Ina Garten's Easy Sticky Buns Are the Perfect Easter Breakfast

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There’s something we’ve never understood about breakfast baked goods. So often, they require that you mix, kead, and let dough rise for several hours before baking. So are there people waking up at like 3 am to make sure the food is ready for breakfast? If so, kudos to them, but for the rest of us, cookbook author and TV star Ina Garten has a convenient alternative. She makes her decadent sticky buns with a store-bought ingredient that’s a huge time saver, meaning this is one breakfast baked good that’s actually possible to make on a busy morning…like Easter!

This Ina Garten recipe comes from the cookbook Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics, and there’s a helpful video of Garten making the recipe on YouTube, too. So what’s her secret to speeding up the baking process when making sticky buns?

Rather than starting with a yeasted dough that requires a long rising time, Ina Garten uses defrosted store-bought frozen puff pastry to make her easy sticky buns. The Barefoot Contessa recommends Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry on her website, which is very flaky, and we also love Dufour Puff Pastry, which is made with butter.

Garten makes her sticky buns in a muffin tin, which helps them keep their shape, and also ensures that each one has the perfect amount of brown sugar and pecan topping. Garten adds the topping to the muffin cups first, because once the buns are cooked the pans get inverted, so the caramelized topping can drip down onto the pastry.

The filling is also simple, a blend of melted butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, and raisins. Garten calls for unsalted butter, but we’d recommend using salted, or adding a sprinkle of salt to the filling and topping, to help balance the flavors.

Unlike traditional sticky bun recipes made with a raised yeast dough, Ina Garten’s puff pastry sticky buns are a beginner-friendly recipe that can be made start to finish in about an hour. You won’t have to wake up before dawn to make sure these pastries are ready in time for breakfast, but they’ll still satisfy everyone’s morning sweets craving, and go perfectly with coffee.

Before you go, check out Ina Garten’s easy weeknight dinner recipes below:

Watch: We Tried Ina Garten’s Overnight Mac & Cheese & We Totally Get Why It Broke the Internet