A tender sandwich loaf rolled around a warm ribbon of cinnamon-sugar butter, baked until the top turns bronze and the kitchen smells like a bakery. This Cinnamon Swirl Breakfast Loaf is the soft, sliceable morning bread you keep coming back to.
It’s one of the 20 recipes inside our Bread Cookbook, and we’re sharing it in full so you can bake the standard before you buy the book. The hands-on work is gentle — the dough does most of the timing for you.
Why this recipe works
The spiral is the whole trick: rolling the buttered, cinnamon-sugared rectangle tightly from the short end locks the filling into a clean coil, and baking to a 94°C core guarantees the crumb is fully set without drying out. Leaving a 1 cm margin gives you a seam that seals instead of splitting.
Ingredients
Dough
- 300 g bread flour
- 160 ml whole milk
- 40 g unsalted butter
- 1 tsp instant yeast
Swirl filling
- 50 g soft butter
- 60 g brown sugar
- 2 tbsp ground cinnamon
- 4 g fine sea salt
Optional garnish
- Coarse sugar crust on top
Serves 2 · Prep 30 min · Cook 40 min · 285 kcal per serving
Instructions
- Build the dough. Mix flour, yeast, salt, warm milk and softened butter. Knead 8 minutes until smooth, then rise 75 minutes covered.
- Roll rectangle. Deflate and roll into a 35x25 cm rectangle, leaving 1 cm margins for a clean seam.
- Spread filling and coil. Smear soft butter across the dough, dust cinnamon-sugar evenly, roll tightly from the short end, seam-side down in the tin.
- Prove and bake. Second prove 50 minutes, then bake at 175°C for 40 minutes until the internal temperature hits 94°C and the top is bronzed.
Chef’s tip
Dampen the dough lightly before the cinnamon-sugar; a dry filling slips during rolling and leaves hollow gaps in the spiral.
Get the full Bread Cookbook
Loved this loaf? It’s one recipe from a 20-strong collection of breads built the same way — clear ingredients, exact temperatures, no guesswork. Grab the full Bread Cookbook below.
