Tessa’s Recipe Rundown
Taste: Is there anything better than the aroma and taste of cinnamon sugary goodness?
Texture: The bites are slightly firm on the outside and fluffy inside. The best part is that each piece is just doused in butter, cinnamon, and sugar.
Ease: Definitely an all-day baking project but completely doable.
Appearance: I love how fun the presentation of these cinnamon bun bites is.
Pros: This recipe makes your house smell like Ikea and tastes even better.
Cons: Paula Deen amounts of butter here.
Would I make this again? Yes, but probably not for a long time.
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Who doesn’t love a good, fluffy, sweet, and aromatic cinnamon roll? How about cinnamon bun bites where every single bite is covered in that ooey gooey sweet cinnamon-sugar butter concoction that makes everything smell and taste like heaven. That’s what I’m talking about. Plus, bite-sized pieces limit portion control (at least a little – promise!) so you don’t end up going into a diabetic coma like when you eat at Cinnabon at the mall. You are going to love these fun and mouthwatering cinnamon bun bites!
While on the topic of sweet cinnamon scents, I couldn’t help but think about Ikea. We have A LOT of Ikea furniture in our house. It’s been a great resource to have while furnishing our first house as a young couple since furniture can be outrageously expensive. Of course it comes with the headache of attempting to assemble pieces yourself and everything in your home will be made from weird particleboard and other strange veneered substances but hey, it’s not that bad. I mean, it will feel bad while you’re midway through trying to assemble a huge dresser. You may experience side effects which include uncontrollable rage and even depression but they will dissipate once you relish in the joy of having (sort-of) built something on your own.
I’ll never forget when Jared and I bought a piece of furniture from Ikea for our first apartment. We had to borrow a truck to haul the humungous box back to our place where we then had to lug it up the stairs. This was of course after dealing with the inside of Ikea itself, which gets incresingly worse after you first enter and are set into a shopping trance by that sweet cinnamon aroma. After all that we opened the packaging and found the “directions” and the hardware package in a clear plastic wrapping. Jared, who can sometimes be a stereotypical impatient man, decided to use his bare hands to tear through the plastic instead of waiting for me to find the scissors. Oh, he tore through it alright. He ripped the plastic so violently that all the crucial little hardware pieces went flying everywhere with the majority of them falling right down the kitchen sink. I can’t even tell you how long it took to fish all those tiny pieces out of the sink. There were flashlights and tweezers involved. But hey, at least now we have a kitchen table.

This dough is beautifully soft and easy to work with. It does require a long amount of kneading, accomplished by your stand mixer hopefully. This is because this cinnamon bun bite recipe is a rich yeast dough, meaning it has fat, sugar, and eggs added that can prohibit gluten development, thus requiring more kneading to develop that gluten.

All puffy and pretty after an hour and a half in a warm spot in my kitchen.

Forming all those little balls does take some patience but there’s really nothing you can do wrong here (unlike rolling actual cinnamon rolls). Plus each bite gets dunked in melted butter and completely coated in cinnamon sugar for the ultimate mouth feel and taste.

After letting the bites sit, covered, for an hour to increase by half they are ready to bake and will smell MARVELOUS in your house.

Cinnamon Bun Bites
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Ingredients
For the dough:
- 1 1/4 cups (296 grams) whole milk
- 4 tablespoons (57 grams) unsalted butter
- 2 1/4 teaspoons (1 packet) instant yeast*
- 1/4 cup (50 grams) granulated sugar
- 1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt
- 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 4 3/4 cups (603 grams) bread flour**
For dipping:
- 1 stick (1/2 cup, 113 grams) unsalted butter
- 3/4 cup (150 grams) packed light brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
- 1/8 teaspoon fine sea salt
For the icing:
- 2 cups (250 grams) powdered sugar
- 1/4 cup (57 grams) whole milk
- 2 tablespoons (28 grams) unsalted butter, melted
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
Make the dough:
- In a small saucepan, heat the milk and butter on medium-low until the butter is melted. Let cool until warm (about 120°F).
- In the bowl of an electric mixer, whisk the milk mixture with the yeast, sugar, salt, eggs, and vanilla until well combined. Add in half of the flour and stir roughly with the dough hook to combine.
- Attach the dough hook and turn to medium speed. Gradually add the remaining flour until a dough begins to form. Knead until the dough is very soft, smooth, elastic, and doesn’t stick to the sides of the bowl, about 8 to 10 minutes. If the dough is unbearably sticky, add more flour 1 tablespoon at a time. Err on the side of sticky to avoid adding too much extra flour.
- Lightly grease a large bowl. Shape the dough into a ball and place in the greased bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
Prepare for dipping:
- In a glass measuring cup, microwave the butter in 20-second bursts until melted. In a pie pan or other similarly shaped, wide but shallow dish, use a fork to mix the sugar, cinnamon, and salt, breaking up any clumps.
Assemble the bites:
- Lightly grease a 9 by 13-inch baking pan.
- Punch down the dough and roll into 1-inch balls. Prioritize speed, don’t worry about being perfect. You should have about 85-90 balls.
- Working with 5-6 balls at a time, dunk them in the melted butter, then remove, letting the excess butter drip back in, then roll in the cinnamon sugar. Place in the prepared pan.***
- Cover with plastic and let rise until puffy and almost doubled, about 30 minutes.
- Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350°F.
- Bake the rolls until lightly golden on top, about 30 minutes.
Make the icing:
- While the bites are baking, whisk together all icing ingredients in a medium mixing bowl until very well combined.
- Allow the bites to cool for about 10 minutes before drizzling with the icing. Serve warm. Store leftovers in an airtight container for up to 2 days, and gently rewarm before serving.





















Hi Tessa! I just made them, and these were amazing!! Thank you so much for the wonderful and BRILLIANT recipe 🙂
Love this- it is kind of like monkey bread & cinnamon bun hybrid. Definitely will be trying this!
I feel like the perfect caption for these would be “Once you pop, you just can’t stop!” They look ADDICTING! And worth every single calorie!
I could eat a dozen of this deliciousness in one seating — which is bad, but oh so good 😉
I can only imagine how dangerously popable these are
Oh no no no… These look so delish, and cinnamon buns are a HUGE weakness of mine. Should I just send you my personal training bill directly? I’m going to need more sessions if you keep posting recipes like this!
Hahaha, that story is so funny…glad it had a happy ending tho! This looks so yummy. Perfect for a lazy sunday breakfast 🙂
These things look addicting!! Must make them!