Cinnamon-Sugar Pinwheels

These cinnamon pinwheel cookies have a cream cheese dough that bakes up impossibly tender and flaky. Butter, cream cheese, egg yolk, and flour. That’s the entire dough. No sugar in it, no leavening. The sweetness comes from the cinnamon-sugar-pecan filling rolled up inside.

The cream cheese does two things here. It adds richness and tang to the flavor, and it keeps the dough pliable enough to roll thin without cracking. After a 30-minute chill, it firms up just enough to handle but stays soft enough to roll into a 12×10-inch rectangle. You brush the surface with melted butter, scatter the cinnamon-pecan filling across, and roll it up tight like a jelly roll.

Slicing into ½-inch rounds reveals that spiral pattern that makes pinwheels so appealing on a cookie platter. The filling caramelizes during baking, creating pockets of crunchy, spiced sugar against the soft, buttery dough.

Chef Tips

• Chill the dough fully. Warm cream cheese dough is a sticky nightmare. The 30 minutes in the fridge is a minimum, not a suggestion.
• Roll from the long side for more spirals per cookie. Starting from the short side gives you fewer, wider turns.
• Use a sharp knife for slicing. A dull blade compresses the roll and squashes the spiral. A serrated knife works well too.
• Don’t overbake. Pull them at golden brown. The cream cheese dough goes from perfect to hard very quickly past that point.

Variations

• Brown sugar filling: Replace the white sugar with brown sugar for a more molasses-rich, deeper sweetness in the spiral.
• Chocolate pinwheels: Spread a thin layer of Nutella over the dough before the cinnamon-sugar for a chocolate-cinnamon swirl.