Ask and ye shall receive.  This month’s Pizza Lab was actually a request from a fan.  We’d already been tossing around ideas for a different pizza, but when the request came in we jumped to it and brainstormed how to make this pizza work.  We briefly tossed around the idea of making them cinnamon roll style, just using pizza dough instead of cinnamon bun dough.  But ultimately we decided that, while it’d probably be delicious, it strayed too far from the traditional pizza format to be a Pizza Lab (though we may still experiment with that sometime in the future).  Just putting cinnamon and sugar on the pizza dough would have resulted in a pizza too similar to the dessert pretzel pizza we made years ago.  It was time to take things to the next level.  We had to make this a stuffed pizza.

For those of you that may be unaware (though I’m not sure how), cinnamon buns/rolls are a breakfast/dessert food made from a sweet yeast dough filled with a cinnamon and sugar mixture.  Then they’re usually topped with a frosting or glaze; cream cheese frosting being the best option.  Not going to lie, they’re kind of a pain in the ass to make from scratch.  But one of the delights of going to the mall is picking up a Cinnabon cinnamon bun to eat after a day of shopping (maybe some people don’t get them from the mall, but seriously, are there other places to find Cinnabons outside of malls and train stations?).  They’re super delicious, and also super not very good for you.  But everyone’s allowed to food splurge once in a while.  The idea of essentially creating a pizza sized cinnamon roll may seem slightly irresponsible, but as long as you don’t eat the whole thing yourself you’ll be fine.

Anyway, once we had our plan in place, it was time to assemble our pizza.  Since it was going to be a stuffed pizza it required two (well, one and a half) balls of dough.  It started like a regular pizza, with the dough filling the bottom of the pan.  Next we brushed it with melted butter.

For the filling we just made the regular cinnamon bun filling, which is pretty much just cinnamon and brown sugar.  We added a few other spices just to keep things interesting.

Then it was time to use half of the other dough to form the top layer.  Once it was stretched out the two crusts were crimped together to seal the pizza shut.

The outer crust was then brushed with the remaining melted butter and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.

Regular followers of the blog know that this wasn’t our first foray into stuffed pizzas.  We did it once before with the peanut butter cup pizza last year.  Last time it worked out great.  This time it didn’t go as smoothly.  When we checked on the pizza to rotated it we discovered that our crimping job had not been as successful as last time.  It looked like our pizza was exploding.  We were a bit disheartened.  But we kept going.

While the pizza was baking we made the cream cheese frosting.  Yum.

Once the pizza was out of the oven and the pan we spread on a generous layer of the frosting.  And to our surprise, once the frosting was on, the exploded crust actually kind of worked in our favor to make it look more like a cinnamon bun!

So that ended up not being as terrible as we feared (obviously it staying together would still have been best though).  We also melted down some leftover of the filling we had with some butter and cream to make a cinnamon spiral to continue the cinnamon bun imagery.

Then came eating time.  Not going to lie – this isn’t the neatest pizza to eat.  Cinnamon buns can be messy to eat too though, so I suppose it’s fitting.  The main problem came from the disconnected crusts, because as soon as you went to take a bite the top crust tried to slide right off.  Mechanical issues aside though, the pizza turned out really yummy.  It tasted like a cinnamon bun, but in the shape of a slice of pizza.  It is a lot of sugar though, so we probably would have been better off cutting the slices smaller.  We both feared diabetes by the end of eating our slices.  This is definitely a good option for pizza for breakfast though.

Rating:

Cinnamon Bun Realness, Just Flat