Cinna-Mania!!

It all started with some of my favorite bloggers posting sweet roll recipes...

There were cranberry orange rolls on Smitten Kitchen, pistachio, orange and dark chocolate rolls on Joy the Baker, caramel apple sweet rolls on The Pioneer Woman, and apple pecan sticky buns on Shutterbean.  I've been dying to try making sweet rolls for months now.  I decided that for my first attempt at roll making I would go basic. I try to travel light since I have limited space in my car and have to bring things like bedding, towels and dishes with me for my assignments, but I definitely make room for a few cookbooks, so i pulled this gem out and got to work.

I was so excited as I began my first venture into the land of gooey delicious cinnamon roll baking.  I quickly learned that it is not all buttery, sugary simplicity.  I am fairly certain I killed the yeast in the first batch since after an hour of "rising" it looked exactly the same...like a large lump of dense dough.  I was feeling discouraged and almost gave up, but gosh darn it, it was Christmas Eve and I was away from home...I wanted some stinking cinnamon rolls.

So, even though I had been up all night at work and was becoming a bit grouchy from lack of sleep, I started over.  So glad I started over!

 

This is how it began, milk, oil and sugar...warmed, but not too warm or you will be sorry. Then add the yeast and some flour and voila!  One hour = a perfect rise. 

Then I added baking powder and soda and a little more flour and rolled it out. A rolling pin did not make the cut to come along with me to Massachusetts so you can see the glass in the back ground that served that purpose.  No fancy equipment necessary!

 This is where things start to get really good...I mean really.

Butter, cinnamon, and sugar, oh my! I might have overdone it on the filling.

Maybe I'm just weird, but this looked a bit like a handprint to me...help, a cinnamon roll has been murdered!  Ok, I know I'm weird, it's alright.  I've come to accept it.  I forgot to take a picture of them after they rose and before they went into the oven, but here are some poor representations of how these rolls looked in all their freshly baked glory.  It's hard to capture how amazing they were..I wish there were a way to send smells through the internet so you could get the full effect.

So then I hovered over them and drooled for a bit while they cooled enough to add the icing.  It took all my will power and a healthy dose of fear at the prospect of burning myself not to dig right in with my hands and eat them like a caveman..but I persevered.

Thank goodness for perseverance. A generous hand with the icing, and this is the result.  Perfection.  Confession, I ate two right away even they were intended to be taken to work.  Only one pan made it there the next day.  Oops/not really oops because these cinnamon rolls were heavenly.

This is the link to The Pioneer Woman's recipe, it's the same as the one in the book.  http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2007/06/cinammon_rolls_/

I only made half a batch, and I'm pretty sure mine were bigger than hers so it didn't quite make as many as expected, but that was fine with me. 

Happy Baking!