“Zombie Guts” Halloween Cinnamon Rolls (with Video)
Warning! This Zombie Guts Cinnamon Rolls recipe is not for the squeamish!
But don’t let looks fool you, these “Zombie Guts” are actually super delicious red velvet cinnamon rolls! They’re perfect as a ghoulish Halloween party treat or a surprise for your favorite Walking Dead fans.
“Zombie Guts” Halloween Cinnamon Rolls
My husband is a huge fan of “The Walking Dead” (both the TV show and original comic series). I knew he would get a kick out of these goofy & gory Zombie Guts cinnamon rolls!
Kids also love this gross-out dessert because it looks just like “guts” of course! And tastes amazing!
To complete your Halloween party table, check out our Easy Mummy Meatballs and Halloween Marshmallow Pops! Also, for a savory “guts” recipe, check out our friend Kathy’s Pizza-stuffed Crescent Rolls Intestines.
Note: because boxed cake mix sizes have changed slightly since we originally developed this recipe, some people were having to add a lot more flour to get their dough to work. We have since updated this recipe so the additional flour needed should be minimal.
Check out our video on how to make these easy Zombie Gut Cinnamon Rolls and then scroll down to grab your free printable recipe:
Zombie Guts Cinnamon Rolls Ingredients
- 2 tsp active dry yeast
- 1 tbsp brown sugar
- 1 1/4 cup warm water
- Pinch of salt
- 1 tsp red food coloring
- 1.5 cups red velvet box cake mix (dry)
- 2.5 cups flour
For the Filling:
- ⅓ cup melted butter
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
For the Glaze:
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 1-3 tsp milk
How to make “Zombie Guts” with Red Velvet Cinnamon Rolls
Prepare the dough:
Combine yeast, brown sugar, and warm water in mixer bowl. Whisk thoroughly and sit for at least 5 minutes until bubbly.
Add in salt, box cake mix, optional food dye and flour a little at a time, mixing in between with a dough hook until you have a dough texture.
Scrape the sides, roll into a ball, cover, and let rise for 1 hour.
Make the “Zombie Guts”
After an hour, flour a large surface and knead for a few minutes, adding more flour as needed, then roll out into a large rectangle. Cut sides that are uneven.
Mix together melted butter and brown sugar, and sprinkle over your dough. Sprinkle cinnamon as evenly as possible. Flatten with a rolling pin.
Roll up into one long roll, then cut every 2 inches. Once rolled, unroll each of them and fold in half.
Arrange in a greased 8×8 inch baking dish so that it looks like “guts.” Cover and let rise another 45 minutes.
While dough rises, preheat oven to 350°F.
Bake & Frost:
Remove cover from dough and bake at 350°F for 25 – 30 minutes.
Once finished cooking, whisk together glaze ingredients in a medium mixing bowl and drizzle over rolls.
Cut and serve.
Printable version of this recipe available at bottom of post.
More Ghoulish “Gore-Met” Recipes
We adapted our recipe for this “Zombie Guts” dessert from the recipe for Red Velvet Cinnamon Roll Guts in Kitchen Overlord’s Dead Delicious Horror Cookbook.
This awesomely unique cookbook features 69 gross-out recipes for horror fans, Halloween enthusiasts, or anyone looking for a dish with serious shock-value.
There’s even modifications for gluten-free, paleo, and vegan diners!
Pin this spooky treat on Pinterest:
Printable version of “Zombie Guts” Cinnamon Rolls recipe:
"Zombie Guts" Halloween Cinnamon Rolls
Don't let looks fool you, these "Zombie Guts" are actually super delicious red velvet cinnamon rolls! Perfect for Halloween or watching the Walking Dead!
Ingredients
For the Cinnamon Bun Dough:
- 2 tsp active dry yeast
- 1 tbsp brown sugar
- 1 1/4 cup warm water
- Pinch of salt
- 1 tsp red food coloring
- 1.5 cups red velvet box cake mix (dry)
- 2.5 cups flour
For the Filling:
- ⅓ cup melted butter
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
For the Glaze:
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 1-3 tsp milk
Instructions
Prepare the dough:
- Combine yeast, brown sugar, and warm water in mixer bowl. Whisk thoroughly and sit for at least 5 minutes until bubbly.
- Add in salt, box cake mix, optional food dye and flour a little at a time, mixing in between with a dough hook until you have a dough texture.
- Scrape the sides, roll into a ball, cover, and let rise for 1 hour.
Make the "Zombie Guts"
- After an hour, flour a large surface and knead for a few minutes, then roll out into a large rectangle. Cut sides that are uneven.
- Mix together melted butter and brown sugar, and sprinkle over your dough. Sprinkle cinnamon as evenly as possible. Flatten with a rolling pin.
- Roll up into one long roll, then cut every 2 inches. Once rolled, unroll each of them and fold in half.
- Arrange in a greased 8×8 inch baking dish so that it looks like “guts.” Cover and let rise another 45 minutes. While dough rises, preheat oven to 350°F.
Bake & Frost
- Remove cover from dough and bake at 350°F for 25 – 30 minutes.
- Once finished cooking, whisk together glaze ingredients in a medium mixing bowl and drizzle over rolls.
- Cut and serve.
Looks perfectly gross! I did notice there is not cinnamon in the ingredients list, are these just sweet rolls rather than cinnamon rolls?
Good catch! We add a generous sprinkle of cinnamon before rolling up the dough. I updated the recipe 🙂
Can we use regular box of white or yellow cake mix instead of red velvet ? And just use red food dye?
Red velvet cake is generally chocolate-flavored, so it won’t quite taste the same. The cocoa in the red velvet mix helps to give it a deeper color, but you may be able to achieve a similar look with yellow cake mix and food coloring. You’ll need to experiment with the coloring to get your desired shade. 🙂
Where is thy rest of thy directions to this recipe? It stops at folding the 2 inch roll slices in half after slicing the roll into those slices.
The directions are complete in the blog post itself, but somehow got cut off in the recipe card. Thank you for letting me know – I just fixed it!
Looks great, I wonder how they’d turn out if you use red good coloring in the glaze to make it even more dramatic!
Ooh that sounds great! Let us know if you try it!
It works great adding food coloring to the glaze but I prefer a cream cheese glaze.
Hi,
One the rolls are arranged in th baking pan, could I leave this covered in the fridge over night and bake the next day? Not sure how much it will rise #novicebaker
Thanks!
It should be fine – we haven’t tried it with this specific recipe but I’ve done it with my other cinnamon bun recipes and it’s worked great.
Where do I use the red food coloring?
You can add it in when adding in the cake mix – but it’s optional.
Can you do the final proof in the refrigerator the night before baking?
That should work fine – I’ve done it for other cinnamon bun recipes but not this one – please let us know how it works out!
Can I prepare this the night before?
Yes, absolutely!
My dough came out VERY gooey and sticky, even after adding an additional cup of flower and a half cup more cake mix. Still the consistency of mud! What am I doing wrong?
Hi Jane!
I’m so sorry that this isn’t working for you – I’ve never had this problem but my first thought was that your yeast hadn’t finished fermenting.
This post has some good tips – https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/16858/why-is-my-pizza-dough-always-too-sticky-to-knead
The ones I would follow are: ensure your yeast has fully fermented (bubbled), ensure you have allowed the dough to rest long enough (it should have doubled in size), flour your hands and your surface well, and depending on how humid it is where you are, you may want to switch to bread flour. Some people were able to see results sticking the dough in the fridge or freezer for a bit.
Good luck! Let us know how it goes.
Mine is coming out very wet too! I let the yeast bubble. Any other suggestions?
Did you let it proof for the full amount of time? Some dough will require more flour, but it shouldn’t go from being a cohesive dough before rising to then muddy.
I added 1.75 cups of flour to mine to get it to the right consistency.
Mine also 😢
I have to make these delicious and spooky cinnamon rolls! My kids are going to love them!
I hope they do! My girls think they are pretty creepy! Haha – but they taste good!
Hello. Has anyone tried adding apples or apple pie filling to the roll? If so, do I need to change the baking time or amount of other filling ingredients?
I added red gel food coloring with a little blue gel food coloring to darken it to the glaze, looks just like blood.
Thanks for the tip – will have to try that!
Hello, This recipe look very cool but I don’t have access to box cake mixes, at least not the red velvet one. Have you tried it without? Any suggestions of what I could substitute??
Thank you.
You could use a chocolate or vanilla boxed cake mix and add in the red food coloring, or you could just use a homemade cinnamon bun recipe and add red food dye. I have a good one on my other website: http://sugarspiceandglitter.com/copycat-cinnabun-homemade-cinnamon-buns/
Thank you for the tips. I’ll see what I try. I like the idea of the from scratch bun!
Can you serve this room temperature or does it need to be served warm?
We just made these and it was so fun! They came out tasting pretty good. We added a ton more cinnamon (like 2 tablespoons) to get a good cinnamon roll flavor. Also we used a 9×13 pan; I truly have no idea how you squeezed these into an 8×8, we tried and it wasn’t even CLOSE to fitting.
I would do a couple things differently next time. First, rather than rolling up the cinnamon rolls to cut and unroll them again, I would slice them into strips with a pizza cutter right after adding the butter/sugar and fold up the strips. This would help keep the outside of the strips a bit cleaner and make tubes. Second, I think I would skip the red velvet cake mix and just use a lot of red food coloring in a regular cinnamon roll recipe. The cake mix does help with the color so it looks nice but the leaveners and additives make for a weird bread texture. I would also maybe brush butter on them in addition to adding the icing to help get a good gross shine.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Thank you so much for the tips, we will look at revising so this recipe can be even better for next year.
While I liked providing a cake mix hack, with cake mix companies changing their ratios, that has messed up our recipe so next year’s version might need to be from-scratch to guarantee good results.
Are you sure that the water amount is correct? 1 3/4 cup is an awful lot. I have made a tone of roll recipes and it never calls for more than 1 cup of liquid. This came out very soupy – and I had to dump it after I had added almost 2 cups more of flour!
I have to agree with others who say this dough is incredibly wet and sticky. And I added a ton of flour and the whole box of red velvet mix. The color was beautiful but it was more wet than focaccia. It rose but was too wet to roll out so we just made a blob of red dough and put frosting on it. The measurements you list seem like way more than the ingredients you put in the video. The video has way less yeast, brown sugar and flour especially. Next time I will just make a regular cinnamon roll recipe and use food gel.
I am an experienced baker, with plenty of yeast dough experience. I doubled this recipe and started with 5 cups flour/3 cups cake mix and probably put in 8 cups of flour before it resembled anything like dough, similar to other bakers’ experiences above.
I could not get the dough to stop being sticky.
I just made these for a Halloween party. It does turn a little sticky, just add a little more flour and you will be fine. I also added a hint of vanilla. One thing I did to make it even creepier it to add red coloring to your icing you add. Those gives it a red glaze and more realistic.
Made these last Halloween for my grandson, he thought they were very COOL!
Going to make them for our daughters Nurse Grad party next month as ‘INTESTINES’
I think they’ll be a big hit!
I make this every year and it’s always awesome. Just a heads up that the baking instructions disappeared from the recipe card. You can find them in the step by step above the card, but you might want to fix that.
Thank you, Phillip, I’m so glad you love this recipe and I’ve made a note to figure out what is going on with our recipe card. Thank you for letting us know about the issue!
These were a big hit. I made them this week for the first time so when I make them for the Halloween Party they are perfect. I agree, more cinnamon, also my dough wsa sticky. I thought maybe I didn’t kneed it enough? I like the ‘roll it out, cut in strips’ going to do that next time. Also, going to add a bit of red food coloring to the icing. I printed ou the recipe and it still doesn’t have the baking instructions on it. I winged it at 350 for 30 minutes and it was perfect. Thank you for this. It’s just lovely for the Halloween Party. 😀
I’ve made these without the cake mix and they turned out fabulous.
cool recipe! glad i read the comments first because my dough also started out like cake batter (way too wet and sticky). i added more flour, 1/4 cup at a time, and probably ended up with 5 cups of flour total to the 1.5 cups of cake mix (basically, just plan on doubling the amount of flour that the recipe calls for). after each flour addition, i’d mix it with the dough hook to start, then scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl with a rubber spatula to get it all combined. eventually, it did turn into a nice ball of dough that i was able to work with. i also followed the one commenter’s suggestion to cut the dough into strips instead of rolling it up, and that worked really well because you don’t have to worry about neatly trimming the big rectangle; you can just use the messy edges as extra strips. be patient when you make this and don’t give up because it’s worth it!
Also ended up with sticky dough and added quite a bit of flour to manage it. Rolled it up and stretched and twisted then put in the pan. Also had to use a 9×13 pan to fit it all. Will be letting it sit in the fridge and baking in the morning so they are fresh for my work Halloween party. Also plan to add a little bit of red and blue to the icing to give it a dark red glaze! Overall really looking forward to the end result! Also would put time spent to like 3 or more hours as this too forever with letting the dough rise and what not.