Classic Cinnamon Rolls

In my family, I started a holiday tradition upon which we have cinnamon rolls for breakfast Christmas morning. And I bake them. The smell and the taste is wonderful to wake up to on such a special occasion, and it gives me something to do in the early hours I'm up before the rest of my family now that I'm past the age of present peeking (mostly). The last few years I've utilized pizza dough to create Easy Breezy Morning Cinnamon Rolls for Christmas breakfast--which are always fun to make, delicious to eat, and don't require yeast (so they get done a lot faster since the dough doesn't need time to rise). But before I discovered this pizza dough hack, I made my yeast-less cinnamon rolls with biscuit dough. And while that recipe has remained a family favorite for years--my handwritten version safely tucked within a fat, orange binder with other old school, paper recipes--I've never actually posted it here. But when this year's Christmas rolled around and I just couldn't find whole wheat pizza dough at my local grocery stores (or any pizza dough, really), I went back to the classic and made cinnamon rolls that hearkened to my early years as an unofficial baker. 

I'll call these my Classic Cinnamon Rolls. It turns out the original recipe (which I adapted slightly) comes from a Cooks Illustrated recipe by Raquel Pelzel, published May 2002 (That's where I got some of the language like "shaggy" dough and "wet sand"). My mom had copied the pages with diagrams to know how to shape the rolls correctly (which are probably safely tucked away within her own recipe binder). But since I don't have those original copies, special thanks to Ed Santiago for his recipe archive scans of the pages:

Ingredients:

For the dough:
Flour (for dusting)
2 and 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
2 Tablespoons sugar
1 and 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/4 cups buttermilk
2 Tablespoons melted butter

For the filling:
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon melted butter

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. In a large bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt for the dough. In a separate bowl or large measuring cup, whisk the buttermilk and melted butter for the dough.

2.) Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until a shaggy dough forms, about 30 seconds. Then knead the dough until it is smooth and not shaggy. Pat into a 12x9-inch rectangle and spray the top of the dough lightly with nonstick cooking spray.

3.) In another bowl, combine the brown sugar, white sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and salt for the filling. Add the melted butter and stir until the mixture resembles wet sand. Then take half the mixture and pat a thin layer onto the rectangle of dough, pressing down but not too deep.

4.) Roll the dough into a log, crimp the edges, and cut into your desired amount of cinnamon rolls. Lay them into a round cake pan sprayed with nonstick cooking spray and sprinkled with the other half of the filling mixture (save just a little to sprinkle on top of the rolls as well). Press the rolls flat and dust the tops with the cinnamon mixture.

5.) Bake the rolls for approximately 23 minutes, checking early for even browning. Remove from the oven, let cool at least 5 minutes and then ice with your favorite icing. If you don't have a recipe, it's easy to make!

From my previous cinnamon roll recipe, here's a simple Icing Recipe:

Combine 1 cup powdered sugar with 2 Tablespoons of your favorite milk-like product (soy creamer, buttermilk, half and half, or just plain milk). Be careful when you pour the sugar, then stir thoroughly. Drizzle over slightly cooled cinnamon rolls and you're done!

Now for some pictures of the process!

Yes, the outfit is a must!

Easy Breezy Morning Cinnamon Rolls!

And now for a change of pace. Don't worry, pumpkin, I still love you. But I opted to not add pumpkin to this particular recipe experiment since, for me, cinnamon rolls are more of a Christmas morning treat. In fact, every Christmas morning for at least four years now, I've made cinnamon rolls for breakfast--a late breakfast after our family's opened all our presents because, well, even gooey, delicious cinnamon rolls take a backseat to presents.

The recipe I use for Christmas involves a biscuit dough instead of a yeast dough so you don't have to wait for the dough to rise. Simple, short, and sweet. But last week I happened to see a freshly made, already packaged pizza dough at Whole Foods that looked awfully tempting. I wondered, could I make cinnamon rolls with pizza dough? It has been done before. As soon as I found out that the pizza dough was actually whole wheat (the only kind of pizza crust I don't feel guilty about eating, and such a rarity to find!) I was sold.

Taking the filling recipe from my Christmas Morning Cinnamon Rolls (since I know from four years experience that those always turn out awesome), I created Easy Breezy Morning Cinnamon Rolls that might just become my new Christmas morning bun. And also possibly an item for the next bake sale. Since cinnamon rolls are so much fun to make (you get to roll them up!), I took pictures of the entire step-by-step process so next time you want to bake cinnamon rolls you can know exactly how to put them together too!

P.S. Your house will smell amazing.

Ingredients:

Flour (for dusting)
1 package whole wheat pizza dough (though any kind of pizza dough will work)
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon cloves
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon melted butter
Nonstick cooking spray

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spread flour on a wooden cutting board or surface of your choice for rolling out your dough, creating a thin layer to keep the dough from sticking. Dust your rolling pin with a touch of flour as well. Then roll your pizza dough into the shape of a rectangle, slightly larger than 9x13 inches (see picture below). It should be about 1/4 to 1/8 of an inch thick.

2.) In a large bowl, combine the sugars, cinnamon, cloves, and salt. Add the melted butter and stir until the mixture resembles wet sand. Spray your dough rectangle with just a touch of nonstick cooking spray, then sprinkle the sugar mixture on top evenly, patting it into the dough. Be sure to reserve a little bit of sugar mixture for the pan.

3.) Using your fingertips, roll your dough rectangle into a log shape slowly and carefully so that it stays together and doesn't stick to your floured surface. Crimp the edges together to seal the log and then flip it over so the seal is on the bottom.

4.) Cut with a serrated knife into 8-16 pieces depending on the size of your log and how thick you want your cinnamon rolls to be. I like to cut my logs in half and then cut each half in half until I get at least eight pieces, but this time I somehow ended up with 14.

5.) Spray a round 9-inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray and dust the bottom with the remaining sugar mixture (you may need two pans if you end up with 14-16 rolls). Place up to 8 cinnamon rolls in each pan, flattening them just slightly. You can arrange them with one roll in the center and seven around the edges. Make sure they don't touch and have enough room to expand while baking. Then bake approximately 18 minutes, keeping an eye on them so they brown but don't burn. Cool at least 10 minutes before icing.

Icing Recipe!

Ingredients:

2 Tablespoons soy creamer (or milk product of your choice--milk, half and half, and buttermilk also work)
1 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.) Carefully pour your powdered sugar in a bowl (powdered sugar always makes a mess when I use it). Add the soy creamer or milk product of your choice and the vanilla. Stir to combine then drizzle over cooled cinnamon rolls.

I've had problems making icing in the past since it used to end up tasting too much like powdered sugar for me. But using a thicker milk product (soy creamer or buttermilk instead of milk or soymilk) and adding vanilla really turns this icing into the perfect match for your cinnamon rolls.

With only one tablespoon of butter in the filling, soy in the icing, and whole wheat dough as the base of the rolls, you can actually count this breakfast treat as relatively healthy (as you nom on the gooey bottom of the roll and lick up all the frosting). So go on, have another one. Christmas is still two months away. You'll have plenty of time to make more for your family and friends then.

The gooey bottom of the roll.

Mickey Mouse Cookies!

To make up for the last silly experiment post, here is an actual recipe that I baked yesterday for a rescheduled wedding shower dessert potluck at work today. I was excited for the opportunity to use a new cookie cutter I had just bought last week at Disneyland! Naturally, my dessert for the shower had to be: Mickey Mouse Cookies (Not to mention the fact that the bride is a HUGE Disney fan!).

To start, I wanted a basic, simple sugar cookie recipe that's result would hold up well in the face of decorations. So I decided to try a recipe appropriately titled, "Simple Sugar Cookies" by famed Italian chef Lidia Bastianich in the back of her children's picture book, "Nonna Tell Me a Story: Lidia's Christmas Kitchen". The book is darling, and great to read around the holidays, and I was equally excited to be able to taste test one of her many recipes--adapted slightly to my needs:

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour, of course)
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract


Directions:


1.) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Sift the flour, baking powder and the salt into a bowl. Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar together in another bowl, then add the egg and vanilla to the butter mixture and continue to beat. Add the flour mix to the butter mix little by little until they are thoroughly combined.

2.) Shape the dough into four equal disc shapes (I made three), wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for an hour or more. Lidia notes that the dough will be "a bit crumbly, but will come together when chilled." However, even though I left my dough in the fridge for an hour and a half, it remained crumbly and fell apart upon unwrapping. Thus I also added about 1/2 teaspoon vegetable shortening to each disc of dough and kneaded it back and forth until the dry dough because moist enough to roll flat.

3.) Roll each disc of dough to about 1/8 of an inch thick and cut out shapes with your favorite cookie cutter. Lift them carefully to place on a baking sheet lined with parchment (not wax) paper. I got about 26 cookies out of the three discs, working the cut dough scraps back into a ball and rolling them flat again.

4.) Bake about 8-9 minutes, or until the edges of the cookies become golden brown. Remove them from the oven and cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely.

5.) Decorate with the icing of your choice! I melted a package of dark chocolate pieces in the microwave for about a minute to use on the Mickey Mouse ears, then, in a separate bowl, melted a package of white chocolate chips with half a tablespoon of vegetable shortening in the microwave to use on the mouse faces. (Stir the chocolate well and dip fast before it hardens!). Leftover white chocolate mixed with a couple drops of red food coloring helped me create pink bows for Minnie Mouse as well. I used a toothpick dipped in dark chocolate to create facial features, and an almond sliver with a drop of green icing completed the eyes.

It was a lot of work to do the decorating part, but definitely worth the cuteness factor that resulted! I hope my coworkers enjoyed!

Quick Gingerbread Cookies!

...a.k.a. Bad Movie Night Christmas in July Gingerbread Men Cookies recipe
(as discussed here).

Ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups + 2 Tablespoons whole wheat pastry flour
3/8 teaspoon baking soda
6 Tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup brown sugar
<1/2 Tablespoon ginger
<1/2 Tablespoon cinnamon
<1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a small bowl, sift the whole wheat pastry flour, baking soda, and spices.

2.) In a large bowl, cream the butter, sugar, eggs, and molasses with an electric mixer or a fork beating very fast until the butter has disappeared into the mix and the ingredients are well combined.

3.) Slowly add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in several batches, pouring from the small bowl into the larger bowl, stirring, and pouring more, and stirring again after each addition until the flour mixture has been thoroughly incorporated.

4.) Using your hands, shape the dough into a small mound in the large bowl and place in the freezer for about 13-15 minutes (14 worked well for me). Remove from freezer, place between two sheets of parchment paper, and flatten with a rolling pin to about 1/4- to 1/8-inch thick. Cut into shapes with your favorite cookie cutters.

5.) Place cookies on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 7-8 minutes or until edges are just crispy. Remove from oven, cool about a minute, and remove to a wire rack to cool completely. Once cooled, can be eaten plain or decorated with icing of your choice.

These cookies have a great ginger, clove, and molasses flavor without being too overwhelmingly sweet. If you miss that kick of sugar in your cookies, definitely go with the icing. Since my brother and his friend aren't lactose intolerant like me, I threw together a quick frosting made from powdered sugar mixed with half-and-half (not measured), stirred until thick enough to spread like frosting. If you prefer to "drizzle," use more half-and-half. To "coat," use more sugar. Wal-Mart decorating gel also works....

Christmas in July

I bet you can't wait! It's only four days away! That's right--it's time for Christmas in July! No, I don't actually celebrate the day that's exactly five months away from my number one favorite holiday, but this year in July my brother asked if I could possibly whip up a batch of gingerbread cookies for him and his friends to celebrate their weekly "Bad Movie Night" showing (this week: The Gingerdead Man. Yeah, I don't want to know either...).

Actually, the request from my 22-year-old brother went more like this:

David: "Cookies?"

Mom: "We don't have anymore cookies."

David: "Cookies?"

Me: "I can make you some cookies."

David: "Cookies?"

Me: "What kind of cookies do you want?"

David: "Gingerbread."

Me: "...Okay."

Thus began a new baking adventure of producing enough cookies to feed three hungry 20-somethings by the time their 70-minute bad movie was finished. If you've ever made gingerbread cookies, you might know that the dough needs time to chill in the fridge--sometimes even overnight--before being returned to room temperature, rolled out, and cut with adorable cookie cutter shapes.

I had my own "go-to" gingerbread man recipe from years ago, but it still called for that same extended chill time, hadn't been tested in a few years, and was...all the way upstairs.

Time to experiment! I knew I wanted molasses, brown sugar, and cloves in my recipe for sure, so I began to search gingerbread recipes online (using my iPhone that was already downstairs) until I came across something close to what I wanted. Using that as a basis, I began to tweak proportions, add a little more of the stuff I liked (omg, cloves smell amazing) and then chilled the dough in the freezer for just under 15 minutes.

It came out cool but not too hard, which allowed me to flatten the dough easily and quickly cut out various men (and women) shapes before baking them in the oven and praying they tasted acceptable to my brother and his friends.

 

I needn't have worried--20-somethings, like teenagers, will eat anything.

However, they did seem to genuinely enjoy how the cookies turned out, finishing about half the batch before deciding they wanted to buy frosting at Wal-Mart and decorate the rest.

I have limited artistic ability, but the above cookies (aside from the single one adorned in white--mine) were adorably dressed by my brother's friends after I went to bed. Mission accomplished.

And to keep this blog short and sweet, my Bad Movie Night Christmas in July Gingerbread Men Cookies recipe will be posted next.