Rachel sent me a video the other day of someone making these very cool, mini pumpkin shaped pumpkin rolls. You can watch that original video here… it’s one of those TikTok baking videos where everything’s perfect and there are specialty ingredients, so I edited the recipe a little bit to make it easier to make in a home kitchen. These rolls are actually pretty easy to make – and the most expensive ingredient is the cooking twine, which you can find in any good grocery store’s baking section for about $10.
Shout-out to @drownedworld for putting this idea in my head (and to see more baking stuff from me, check out my Dough Quest).
Give the people what they want: Cooking With Courage. 😂 https://t.co/YuZGdW3l4g
— Ryan (@drownedworld) October 13, 2021
Ingredients:
3.5 cups bread flour
.25 cup sugar
1 heaping teaspoon instant yeast
1.5 teaspoon salt
1.25 heaping cups pumpkin puree
4 tablespoons condensed milk
.5 cup milk
3 tablespoons butter
Other stuff:
8 to 12 Cinnamon Sticks
1 Roll of Cooking or Kitchen Twine/String
1 Hand Saw?
Note: The original recipe is in grams and is vegan (with ingredients I didn’t have in my local grocery store) so I’ve done a rough conversion to cups and tablespoons here and switched some ingredients out.
1. Mix all ingredients except for the butter in a mixing bowl.
The video I was referencing says to do this, and it feels weird because later in their recipe they reference a “butter mixture” — so who knows. But I followed this part of the recipe and mixed everything together until the ingredients formed a very rough and flour-y dough.
A note on yeast: If you’ve made bread before, this isn’t going to seem like enough yeast… and when my dough didn’t double in size in step 4, I really started to second-guess the original recipe. Ultimately, though, these baked really nicely and rose just enough in the oven.
2. Cover and let sit for about 20 minutes.
3. Add warmed butter and mix until the dough is smooth.
I don’t think you actually need a mixer for this, so if you don’t have one… you should be fine just using a bowl and a little bit of elbow grease. I used a mixer with a dough hook and the dough is so stretchy and thick that it just rattled a lot and gave me a lot of trouble. If you’re not using a mixer, I’d just punch and knead it out for a few minutes until the dough is smooth.
4. Cover and let prove for an hour or two.
The dough is supposed to double in size. Mine didn’t after the first hour with my kitchen at a little over 70 degrees, so I let it sit for two hours… and it got a little bigger, but it didn’t double — so instead of making 12 pumpkins, I made 8 (and everything came out fine).
5. Divide the dough into 8 – 12 small pumpkin sized chunks and roll into balls
I can never get my dough balls as smooth as they seem in videos and recipe pictures. They’re always a little rough, but for bagels and pumpkins I think that’s fine – it’s not like, supposed to be fine patisserie or anything – so I say, as long as there aren’t too many cracks in the dough balls, you’re good to go.
6. Tie the string around each pumpkin to create the pumpkin segments
I tied these so they were just kind of pinching into the dough. The idea is that the dough will expand in the oven, cut into the string, and make the dough ball look like a pumpkin. You can watch the video for my technique here… but basically, what I learned is to snip as much excess string off as possible because it can stick to the wash we add in the next step and it’s a pain to get off.
7. Coat the stringy dough balls in a layer of condensed milk
I have a little silicon brush for doing this because Rachel saw me doing an egg wash on some bagel dough with an eggy paper towel. You don’t need the little silicon brush, though – if you dunk a paper towel in condensed milk and drag it over the dough, that should be fine. Just know that the string is going to stick to the condensed milk and that the condensed milk is sticky and might get everywhere.
8. Pop in the oven at 350F for 25 – 35 minutes.
My oven is absolutely a slow cooker, so my cook time was about 35 minutes. The original recipe called for 25 minutes, so… DJ’s choice. If you’re baking these Great British Bake Off Style, you’ll be watching them the whole time anyway.
9. While cooling, cut off the string and add the cinnamon sticks – plus, when cool, you can add a basil leaf for garnish.
Cinnamon sticks are longer than a traditional pumpkin stem and can look weird because they just stick straight up. They’re also hard to cut with scissors (they’ll crack a little) – so I used a hand saw to cut these down about an inch or so. I think you’d be fine with scissors, too – but this is one of those late in the recipe surprises for sure.
10. Set up in an autumnal tableau, bask in the appreciation of your family and friends.
PS. You can find the “Skate or Try” shirt that I’m wearing beneath my Jazz Fest apron in this video (product placement fail!) here.