Easy Raspberry Lemon Cinnamon Rolls
These raspberry cinnamon rolls made with soft and fluffy sourdough and a lemon glaze are absolutely delicious! Raspberry lemon sourdough rolls are good anytime of the year, but I especially like them in the springtime! The raspberry and lemon together with the tangy sourdough are some of my favorite springtime flavors.
Ingredients
- 1 cup water or milk
- 1 cup sourdough starter
- ½ cup melted butter
- ½ cup sugar or honey
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 2 eggs
- 4-5 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder optional - only use if baking right away
- 1 teaspoon baking soda optional - only use if baking right away
- Raspberry Filling
- 1 cup raspberries fresh or frozen - or raspberry jam
- ½ cup sugar
- 1 Tbl cinnamon
- 2 Tbl cornstarch
- Topping Options:
- Lemon Glaze
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 2 Tablespoons lemon juice
- 2 Tablespoons cornstarch
- Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting
- 8 oz. cream cheese
- ¼ cup butter
- 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
- 2-3 Tablespoons milk can add more to make a thinner frosting
- 4 cups powdered sugar
Instructions
Mix Up The Dough
- In a large bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment, combine the first six ingredients.
- If using a mixer, start mixing on low and slowly add the flour until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl.
- If you’re not using a mixer, add the flour to the other ingredients in the bowl and knead until the dough comes together into a nice ball. Stretch and fold or knead the dough every 15-30 minutes for a couple hours. This will develop the gluten similar to how the mixer develops it by mixing.
- While the dough is mixing, make the raspberry filling. You can just use raspberry jam. Or you can use fresh or frozen raspberries and cook them with some sweetener, corn starch and cinnamon until they are nice and thick. Cool for a few minutes before spreading on the rolls. (See video).
- On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough using a rolling pin to ¼” thick in the shape of a rectangle.
Make the sweet rolls
- Spread the raspberry filling on the dough.
- Roll dough up beginning with the long side of the rectangle.
- Using a sharp serrated knife, cut rolls into approximately 1 ½” lengths.
- Place in a greased cast iron skillet or baking dish.
- Cover with plastic wrap or beeswax wrap and let the dough rise in a warm place overnight. If you need to wait longer than overnight to bake them, place them in the refrigerator, and pull them out to finish raising a couple of hours before baking.
- You can also freeze the cinnamon rolls at this point, and take them out of the freezer to raise and bake later on.
Bake the rolls
- When ready to bake, preheat your oven to 375 degrees and bake rolls for 25 minutes or until golden brown.
- While the rolls are baking mix up the lemon glaze or lemon cream cheese frosting.
- Remove from rolls the oven and drizzle the lemon glaze over them. Or spread the lemon cream cheese frosting over the warm rolls.
- Garnish with fresh raspberries if desired.
- Serve warm with a cup of coffee or tea from Farmhouse Teas.
- Savor every bite! Store any leftovers in an airtight container in your refrigerator for up to one week, although I know they’ll never last that long.
Notes
Tips
- To gain all of the health benefits from making these with long-fermented sourdough, be sure to allow them to bulk ferment at room temperature overnight. This will ensure that most of the phytic acid and gluten in the flour are consumed by the sourdough starter making these much easier to digest especially if you are gluten intolerant.
- If your sourdough starter is really thin, you may need to add a little more flour to this recipe. I always mix them until they dough pulls away from the sides of my mixer bowl, or until it’s not super sticky if mixing up by hand.
- You can mix these in a mixer (my favorite is a Bosch), or just mix up the dough and do a series of kneading or stretch and folds every few minutes for about an hour to develop the gluten in these rolls. Then just roll them out, shape and allow to rise until double and then bake.
- You can use string to cut the rolls if you’d like, but I find that cutting them with a very sharp knife works just fine for my family.
- It is perfectly safe to add the eggs to this dough and still allow the dough to bulk ferment at room temperature overnight because the good active bacteria in the sourdough starter will prevent any bad bacteria from forming on the eggs.
