different favors with, I thought I was gonna give you 1/2 a teaspoon here.

We'll just add a little touch more.

You can add so many different herbs, so many different flavorings to butter that really give it a special flavor.

And then what you do is, after you mix this all up and get it all incorporated, you can either just leave it in the bowl and use it up right away, or you can roll it in some plastic wrap and put it in the freezer for a later date.

You can even put it in like little molds and make cute little butter pads out of it.

Whatever your heart desires is really the way to go.

This particular butter with the cinnamon and the brown sugar is really delicious on rolls, on muffins, on toast even.

You can use it in a variety of ways.

But as you can see here, I'm just working it through getting all that brown sugar deliciousness in.

And as soon as it all comes together, and you can see it's working it's magic in the butter, we will have one heck of a delicious butter.

The thing too that's nice about only putting in 1/4 of a cup of the brown sugar is it gives it a little bit of sweetness, but it's not overly sweet at all.

So I'm just gonna switch out here to my little spoon because I think that's gonna help me just really get down under there.

And I think with a few more turns here so we can get all of our cinnamon and our brown sugar incorporated, we will be ready to rock.

(gentle music) All right.

I think we have it here, you guys.

See how the butter has kinda turned.

It's a little bit darker in color from the brown sugar, which is exactly what we want.

You can still see the flex of the pure butter.

And oh, by the way, you can use salted butter, you can use unsalted butter, whatever you have on hand.

But as you can see, here you have it.

I'm gonna put this in a pretty little bowl and serve it up for breakfast.

So here you have it, you guys.

Brown sugar cinnamon butter.

(gentle music) So here are our beautiful pumpkin rolls out of the oven.

I've let 'em cool down a little bit and I've already taken the string out of a couple of 'em, but I wanna show you how to get the strings out of the roll or one of the easiest ways, I guess.

And that really is just get your handy-dandy little scissors and start cutting away.

The only thing that I will say about these strings is sometimes they get baked in there well enough that you might miss one.

So you don't really want anyone eating string.

So just be aware and be careful that you're getting all of the strings out.

I've tried a bunch of different ways, pulling 'em all the way through, doing 'em halfway, cutting 'em from the bottom.

And I feel like cutting 'em from the top is probably the easiest thing to do.

And so once you have your strings cut, and so here I've got one going, I like to give the roll just some additional pressure because I'm always afraid that if I pull too hard I'm gonna rip the pumpkin apart, which is not the look that you're actually going for here.

And I didn't cut all of my strings, so just keep your scissors handy.

And the thing too about these is you see that, yeah, you see some crumbs there, but that's okay.

We're going to smother these in some cinnamon brown sugar butter on top.

So no one's gonna notice those little crumbs that are up throughout the roll as you're pulling the string out.

So as you can see, I've got all of my strings down to the bottom here, and now I'm just gonna hold onto my roll so I don't pull all of my roll apart and pull the strings through.

And here we have a beautiful pumpkin roll.

So now let me get rid of our strings.

And on top of these stringless rolls I have here a little bit of the compound butter, which is cinnamon brown sugar and just 1/2 a pound of butter, not in here.

But I melted a little bit of this and I'm just going to brush the tops and see what I mean about just getting rid of any of the crumbs that remain from pulling out the strings.

You're just gonna make them disappear with this delicious brown sugar cinnamon butter.

And some of this that I did not melt would be delicious just to serve on the side.

So if someone wants a little bit more of this buttery goodness, they certainly can enjoy that on their roll.

(gentle music) One more.

And then we have one last little piece of beautification here for our pumpkin rolls.

And that is the stems.

So all these are, are pecans that I cut in half, and we're just going to take our half and place it right in the center where all of our strings and knots were.

Gives us a nice little opening to put our stem.

And there you have it, sweet, savory, rosemary, salty a bit, pumpkin rolls.

We're gonna come back and plate them up and show you the inside and give it a taste.

(gentle music) So here we have it, our finished pumpkin dinner roll.

Doesn't it look darling?

I love it.

Let's cut it open and see what it looks like inside and give it a taste.

So, oh goodness gracious!

Look at the color of that.

You can really see the pumpkin.

You can see some of the little rosemary flecks there as well.

I am going to put some more brown sugar cinnamon butter on my little taste, because gosh, why not, right?

All right, here we go.

I'm going in.

(gentle music) Seriously, guys, you've got to try these.

They might take you a little time, but they are so worth the effort.

You can taste a little bit of the pumpkin, you get a little hit of the rosemary and the salt, and then when you combine it with this brown sugar cinnamon butter, the creaminess and the little bit of sweetness, it is really out of this world.

I so hope you try it.

Enjoy.

(gentle music)