Ordering the Thing That No One Orders: The Burger King Cinnamon Roll

When Breakfast Isn't Your Chain's Thing
Walk into a McDonald's at 7:15 in the morning and you'll experience a flurry of activity.  Cars wind their way through the sinewy path of the drive thru, professionals and laborers alike queue up, their orders already formed in their minds.  Behind the counter, orders are beamed from the terminals in the front to the brigade of cooks in the back, and a well-rehearsed ballet of movements sends conveyor-belt like streams of food to the hungry.

By contrast, if my small number of experiences is any indication, the breakfast "rush" at a Burger King is an Edward Hopper-esque affair, marked by solitary industrial carafes of coffee cooling in the corner and a few expectant prefab breakfast sandwiches languishing under heat lamps.   There may be a cadre of devoted Croissanwich fans but they are not legion, and to enter a Burger King is to instantly arouse the curiosity of the staff that, usually, seem to have had little to occupy their minds a moment prior.

A Cinnamon Roll Value Meal
Be that as it may: this week, we'll be sampling the newer or less-covered breakfast items at Burger King and we'll start with the mini cinnamon rolls, which are offered a la carte or as a value meal featuring two rolls and a small coffee for $3.69.  The buns sport the Otis Spunkmeyer label, which used to mean a lot more than it does now.  About a decade ago, the idea of baking items fresh on-premises from dough frozen off-site was a fairly novel concept and the Spunkmeyer dough service brought fresh-baked taste to delis and other establishments that could not otherwise have afforded to bake on-site.  Over a decade later, the concept is a little stale and passe, and the brand doesn't carry the cache it once did.  McDonalds briefly featured Spunkmeyer cookies but have now gone their own way, demonstrating their own judgment about the brand's value.  Now, rather than promising an extra level of quality, the name in a way just advertises that Burger King doesn't seem to have the wherewithal to design the product themselves.  In a probably unrelated but interesting side note, Spunkmeyer's parent company, the Irish-Swiss dough giant Aryzta, recently suffered a 33% slide in its stock's value after many years of growth.

Burger King Trades on the Otis Spunkmeyer Name and the Forced Puns that are Their Specialty

Baked on a Dry Island
Of course, all would be forgiven if BK could offer us the taste of a freshly baked, gooey cinnamon roll at fast-food prices and with fast-food speed, so let's see how it does.  I should say at the outset that BK starts with stiff competition for I have always felt that McDonald's Cinnamon Melts deliver everything you could ever want in a sweet, doughy, cinnamon snack, though they've never seemed to win the immense popularity they deserve.
Things start promisingly upon opening the protective shell, for the rolls are positively drenched in buttery, sweet, drippy icing.  If we were judging this breakfast snack solely for its icing, it would be judged nearly perfect.

There are very few things you couldn't render appetizing by drowning it in this icing.

But this roll really falls down when it comes to the dough.  Maybe it's because the rolls sit around a long time in the fridge or the deep freeze waiting to be ordered, but the texture of the dough is dense and dry rather than moist and pliable.  And, as the next picture shows, it doesn't help that the rolls are reheated individually.  Classic cinnamon rolls are baked in groups, each roll abutting the other, so that when you tear them apart, each newly exposed side had, just moments earlier, been steaming moistly beside its neighbor.  That allows each roll to stay soft, stretchy, and pleasingly damp.  But as you see here, any surfaces not showered with dough are hard and semi-crunchy; not the taste you want out of a cinnamon roll.  So despite ample icing, despite a reasonably strong cinnamon flavor, these tightly wound rolls are just too gummy, tough, and dry to deliver what we expect in a cinnamon roll.  As a final side note, this is exactly the reason that McDonald's Cinnamon Melts work so well.  Rather than try to serve a roll, McDonald's compacts little gems of dough in a baking dish and cooks all the dough nuggets cheek-by-jowl so all the dough hunks steam together, keeping each other moist.

Conclusion:
This was a nice try, but a lack of careful product design and a probable infrequency of ordering makes this another permanent sideshow in BK's perpetual circus freak of a breakfast menu.  Speaking of which, we will soon be reviewing their new fully loaded Croissanwich, featuring ham, bacon, and sausage in one sandwich.