Kanelsnegle (Danish Cinnamon Rolls)

Denmark has so many wonderful sweet buns and pastries (hello, Danishes), and one reliable Danish classic is kanelsnegle. Kanelsnegle, or “cinnamon snails,” are Danish cinnamon rolls made with a buttery cardamom dough and filled with cinnamon, sugar, and butter.

Kanelsnegle set themselves apart from other cinnamon rolls with the great amount of butter in the dough and their hint of freshly ground cardamom. Traditionally they are bare or drizzled with powdered sugar icing. However last time I was in Copenhagen I had the most delicious kanelsnegle with cream cheese glaze at Andersen & Maillard in Nørrebro. So today I decided to recreate their cream cheese frosting topped kanelsnegle. Well, I topped half of them and kept the other half bare, because classic kanelsnegle are also so good.

In the recipe below I’ve included an optional cream cheese glaze.

Tips

You can use ground cardamom for this recipe, but if you have a mortar and pestal I highly recommend grinding cardamom seeds instead, as freshly ground seeds are much more flavorful. I wouldn’t bother unless it really made a difference, but it really does.

Kanelsnegle dough has a lot of butter in it. And while usually it’s best to add butter to dough towards the end of kneading, in this case you should add in the melted (and cooled to room temperature) butter at the beginning. You can knead the dough by hand or in a mixer with a dough hook. I knead it by hand for about ten minutes.

Try to add as little flour to the dough as possible when mixing together the kanelsnegle dough. I usually save the last half cup of flour until I turn the dough out onto my counter to knead. Then I slowly add flour until I can knead the dough without it sticking.

Let the dough rise until it’s about double in size. This usually takes around an hour, however the rising time will vary depending on your room temperature and whether you’re using fresh or instant yeast.

I roll the dough out into a square instead of a rectangle. This ensures that I can roll the dough many times so that the cinnamon “snails” have lots of curls.

Kanelsnegle are typically on the thinner side for cinnamon rolls, but you can of course decide yourself how thickly or thinly you would like to cut them.

Be sure to brush the kanelsnegle very thoroughly with the egg wash – you want it covering the entire top and sides of the cinnamon buns.

Do not bake these longer than necessary! The most common mistake I see when making cinnamon rolls is baking them for too long, which results in dry buns. I bake mine for exactly 10 minutes, until the tops and bottoms are golden brown.

If you’re planning on freezing these, freeze them as soon as they’ve cooled. Freeze them without the cream cheese frosting. Then you can either pop them in the oven for a few minutes or defrost them and toast them and they’ll taste freshly baked.

You can switch the recipe from US measurements to metric by clicking from “US Customary” to “Metric” under Ingredients.