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

One of the world’s first Cinnabon Swirls is deep in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro, wedged between a Jamba Juice and a Shake Shack in a sparkly new shopping center in a new housing development called Reed’s Crossing.

Cinnabon Swirl is a corporate chimera dreamed up by Carvel and Cinnabon’s parent company, GoTo Foods, which owns other ’90s shopping mall staples like the aforementioned Jamba Juice, plus Auntie Anne’s. According to Food & Wine, Carvel plans to open 30 Cinnabon Swirls in the U.S. by year’s end. Cinnabon’s executive chef Jennifer Holwill told the magazine the “strategy that just made sense for the two iconic chains,” since the two brands already have spaces that house both businesses. Putting ice cream on a Cinnabon cinnamon roll is a “no-brainer,” according to Holwill.

If you’re someone who gravitated towards the fumes that Cinnabon pumped out of its bakery across the hall from the Sbarros Pizza back in middle school, Cinnabon Swirl might intrigue you. Employees are baking cinnamon rolls on an hourly basis, slathering scoops of frosting onto the iconic gooey dough balls just after they leaving the commercial ovens. Baking trays full of these cinnamon rolls greet you upon entry, icing dripping down their sides, cookie sheets charred with cinnamon sugar crust.

If you get a Cinnabon Swirl Sundae, you can top one of these rolls with soft serve (there are vanilla, chocolate, cold brew, and birthday cake flavors) plus a syrup of your choice. If that sounds too normal for you, there’s always the “Bonini.” That’s where a cinnamon roll gets cut in half and filled with a puck of vanilla ice cream specifically manufactured for the brand’s signature masterpiece. After tucking the ice cream between the two Cinnabon halves, employees stuff the sandwich into a custom-sized waffle iron and press it together to toast. (It is 1,000 calories, in case you were wondering.)

In the spirit of exploration, I ordered a Bonini. 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. The waffle iron process melts the cinnamon sugar coating into a sticky syrup that coated my hands the moment I touched it. It kind of felt like picking up an overstuffed burger and worrying the condiments could fall out at any moment. And once I did find a way to pick it up, I was unsure of where to begin eating. It’s so big that my mouth couldn’t fit around the whole thing; I started eating the top half of the bun, trying to ration smaller and smaller portions of the ice cream with each bite, as it became clear that the ratio of Cinnabon to ice cream was 3:1.

A sticky mess, the Bonini is everything I’ve always disliked about an American cinnamon roll: It’s covered in sugary cinnamon goop, and yet somehow the dough is still dry. The ice cream itself was a little plain compared to the soft serves that are available at Cinnabon Swirl.

That’s a shame, because the birthday cake and cold brew soft serve flavors were actually quite delicious without sending me into a sugar-induced coma. Decadently creamy and subtly flavored, they both invoked a sense of nostalgia for flavors that other millennials may have grown up with — especially the yellow batter of a signature 2000s birthday cake topped with Duncan Hines fudge frosting.

Cinnabon Swirl is emphatically not for us pastry snobs. If you’re the type of person who will wait half an hour in line for the latest limited-edition Jinju croissant, under no circumstances should you drive 30 miles round trip to get a Bonini. But it fits the suburban space. During my visit, the place was stuffed with patrons — mostly young families or high school kids — ordering sundaes, soft serves, and Boninis, and grabbing ready-made Carvel ice cream cakes alongside four-pack mega cinnamon rolls from the takeaway fridges. The service was friendly and prices were under $8 for most items, a pretty good deal these days, especially on a per-calorie basis.

Call it nostalgic, corporate America at its finest, recession signaling. Maybe it’s all of the above. Some of us are obsessed with croissant layers; others evidently hunger for an ice cream Cinnabon sandwich. The future of dessert in America is as uncertain as this economy.