The Sweet Smell of Success

By Mimi Sheraton.

Fed up with chocolate chip cookies, frozen yogurt, oversize muffins and all the other sweet and faddish snacks? Then you might consider cinnamon rolls, perhaps the ultimate in sugary binges. Now taking defenseless nibblers by storm in the shopping malls of the Midwest, South and Far West, these huge pinwheels of thick dough enfold gluey cinnamon, butter (or one of the more or less convincing substitutes) and enough sugar to create a sticky, candied mass. Measuring from two to five inches in both height and diameter and weighing in at about half a pound each, the buns suggest great spiraled coliseums of honeyed cardboard. Given the size and messiness of these concoctions, it is hard to imagine that an individual could consume a whole one at a sitting. Nonetheless, people do just that, either at the tiny counter of the shop in the mall or back at home after reviving the stiffening rolls in the microwave. Says Deborah Taussig, a retailer from Boulder: "I always hope that I am with a friend, because if I'm not able to split one, I'll never be able to resist eating the whole thing myself."

Kansas City is the center of the sticky craze, and the pioneer there is the T.J. Cinnamons Bakery, opened in the Ward Parkway Shopping Center in January 1985. T.J.'s workers shaped the ball of dough (called by some a brain) into buns and baked them nine to a pan in full view of the public. The proud creators were Ted and Joyce (thereby the initials T.J.) Rice, he a television cameraman and she an elementary-school teacher. After tireless testings of their recipe on friends, they arrived at the right formula. "I thought it should have a high center of gravity so I could dunk it in a cup of coffee and it wouldn't dissolve," Ted recalls. He is right--it doesn't. The allure of the cinnamon scent wafting through the corridors of the malls, now considered essential to the format, was in fact an accident. Installed in an existing structure, the bakery was not vented, and so the aroma of cinnamon became its first and most potent advertisement.

T.J. CINNAMONS IS ON A ROLL, reads a sign by the cash register of the original shop, and that may be an understatement. The cinnamon buns cost $1.25 each, and the top Kansas City shop grossed $50,000 in March. All the bakeries follow much the same routine, offering the rolls as the only solid food, along with coffee, tea and soft drinks. As each one is purchased, it gets a lacing of a thick, viscous white icing, unless the customer protests. At Cinnamon Sam's in Kansas City and Cinnamon Kitchen in Tampa, the buns can be "personalized" with a choice of toppings, such as caramel nut, honey butter, rum raisin, apple and cinnamon.

Some bakeries boast that their dough is based on a secret family recipe. Others admit that they buy a premixed flour formula. All the shops bake in small lots at frequent intervals so that the rolls will be as fresh and flexible as possible. Once cold, they turn leathery. Cinnamon Sam's rolls remain soft an hour or two longer without reheating, although they have no more flavor than others tried in Kansas City. Nevertheless, the buns have a huge following. "Cinnamon rolls are ageless," observes Rich Favaro, founder of Cinnabon in the SeaTac Mall in Federal Way, Wash. "Their appeal crosses all demographics."

Some fans say they jog an extra two miles so they can eat one more cinnamon roll. And despite efforts to standardize the buns, customers have discovered differences. Dick Johnson, when placing his order at Cinnamon Kitchen, asks to have his two out of the center of the pan. "They're gooier that way," he says. "Oh, I love them."

Knowing how fickle that kind of love can be, the entrepreneurial brains behind the cinnamon craze are already thinking of new products. At T.J.'s, pecan sticky buns are regulars. At Mom's in Fort Collins, Colo., Co-Owner Doug Alvey sells what he hopes will be the new-wave temptation for snacking patrons: New Zealand Maori bread. "We have to have something up our sleeve," he says. Considering the stickiness, let's hope it's not a cinnamon roll.

With reporting by Miriam Pepper/Kansas City