Sticky buns are a dessert or breakfast pastry

Pastry

Pastry is the name given to various kinds of baked products made from ingredients such as flour, sugar, milk, butter, shortening, baking powder and/or eggs. Small cakes, tarts and other sweet baked products are called "pastries."...

 that generally consist of rolled pieces of leavened dough

Leavening agent

A leavening agent is any one of a number of substances used in doughs and batters that cause a foaming action which lightens and softens the finished product...

 — sometimes containing brown sugar

Brown sugar

Brown sugar is a sucrose sugar product with a distinctive brown color due to the presence of molasses. It is either an unrefined or partially refined soft sugar consisting of sugar crystals with some residual molasses content, or it is produced by the addition of molasses to refined white...

 or cinnamon

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a spice obtained from the inner bark of several trees from the genus Cinnamomum that is used in both sweet and savoury foods...

 — which are then compressed together to form a kind of flat loaf corresponding to the size of the baking pan. Before the dough is placed in the pan, the latter is lined with the "sticky" ingredients like maple syrup

Maple syrup

Maple syrup is a syrup usually made from the xylem sap of sugar maple, red maple, or black maple trees, although it can also be made from other maple species such as the bigleaf maple. In cold climates, these trees store starch in their trunks and roots before the winter; the starch is then...

, honey

Honey

Honey is a sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers. The variety produced by honey bees is the one most commonly referred to and is the type of honey collected by beekeepers and consumed by humans...

 (or both), as well as nuts and perhaps more sugar and sometimes butter. After the buns are baked, they are inverted so that the pan lining then becomes a topping. Commercially produced sticky buns, however, are usually just baked in an aluminum loaf tin, which allows the topping to suffuse the buns, making them sticky throughout. The way the buns were baked allows them to more or less be pulled off as individual servings, although it is often a futile effort.

Sticky buns appear to have a Germanic

Germanic peoples

The Germanic peoples are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group of Northern European origin, identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages which diversified out of Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age.Originating about 1800 BCE from the Corded Ware Culture on the North...

 origin and were originally known as "Schnecken". Wherever 18th-century German settlers (such as the Pennsylvania Dutch

Pennsylvania Dutch

Pennsylvania Dutch refers to immigrants and their descendants from southwestern Germany and Switzerland who settled in Pennsylvania in the 17th and 18th centuries...

) went, sticky buns have remained long after many other cultural traits have disappeared.