These make for an extra special Christmas, Mother’s Day, Easter, or Father’s Day brunch recipe! Melty chocolate, fresh dough, and espresso glaze. What’s not to love about this trio?
Tell Me About These Chocolate Sweet Rolls
Flavor: I often use softened butter in softer bread doughs, but opted for melted butter here. I find melted butter adds more, well, buttery flavor. This dough is sweet and so buttery—in fact, it would be fantastic completely plain. But plain’s not in our language today and we’re filling it with brown sugar, cocoa powder, a bit of cinnamon, vanilla, and lots of real chocolate. Don’t limit them to the morning hours because these chocolate sweet rolls definitely taste like dessert. Texture: Because there’s fat in the dough from the whole milk, eggs, and butter, the bread is extra soft, rich, and flaky. Though all-purpose flour is fine, bread flour promises extra bread-like chewiness. These textures work perfectly with the gooey chocolate swirls and smooth espresso glaze. Each bite has different twists, flakes, and pockets of melty chocolate—similar to the texture of apple cinnamon babka. They’re like warm chocolate babka rolls. Ease: It goes without saying that homemade bread takes time and effort. Consider these chocolate sweet rolls a fun afternoon or weekend baking project. The dough requires 2 rises, but otherwise is pretty straightforward. You can even get started the night before by following the overnight instructions. If you’re new to baking with yeast, review our Baking with Yeast Guide.
Use a Rich Dough for Chocolate Rolls
Before I show you how to make chocolate rolls, let’s talk about the dough. This is a rich dough, which means that it’s prepared with fat like milk, butter, and eggs. Rich doughs make soft breads such as dinner rolls, pull apart bread, and glazed doughnuts. Lean doughs, on the other hand, are made without much fat and produce crusty bread like homemade bagels, artisan bread, and pizza dough. There are so many ways to bake bread and if you want to expand your bread skills, here are all of our yeast bread recipes. (This cheese bread is a reader and team favorite!)
Instant Yeast or Active-Dry? You can use instant yeast or active-dry yeast in the chocolate rolls. I usually use instant yeast and still take the time to quickly proof the yeast in step 1. Proofing the yeast means mixing it with a little sugar and the warm liquid to prove that it’s active—the mixture will look foamy on top, see photo below. But this step is not usually required when using instant yeast. Still, it doesn’t hurt and takes 5 minutes and you can prep your other dough ingredients as you wait.
This rich dough is supposed to be very soft, so don’t add more flour than absolutely needed. Embrace the softness and a sticky work surface because if you don’t mind the mess, you’ll be rewarded with the richest, flakiest chocolate rolls. I heard chocolate croissants were borderline jealous of all these flakes.
Do These Taste Like Cinnamon Rolls?
As far as the process goes, we’re essentially making homemade cinnamon rolls but with a chocolate filling. Make the dough, let it rise, punch it down, roll it out, add the chocolate filling, roll up jelly roll style, cut into rolls, let them rise until puffy, then bake. If you’ve made homemade cinnamon rolls before, this process isn’t anything new. We do use cinnamon in the filling, but it’s really just a background flavor behind all the chocolate and brown sugar. They certainly resemble cinnamon rolls, but they taste like homemade bread swirled with gooey melted chocolate.
Step-By-Step Photos
Proofing the yeast: After the dough comes together, knead by hand or with your stand mixer. (See my How to Knead Dough tutorial for extra help with this step.) The dough is now ready to rise. Here is the soft dough before and after the 1st rise: Here are the rolls before and after the 2nd rise. See how puffy they get? I don’t want to stand in your way of chocolate bliss, so I promise I’m almost done. 😉
Espresso Glaze & Other Topping Options
I couldn’t decide on a topping that would be legendary enough for these extraordinary rolls, but espresso glaze comes pretty close. The bitter espresso powder helps offset the sweet confectioners’ sugar and all the sweetness in the rolls themselves. It would taste divine on these no yeast cinnamon rolls too! Other topping options include salted caramel, vanilla icing, the maple icing from maple bacon doughnuts, or cream cheese icing from homemade cinnamon rolls or raspberry sweet rolls. For something simple, a light dusting of confectioners’ sugar would be beautiful. Peanut butter frosting would be over-the-top and I’m certain all your sweet teeth would be satisfied for weeks. Ha! And, again, these rolls are RICH so you could easily skip the icing on top.
See Your Chocolate Sweet Rolls!
Many readers tried this recipe as part of a baking challenge! Feel free to email or share your recipe photos with us on social media. 🙂
More Cinnamon Roll Varieties:
Cinnamon Rolls Apple Cinnamon Rolls Raspberry Sweet Rolls (my favorite!!) Overnight Cinnamon Rolls Maple Pecan Sticky Buns Lemon Sweet Rolls Orange Sweet Rolls Birthday Cake Cinnamon Rolls Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls
