New Fast Food Chain Cinnabon Swirl Puts Ice Cream on Cinnamon Rolls | Eater Portland

"One of the chain’s early hybrid cinnamon-roll-and-soft-serve shops sits in a new shopping center in the Reed’s Crossing development in Hillsboro, wedged between a Jamba Juice and a Shake Shack. The concept is a corporate chimera dreamed up by the parent companies behind a legacy cinnamon-roll brand and an ice-cream brand; according to Food & Wine, Carvel plans to open 30 of these by year’s end. Cinnabon’s executive chef Jennifer Holwill told the magazine the “strategy that just made sense for the two iconic chains,” and that putting ice cream on a cinnamon roll is a “no-brainer.” Employees bake cinnamon rolls on an hourly basis, slathering scoops of frosting onto the iconic gooey dough balls just after they leave the commercial ovens; baking trays full of cinnamon rolls greet you upon entry, icing dripping down their sides, cookie sheets charred with cinnamon-sugar crust. Menu highlights: a sundae option that tops a roll with soft serve (vanilla, chocolate, cold brew, and birthday cake flavors) plus syrup, and the signature “Bonini,” where a cinnamon roll is cut in half, filled with a puck of vanilla ice cream specifically manufactured for the brand’s signature masterpiece, then tucked into a custom-sized waffle iron and pressed to toast. It is 1,000 calories, in case you were wondering. In practice the Bonini is a messy, overstuffed item: “While the ice cream filling stayed surprisingly intact, this goopy monstrosity was hard to look at (my brother said it looked like a brain from the photo I sent him) and harder to pick up,” writes the reviewer, who notes the waffle-iron step melts the cinnamon sugar into a sticky syrup that coated their hands. “It kind of felt like picking up an overstuffed burger and worrying the condiments could fall out at any moment,” they add, describing a product so large their mouth “couldn’t fit around the whole thing” and with a Cinnabon-to-ice-cream ratio that felt like 3:1; the reviewer calls the Bonini “a sticky mess” and criticizes that “the dough is still dry” while the branded ice cream puck tasted a little plain compared with the shop’s soft serves. The birthday cake and cold brew soft serve flavors, by contrast, are praised as “decadently creamy and subtly flavored,” evoking a nostalgic yellow-batter birthday-cake flavor. The spot is emphatically suburban: during the visit it was stuffed with patrons — mostly young families or high-school kids — ordering sundaes, soft serves, and Boninis, grabbing ready-made ice cream cakes and four-pack mega cinnamon rolls from takeaway fridges; service was friendly and most items were under $8. Not for pastry snobs, it fits the mall/suburban context and reads as nostalgic, corporate-America desserting — appealing to people who loved the bakery fumes of middle-school food courts even if it disappoints those who prize laminated croissants or well-textured dough." - Katrina Yentch