Decadent Cinnamon Rolls

Happy New Year!  This is my favorite time of the year!

Putting up all the Christmas stuff and getting the house back in order always gets me in the mood to re-organize for the New Year! I love, love, love that! I love things nice & orderly, and always wish I were more organized. I keep striving, but I never seem to quite get there… 

Still, though, I love the fresh, new beginning of the New Year! It's a January thing.

So... I made The Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls over the holidays.

If you haven’t gotten hooked on her blog yet, check it out at www.thepioneerwoman.com Romance, recipes, ranching… she’s got it all. And her cinnamon roll recipe. Oh my, her cinnamon roll recipe. She promised they would be wonderful and they really, really were.

And they were pretty easy to make too, if, if you don’t mind melted butter, dirty dishes and flour all over the place. Maybe I’m messy and don’t know it, so it may be just me. At one point I think I would’ve freaked, except I knew that Mr. Man always cleans up the kitchen for me after I do any cooking or baking. Isn’t he wonderful?? He says (to paraphrase the ending of the movie, An Affair to Remember), “If you can cook, I can clean.” Thank heavens, too, because I did have a bit of a mess.

But it really was a pretty easy recipe, and of course, the rolls were so worth it. Yummy! It makes several pans full, and you can freeze them, so how perfect is that? (I opted to give mine away and make some neighbors and friends happy, but having some in the freezer sounds divine!)

And now that I’ve tried the recipe, I would offer 2 suggestions. I’m big on passing along the kind of I-learned-this-the-hard-way-so-now-you-don’t-have-to stuff. And the first one is, use a candy thermometer to make sure your scalded milk mixture is around 115ºF. before adding your yeast. Just to make sure. You don’t want to kill the yeast with too much heat at this point!

And the second one is, I got much nicer slices when I used dental floss to cut the rolls with instead of a knife. (You slide the floss underneath the roll and bring the two pieces of floss together to cross over the top, pull taut, and voilà, really beautiful slices.) When I used my knife, they smushed. Now, your mileage may vary, but I’m just passin’ that along for what it’s worth. Dental floss.

And the dough was so dreamy soft, and handled so beautifully. I just love the feel of a good bread dough. It just has a quality that’s hard to describe. Very tactile and satisfying. Springy. And of course that maple icing was delicious. (Let’s just eat that by the spoonful, shall we?) I think you could put that maple icing on pig slop and it would be heaven!  :)  

But the dreamy, soft dough leads me to my next experiment. Pioneer Woman’s roll recipe vs. the sourdough yeast bread starter recipe that I currently use for my pillow-soft yeasty white bread or rolls. Hmmmm…

Yes, I will definitely need to make both recipes and see which we prefer. But it will have to be a real comparision. Limit the variables. It’d have to be a true hot-out-of-the-oven taste test. Side by side. Freshly baked with lots and lots of real butter. Okay, I’d better get started. I have to feed my starter a day in advance.

Let the games begin.

XOXO,

Lucky Dog
♥