It started with brioche, not cinnamon rolls
I've taken pastry and baking courses on and off most of my life, and the thing I keep coming back to is enriched dough: the butter-and-egg-heavy stuff that takes its time and doesn't forgive being rushed. Brioche especially. Cinnamon rolls are what happened when I pointed all of that at something sweet. And honestly, you can't go wrong with a cinnamon roll.
There's no recipe handed down to me here. This one came out of adjusting brioche recipe after brioche recipe until the crumb was right, and then building the swirl to match.
The part that actually took work
The regular roll was the easy one. What I set out to do was make the vegan roll, the roll without gluten, and the higher-protein roll just as good, not "good, considering." That's been the personal challenge. None of them is a compromised version.
The vegan one might be the best thing on this menu, and I say that as a non-vegan.
Why Rockaway
I live here. I grew up in Ozone Park, fifteen minutes up the road (used to be 10 before all of the speed cameras), and spent my summers out on this beach long before I lived on it. My family works here too (in the local schools and running a business a few blocks away), so this peninsula isn't a location I picked, it's the one I'm already in. Being part of this community instead of visiting it is the whole reason this is a Rockaway bakery and not just a bakery.
Why "con canela"?
Because that's the whole idea: with cinnamon. It's the one ingredient every single thing on the menu is built around, and the reason the roll on the logo is the only logo this place was ever going to have.
