Mile High (almost) Club - Cinnamon Bread

Mile-high (Club) Cinnamon Bread

This past weekend I took a trip to Denver to attend a wedding with Megan, so I thought it would be a great time to try out a new cinnamon bread recipe – Mile High Cinnamon Bread!  What makes it Mile-High?  A lot of yeast and a lot of flour crammed into a plus size bread pan along with a fun swirl wrapping technique allows the bread to expand directly up to nearly twice the height of the bread pan while baking (at least in theory).

High Expectations:

There are two keys to making the mile high cinnamon bread a success.  The first is patience (although this is a common necessity with most breads).  Patience to wait until the dough has risen enough.   The second key is to score the bread carefully with a very sharp knife.  Once the bread rises up over the edge of the bread pan and you are ready to put the bread in the oven, you must score the bread along the edge of the bread pan – all the way around.  And then score the bread along the top of the bread parallel with the long edge of the bread pan.  The scoring is necessary to control the bread rising in the oven, otherwise the dough will split and rise in a random direction.

Know When to Fold ‘em:

After the ingredients have been combined and the dough has had a chance to rise (1.5x to 2x in size), you need to roll it out.  After lightly flattening the dough, fold over opposite sides to meet in the middle, and then do so for the other two sides.  This should create a square.  Roll this square out into a 12”x22” rectangle. 

Brush on the vanilla water and evenly sprinkle the cinnamon/sugar/cocoa/nutmeg mix over this square.  Now fold the long sides in to touch each other in the middle.  So all the coated parts are now inward facing!

Mile high rollers:

Carefully roll the dough.   Make sure that the dough width is that of the pan so that you can simply and neatly set the rolled dough into the pan to rise! (about 7” in width).

Patiently wait for the dough to rise.  Remember the normal temperature for dough rising is at 71 degree Fahrenheit.  For every 7 degrees warmer you double the rate of rising (until you kill the yeast – I think at 160 degrees).  For every 7 degrees cooler you halve the rate of rising.  The bread usually takes about an hour to rise at this point at 71 degrees.  I was ‘rising’ at 64 degrees and I forgot this so I ran out of time (and my bread did not quite get to a mile high – more like a half mile high…)