I’m sorry guys. I’m sorry that I have to barge in on your Thursday morning just to break your heart with lust for chocolate hazelnut cinnamon rolls. It isn’t my fault. Really. You can blame this on my dad for giving me the hazelnuts in the first place. What’s a girl to do, if not mix those hazelnuts with delicious melty chocolate and sweet warm bread? But I’m only a little bit sorry – because damn, these rolls are good.

I spent ages looking for a cinnamon roll recipe. I tried Google, I tried Pinterest, I tried Waitrose. Nothing. Nada. No recipe that grabbed me. So I went back to the old faithful, cinnamon sugar pull-apart bread recipe, and tweaked. And chopped, and sprinkled, and rolled. Cooked and waited and waited and waited, and then did a little victory dance around the little kitchen. Clapped like a seal a few times. This is a victory.

The great thing about this recipe is that you can get halfway and put the dough in the fridge overnight. So, with a bit of careful time planning, you could have these for an indulgent Friday morning breakfast to help get you through the day.

If you’re good enough to have the self-restraint to stop you from eating them all in one go, they will be just as tasty the next day, heated in a microwave for about a minute.

Recipe adapted from a recipe adapted from Joy the Baker. 

Ingredients:

Dough:

2 3/4  cups plain flour
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 envelope dry yeast
2 oz/50g (unsalted) butter
1/3 whole milk
1/4 cup water
2 large eggs, whisked
Sprinkling of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

 Filling:

1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 oz/5og (unsalted) butter, melted until brown
50g skinless roasted hazelnuts, roughly chopped
100g chocolate, roughly chopped (I used 75g dark, 25g milk)

Method:

1)  Mix together flour, sugar, yeast, and salt.

2)  Heat the milk with the butter in a saucepan until the butter has completely melted. Remove from heat and add the water and vanilla extract. Let it stand for a minute or so to cool.

3)  Add the milk mixture to the dry ingredients, along with the eggs. This makes a very sticky mixture – just added a little more flour until its easier to handle.

4)  Transfer the dough into a greased bowl, cover with clingfilm and leave to double in size.

5)  While that’s rising, mix together your sugar and cinnamon for the sugar filling, grease your tin (I used a Bundt-style tin), and melt the butter. Preheat oven to 180C or gas mark 4.

6)  When the dough has doubled in size, tip it out and knock it back. Cover it with a tea towel, and leave to rest for 5 minutes. Roll out the dough as big as you can on a floured surface, or if you’re refrigerating it until the morning, wrap in clingfilm and pop in the fridge. Be sure to take it out of the fridge 30 minutes before you plan to roll it out!

7)  Slather the dough with the melted butter using a pastry brush or the back of a spoon, and sprinkle the sugar mixture over it. Next, sprinkle the chopped hazelnuts and chocolate over the buttered, sugared dough, roll lengthways and cut into rolls about 2.5 inches deep. Transfer them to the tin.

8)  Put a tea towel over your tin, and leave the rolls to rise for about 30 minutes – until they’ve doubled in size.
(As my flat is pretty cold, I put a hot water bottle underneath to aid the rising. True story.)

9)  When risen, place it on the centre shelf of the oven and cook for about 30-40 minutes, until a deep golden brown.
Similar to baking a cake, if you put a knife between the individual rolls and it comes out sticky, let them have longer. This might mean putting a foil cap over the rolls to stop the top from burning.