pepperoni pizza rolls

These are like cinnamon rolls, but with pepperoni pizza. Which I guess is very not similar to cinnamon rolls. Actually, I could go for a cinnamon roll right now. So, that sucks for me.

Now, either I saw a picture of something like this that inspired me to make these, or I saw a picture that I mistook for something like this that inspired me to make them. Regardless, I tried to find a recipe online for this kind of thing and couldn’t find one, so ‘wing it’ it was! These tasted pretty good hot, really good warm, and absolutely delish lukewarm. I’m not sure how they would taste cold or reheated because they never made it that far, but I imagine quite delish.

You need:

-one batch of pizza dough
-one pack of sliced pepperoni, the sandwich meat kind
-chedder/mozzarella cheese (we had a blend. a blend of what was left in the drawer. This is why I don’t have a cookbook.)
-pizza sauce

Start off with a batch of your favourite yeast-based pizza dough crust. You could probably even use premade pizza dough. You just want to roll it out into a big rectangle. You want it thinner than your average pizza, though. I’ll say a few millimeters thick (sorry, there, citizens of the united states. I speak metric.) If anyone pulls out a ruler I will slap their hands with it. This is a messy do-it-with-your-kids recipe, not fine dining.

Spread pizza sauce all over your rolled out crust, to taste. I think it would have been tastier with more pizza sauce, but Chris says I should not mess with a good thing. Also, the more pizza sauce you have, the harder it would be to roll. Or sloppier, rather, I should say.

Next, we are spreading the pepperoni on. This does not need to be precision. I am obsessive enough that if I had been doing it there would have been a perfect little grid of pepperonis just barely overlapping. But, I was not doing it.

The diseased looking pepperoni is really just covered in flour. I needed to peel them apart for her highness. We wound up using a whole pack of the meat.

Next you want to spread on the cheese. We used a mixture of preshredded pizza mozza, and grated marble chedder. I think either/or or both would be good, but I imagine just chedder would be really great, in hindsight. Once again, we don’t have a set amount going on. Just do what feels right. We used everything we had left in the drawer.

Yeah, this was done at night, so I apologize for the creepiness that is caused by the flash. Anywho. Now you want to roll this baby up. I found this a little awkward because mine was super long, but I got Nicole to hold one side while I rolled the other a scooch.

Here is where we really deviate from the cinnamon rolls (as if we didn’t already back when we started adding the fillers.) What you want to do here is just cook it rolled. I cut mine in half to fit it on the baking sheet. I baked it on parchment paper (my stone was dirty, ha) and I actually used the parchment paper to help it get on the baking sheet. I kindof pushed/rolled the rolls onto the paper and then lifted it gently onto the baking sheet. If you don’t have parchment paper, you could use wax paper to move the rolls onto the sheet and just remove the wax paper. You could use any number of things to move it, really.

We baked our rolls for about 40 minutes at 350F (see, I’m not totally metric.) You want them to be a light golden brown on the top. I cut into the middle of my thicker roll to make sure it was cooked through, just to be sure it wouldn’t be doughy. Let the rolls cool to the touch and cut to desired thickness. Chris and Nicole dipped theirs in ranch dip but I just ate mine naked and free! Yum. And Nicole LOVED helping out.

These would be great to make ahead for a kids birthday party. They’re a bit messy to make but they aren’t messy to eat (potential for dip mess, mind you.) I imagine flavours like Ham&Pineapple would be pretty good as well, but you might want to increase the sauce. These actually don’t taste exactly like pizza, more like a really hearty little sandwich. But Nicole loved eating it!

Enjoy!