Hot Dish: Cinnamon buns at BreadsNBakes

Owner Jason Bowman, top left, and junior baker Tish Nadelman, bottom left, making cinnamon buns. Amy Sowder Photos

By AMY SOWDER

Jason Bowman arrives at his bakeshop in the dark while most people in Pound Ridge are asleep in their beds.

It’s 3 a.m., and it’s time to make the croissants.

By 7 a.m., four other bakers joined him to ramp up production. In the last few hours of one workday, about 10:30 a.m., Bowman sips a Hatch latte with his wife, Dawn, both of them perched at the window bar at BreadsNBakes in Scotts Corners. Dawn slices a cinnamon bun in half to reveal delicate layers and pockets in the cinnamon-coated interior. This cinnamon bun is the couple’s top-selling item by volume.

“We use croissant dough. It’s buttery and flaky. The brown sugar, butter and cinnamon combine to create a caramel,” says Jason, head baker and co-owner with Dawn of the shop crafting European-style breads, pastries and treats.

She nods as Jason peels off the white paper from underneath, where sweet, golden brown threads cling to this delectable twist on a classic.

“It’s got that lovely gooey, sticky bottom that’s not a typical cinnamon bun,” she says.

Jason is a tech insurance underwriting consultant who transformed his baking hobby into a home-based business in 2020. Back then, customers ordered online and picked up at Booksy Galore, where Dawn worked at the time. The croissant-layered cinnamon bun (cinnamon croissun? cinnamon bussant?) came about while baking at home, as a way to utilize the off-cuts of croissant dough. 

In 2022, the couple, who had immigrated to the U.S. with their family from the United Kingdom and now have grown children, opened a brick-and-mortar bake shop. Since 2024, they also operate and make the baked goods for Bedford Post Barn, the daytime café at the Bedford Post Inn.

How it’s made

The birth of this popular BreadsNBakes cinnamon bun begins even earlier than the painstaking process of laminating 33 layers of croissant dough. 

It begins with the living organism they must feed and grow: the sourdough starter. 

“Using a sourdough starter reduces the amount of commercial yeast we have to use, and it has more flavor and adds more aeration,” Jason says.

Pulling down a clear, square bin from a top refrigerator shelf, Jason peels back the plastic wrap to show a bubbling, gurgling, beige liquid goop. He feeds the wild yeast culture some flour and water on Sunday nights. While feasting on its smorgasbord, the hungry yeast and good bacteria turn the starch within the flour into carbon dioxide, causing it to expand. The starter acts as a leavening agent, causing the dough to rise. When it’s time to make the croissant dough, the bakers mix the starter, King Arthur flour, milk and butter. They mash and roll out big 2.2-pound flat squares of  Isigny Sainte-Mère Beurre de Tourage butter between paper-thin layers of dough to create those dizzying 30-plus layers.

Typically, they make the dough Monday or Tuesday, and refrigerate it for 24 hours so it’s cold all the way through. On Wednesday, they laminate it, folding the dough.

This is when the sheeter — or laminator machine — comes in handy, which has two belts on opposite sides running at different speeds. When they’ve had enough layers, Jason and junior baker Tish Nadelman, carefully push the big, buttery, doughy, 33-layer sheet back and forth through the machine.

“We run this through so we get the right thickness. We’re trying to get the dough to be 6 millimeters thick,” Jason says.

On the last pass, the dough wraps around a metal roller the size of a rolling pin before it’s unrolled and laid out on the cutting table. Nadelman slices long strips and rubs some water on it. Then she sprinkles light-brown sugar all over, followed by organic Saigon cinnamon. 

Then this dish really gets on a roll.

“I’m just pinching the dough up to make a round cylinder,” Nadelman says, as her nimble fingers create the signature roll. “And then you just keep pinching it and pulling to make it tight.”

Nadelman measures two fingers with finger-width space on each side and slices individual cinnamon rolls all along the way. Then she places white baking paper under each roll before nestling each one into the baking tray cups.  “You can see the layers there,” Jason says, peering into a roll where the striated dough hints that this is no ordinary bun.

Then they wait hours again for “proofing”; that’s when yeasted, shaped dough rests, ferments, and rises.

“This is basically a refrigerator at night and a proofer in the morning,” Jason says as he slides the tray of unbaked cinnamon rolls into a fridge among trays of almond croissants, pain au chocolat, regular croissants, pistachio pinwheels and raisin buns.

Right now, the fridge is at 35 degrees Fahrenheit. About 1 a.m., the fridge, which has a humidifier to prevent the baked goods from drying out, will gradually warm up. Once the buns have been at 80 degrees for about an hour and a half, they’ll be ready for baking. 

“They’ll be doubled in size and coming out of the container,” Jason said.

When ready by about 4:15 a.m., the cinnamon buns bake for 30 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

“When that heat hits the yeast in the first five minutes, it balloons up, and it’s very satisfying to watch,” Jason says.

Meanwhile, Jason mixes the icing made from confectioner’s sugar and paints the top of the bun with a pallet knife. “See, it’s got that shine,” he noted. Spread on each individual rolled bun, the bakers strive for just the right amount of icing. “It’s not overpowering,” Dawn says. “We want people to taste not just the icing, but the whole thing. We want balance.”

BreadsNBakes is located at 73 Westchester Ave., Pound Ridge.