Cinnamon Roll Scones

These cinnamon rolls scones give you all the vibes of a classic cinnamon roll in easy scone form. Plenty of gooey cinnamon sugar is swirled through these buttery, tender scones. And the best part? No yeast, kneading or proofing necessary with these!

Ingredients

If you look around this website, you will see a whole lot of buttermilk scone recipes. It came from my love of all things English tea shops so I meticulously created what I think is the perfect scone recipe. They are tender, flaky, buttery – great on their own and great with jam and fillings.

• All-purpose flour. The base for our scones.
• Buttermilk. I always use buttermilk for my scones because it provides not only a depth of flavor but also gives a tender texture.
• Unsalted butter. And plenty of it! Any good quality butter will work.
• Egg. This is the biggest difference between a scone and a biscuit. A bit of egg gives just a hint of a cakey texture.
• Baking powder. In addition to some of the techniques to making scones tall, baking powder gives us an extra lift.
• Brown sugar. Brown sugar in both the scone dough and the filling gives us that ooey-gooey cinnamon roll vibe.
• Cinnamon. Ground cinnamon is key in a cinnamon scone! I chose to just put the cinnamon in the filling to replicate a cinnamon roll, but you can get adventurous and add some to the dough, the glaze or even in a coarse cinnamon sugar sprinkled before baking.

Scone Making Techniques

Scones are so simple to make – there is a reason they are one of my favorite pastries! After many-a-scone tested and eaten, there are a few recommended techniques for the best flaky, tender scones.

Cold butter. Called the “rubbing in” method, we are literally going to take cubes of cold butter and rub it into flour with our fingertips. The finished texture will be slightly sandy but I leave some larger quarter-sized clumps in tact.

Why? When cold butter goes into a hot oven, the steam it creates lifts and gives us flakes.

Buttermilk amount. Always separate out some of the buttermilk before adding to the scone mixture because you may not need all of it. Depending on the humidity, flour brand and so many other factors, it’s better to add as needed. The final texture should be sticky and “shaggy” but not wet and soupy.

I use a Danish whisk for this, it’s the easiest tool I’ve tried. You can also use a wooden spoon or just your fingers!

Chilling. Before baking, I always freeze my scones. I prefer to freeze solid for at least 2 hours but it can be shortened and still be successful. I do this to rechill the butter and give the best flake and least amount of butter leaking in the oven.

Making Cinnamon Swirled Scones

The “trickiest” part of these scones is the folding technique. And I use quotes because it’s not so hard and very forgiving!

Folding means exactly what it sounds like – we are literally folding the dough! It’s a method of laminating the dough which means to make layers of dough. If you’ve seen a croissant and all those layers of flaky dough – that is a very laminated dough. Ours is a simplified version.

We’re going to do this twice, once for the flakiness in the dough and once to create the cinnamon swirl. So roll the dough out and fold the top third down and the bottom third up. Just like you would if you were folding a page into an envelope.

Reroll the dough out. Before folding this time, spread that generous amount of cinnamon sugar onto the dough. This way, when we fold it up, ta-da, instant cinnamon swirl!

Give the scones a quick reroll, but not too thin, (we want sky high scones) shape and slice! The hardest part is working the dough into a circle delicately to keep the cinnamon sugar inside.

As you can see above, they do not have to be perfect in any way!