Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

These cinnamon rolls are worth the time commitment. Start to finish, it takes about 3 hours to "make" cinnamon rolls. I snagged a recipe off allrecipes.com that works great. If I happen to get up early on a Saturday morning while Sean happens to sleep in (both don't often coincide the same day, as we often have things we want to do that benefit from getting a good n' early start on the day!), and if the urge strikes me, I'll start some dough in the maker and whip up breakfast for us both-- coffee, eggs, toast, or oatmeal, OJ-- while the machine does the work for me. (Since the process takes awhile, usually we have breakfast, and go about our business, then later eat the yummy, finished cinnamon rolls, either around 11 for a pre-lunch snack, or later for a mid-afternoon snack.)

I am grateful to have a bread machine, which makes the dough part easy!! The first time I attempted these cinnamon rolls, I naively used highly active yeast, which does NOT work the same as normal, active dry yeast, as we discovered. Those rolls were more like swirly bricks. :) Still yummy, but I think there are a few in the freezer even now. We know that if food items survive, even in the freezer, that something needs to be amended in the recipe. :) I recently threw out about 1/3 of a cake that was sitting in the freezer-- sliced, frosted, and ready to go-- and had been residing in the freezer since May 2010. Ahem. I know this because it had blue frosting, and I had coated blue a yellow bundt cake in my zeal to celebrate after we found out we were going to have a baby boy. The only problem is, neither Sean nor I really care for cake (unless it's Mom's inside-out chocolate bundt cake, which his sinfully chocolate-y.) So we ate most of this blue-tinged dessert, but the rest got stuffed in the freezer, taking up valuable space... until I purged it. I just couldn't force myself to eat it, especially since I'm within a few pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight! The other day I was excited to be exactly what I weighed right before I got pregnant, then realized two of the numbers were inverted. It was only a difference of about three pounds, but still! I'll take what I can get, where willpower toward sweet things is concerned.

I'll often make and freeze whole batches of Cheddar Bay biscuits (taste just like Red Lobster's), pumpkin choc.chip muffins, cookies, or rolls, just so we can have them ready for later (Sean's lunches, spontaneous dinner guests, etc.). Talk about convenient! I really think making food from scratch doesn't take very long, and it's way better for you! You know exactly what goes into things, and you can probably pronounce all the ingredients, unlike packaged things! I've made a batch of breakfast burritos a time or two, which are really handy for early mornings. I package the Cheddar Bay biscuits in baggies by two's, single-serving size. I buy 5 pounds of beef at a time, cook it all at once in my big saucepan, and portion it out between six quart-size plastic bags.  I also cook a huge amount of chicken breasts (esp. when on sale!), cube it, and freeze it in 2- to 3- cup portions in quart Ziploc bags. Most of my dinner recipes can be modified to just throw in the chicken  or beef, already-cooked (instead of cooking it then as part of the recipe), and having meat cut up makes it go further. But I digress.

These cinnamon rolls were..... mm mmm good!



Dough rolled out thin with melted butter and cinnamon/sugar mix

Rising in the pan

After baking, and having risen nicely...

And of course, cinnamon rolls would NOT be complete without a vanilla glaze! They were deelish!

Next post: a meatless meal that was tres bien! Sean didn't even mind that it didn't have any meat in it! But he is cool like that-- ever a huge fan of my cooking. :)