Jason’s Home Cinammon Rolls

December 27th, 2009 by leigha

I’ve been a very bad blogger lately, so I’m going to try very hard to get back on that horse and keep on blogging.  I can’t even lie and say that I’ve been cooking and just haven’t been blogging, because that would just not be true.  I just haven’t cooked.  I’ve been super busy, so I haven’t been cooking.  But I’m going to try much harder to be a better blogger and a better soon-to-be wife and cook.

Last month or so Jason’s sister called with a Christmas offer–She’d buy a plane ticket home for him if he’d come home for Christmas as a surprise for their dad.  He was gone from the Tuesday before Christmas until the day after Christmas.  I didn’t think it would be that bad since Christmas isn’t a huge deal for us right now.  We’re both a little too old to get giddy about presents and we don’t have kids to get excited for either.  The four legged kids we have don’t know any better, so I figured it wouldn’t be too bad of a time being by myself for the holidays.  It wasn’t HORRIBLE, but it wasn’t overly easy either.  I’ve gotten use to him being around and to be quite honest, he’s pretty handy to have around.  I missed him a lot.

To keep myself busy I bought Baking Illustrated while he was gone.  I really really really like this cookbook.  It has great recipes that you can be almost certain (barring user error) that are going to turn out great.  The cooks for this cookbook tested the recipes over and over and over again until they got them just right.

Since Jason came home yesterday I made him a special welcome home breakfast.  He loves cinnamon rolls, so that was my task this morning.  Overall, they were doable.  They weren’t horribly hard to make.  I will say that making the dough was a little intimidating, but I think I did it okay.  While hand patting the dough into the prescribed 12×9 rectangle for the rolls I kept getting holes in the middle of the rectangle from not spreading it easily enough I guess.  Oh, and the dough was super duper sticky.  I don’t know if that was normal or not, but the “lightly floured” surface ended up being spread with 1/4 cup of flour that would keep it from sticking to me and the counters and everything else it would touch.

Cutting the cinnamon log into the rolls was a fun endeavor, and I learned to not question Jason… The man’s brilliant.  I was having difficulty keeping the dough from sticking to the knife as I was attempting to cut them into individual rolls.  He suggested that I brush a touch of the melted butter on the knife blade.  I laughed at his silliness–if the test cooks wanted it that way they’d have said so, but I was open to the idea and tried it.  Holy cow, it worked.  I’ll never doubt that man’s advice again.

Anyhow, Jason enjoyed them (had 2) and his only suggestion is that next time I make them bigger like the “Grands” biscuits.  So they must not have been too terrible.  I kind of think they were in the oven a little bit too long and browned a bit too much and were rolled a little too loose so the filling kind of melted out of the rolls instead of staying in the rolls making them gooey.

Overall this was pretty easy, there were moments of intense irritation, but not too bad so I guess this was a flip out factor of 2.

The first picture is before they went into the oven, the last two are after they came out and were frosted.