Finally! Cinnamon rolls as big as your head ultimate recipe

Today I re-read Robin McKinley's comments on cinnamon rolls where she said they should just be good old white bread rolled around cinnamon sugar. That made me realize that the Cinnabon-type recipes I tried were all wrong: too sweet, too gooey, too much of everything.

I realized that I would have to make a spread sheet in order to get some understanding of what was wrong with the cinnamon roll recipes I was trying. I made three categories: Swedish cinnamon rolls, American cinnamon rolls, and white bread. One recipe in each row, and in columns were the different ingredients.

After comparing over 20 recipes I realized that the rolls I had tried were more like American dinner rolls, with lots of butter, sugar, eggs, and salt in the dough.

However, one American recipe: "Sweet-Roll Dough" caught my eye since it had less butter and sugar. I found it in the Fanny Famer Baking Book by Marion Cunningham:

In the spread sheet I noticed that the dough ingredients from that recipe were almost the same as another recipe I found online:
Leila's American sticky buns

I sort of combined the recipes and tested this:
1 pkg yeast (25 g fresh yeast), 1/4 cup butter, about 3/4 cup milk, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 tsp. salt, 3 cups flour, 1 egg. In the filling I used 1/4 cup butter, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 3/4 Tbs. cinnamon. Instead of a cream cheese frosting I made a vanilla glaze: 1 cup powdered sugar, 1 Tbs. softened butter, 1/2 tsp vanilla, and enough milk to make it into an icing.

Next time I will cut down the butter in the filling to less than 1/4 cup - that much isn't needed. I will also roll the dough more tightly, since I noticed that a lot of filling melted into the bottom of the pan (hmmm...more searching on how to avoid this will be needed I guess).

The rolls were just perfect: more like a fluffy white bread, with a lovely cinnamon flavor (it could be increased but I noticed before that 1 Tbs cinnamon was grainy). I cut the dough into 8 rolls instead of 10 to make them extra big.

I will write a proper recipe soon but I just had to write this so I wouldn't forget. I can truly imagine Sunshine serving these!