Homemade cinnamon rolls are a major part of my holiday celebrations. My mother makes endless batches for neighbors, dance teachers, acquaintances, dog sitters, whomever. If you have a relationship with the Weaver family, come December, you can expect a batch of homemade cinnamon rolls.
But, Sinful Sweets takes the cinnamon roll to a place that even a cinnamon-roll glutton like me didn’t expect. They put it in a cookie.
The local sweet shop’s line of deep dish cookies seems to be based on the idea that bigger is better. Each cookie is almost larger than a cupcake but smaller than a doughnut, and weigh at least two pounds. The dough is baked like a small pie crust and filled with anything and everything. Varieties are endless: brownie filled with cookie dough, sugar cookie with a mountain of icing, chocolate chip stuffed with fudge. At Sinful Sweets, there’s no such thing as too much.
The deep dish cinnamon roll sugar cookie is daunting. The cookie portion is about an inch-and-a-half tall, squished down by the weight of a miniature cinnamon roll that’s baked into the center. It’s a monster of a cookie.
As expected, the cookie is doughy and underbaked (not that I’m complaining). I’ve credited this to the sheer size of the base; it could take hours to bake something that thick the whole way through. It’s dense and basic and the flavor is less spectacular than the size. Icing is standard and the cinnamon roll is dry, though the roll is the only piece of the cookie to bring a flavor other than sugar to the table. Cinnamon is a welcome respite from the layers of sweetness.
All together, the cookie is too much to handle. It’s a nice, novel idea to stack sweets and make a mega-cookie, but it’s a bit much. Even half of a cookie is, in my opinion, too much for one person. Eating half feels like eating six cookies. You’ll sit in a sugary daze all day.
Sinful Sweets. 539 Liberty Ave., Downtown. 412-720-1381. sinfulsweetspgh.com
