Cinnamon Pull Aparts Recipe - soft, brown sugar and cinnamony goodness!

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I looove cinnamon buns.. warm and fresh out of the oven with its tender melt in your mouth dough enveloped with buttery brown sugar and cinnamony goodness! I'm not too overly fond of making them from scratch though. It eats up so much time and the suckers disppear within minutes! Enter in the cinnamon pull a part recipe courtesy of my fellow foodie, creative artist/baker/dessert making machine extraordinaire: Lydz! The exact recipe Lydz gave me happened to appear right on the back of the bag of frozen white dinner bun dough balls I picked up, but credit goes to her for her brilliant and simple modification that ensures every single pull apart is coated in the buttery brown sugar and cinnamony goodness that I so love! FYI - this recipe does take about 5min of prep but about 6-8hrs of rising and 30min of baking. Super easy peasy dessert for entertaining, but you gotta remember to get it ready by late afternoon at the latest... unless you want warm cinnamon pull aparts around midnight (don't hear anyone complaining lol!). Anyways, enough yapping and lets get to the recipe!

Well, first off, gather up your ingredients. You'll need some frozen white (or whole wheat if you're feeling guilty, but who makes whole wheat cinnamon... never mind.) dinner bun dough balls that you can find in the frozen aisle of the grocery store, or if you're gung ho and what to spend a day making this, you can make from scratch some bread dough and roll it into balls, though it would really defeat the whole save time thing I'm going rah rah rah here ;) Some brown or yellow sugar, whatever you got kicking around, ground cinnamon and a small pkg of pudding mix (vanilla works better as butterscotch.. well, I'll tell you in a bit) and...

You'll also need to round up some butter. Salted butter gives a bit of a salted caramel flavor to the pull apart, if you're not into that, use unsalted. And optional raisins (rehydrate them for a few min in water and drain off the water if you like them to bake up soft and plump.. which I forgot to when I made this batch, so they were a bit well, raisiny lol!) If you hate raisins, sub them out with craisins or just leave them out all together... its your cinnamon pull aparts!!

Grab either a bundt pan or an angel food cake pan- I'm guessing the extra bit of surface area in the center allows the dough balls to climb up and not crowd each other too much to allow for maximum expansion... and do these things expand! Okay, getting ahead of myself. Grease the pan lightly with oil spray, or if you're using a silicon (this is the one I used: Silicone Deep Fluted Pan) or non-stick pan, save yourself the calories and don't bother... the cinnamon pull aparts will give you plenty in a bit! Now for the easy peasy yet brilliant modification: original recipe tells you to load up the pan with the dough balls, mix the rest of the ingredients together, and dump over the balls, making for a rather uneven (and unfair!) distribution of the buttery cinnamony brown sugar glop that makes these cinnamon pull aparts so good. So instead, you mix all the ingredients together (except the doughballs) then dip and coat the dough balls and layer them in the pan, so every single dough ball gets covreed in an awesome blanket of cinnamon sugar butter... Simple and ingenious! Here's the first layer...

... a bit of raisins

And second layer! I found the mixture started thickening up after a bit (no worries), just goop it onto the dough balls generously and stack them up!

And finished with adding in the last of my raisins and scraping the last bit of cinnamon-butty-sugar-pudding goop on the top. Cover with a damp towel and let it sit in a warm spot for 6-8hrs. I discovered my oven had a "dough rising" button on it... score!!! :D Now if you're the gungho everything has to be made from scratch person.. at this point, you'd let your dough do its final rise for 30min or however long it normally takes and mosey along to...

After your dough rises... woot, looky looky!! Preheat your oven and pop it in for 30min or so. Really let it cool for about 10-15min (its hard with the cinnamonny goodness sitting right in front of you!) so you don't burn your fingers off :P

And you'll have some warm buttery cinnamony-sugary balls of happiness. Yup, I said it. Nom!

Cinnamon pull apart recipe
Ingredients
-24 frozen dough balls - dont worry if your package came with less... mine only came with 22 (boo! got jipped!)
-1 cup brown sugar
-1/4 cup instant pudding powder (vanilla or butterscotch - I found butterscotch to be a bit too sweet, so next time its vanilla!)
-1/4 cup melted butter - you can use up to 1/2 cup if you don't give a damn about the calories
-1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon
-optional: 1/3 cup raisins (rehydate a few min in warm water and drain before using)
How to
1) Mix all ingredients in a medium bowl except for dough balls
2) Dip, dunk, coat dough balls generously and pile into a lightly greased bundt or angel food cake pan and sprinkle in raisins if using nilly willy
3) Pour any remaining cinnamon goop over top of the dough balls in the pan. Cover with damp cloth and let it sit for 6-8hrs in a warm spot
 4) Preheat oven to 350F and bake for 25-30min
5) Cool for 10min and watch them disappear!!