The San Francisco Bay area is rich with bakeries that make excellent morning buns.
An unsticky sticky bun made with buttery croissant dough and veined with swirls of sugar and cinnamon, the morning bun first became popular in the San Francisco Bay area in the mid 20-aughts. Some reports say it originated in Wisconsin and traveled west; by 2010, it had become ubiquitous, even part of the regular lineup on Starbucks’s pastry shelf. It is made in a muffin tin, giving it a dual personality, the stump compressed and rich like a farmland sweet roll with perhaps a thin web of caramel crispness like a chewy trivet all around the bottom, its top as light and flaky as a well-made croissant.