Cinnamon Rolls

So the baking on this blog is straying away from cupcakes pretty regularly now... and the blog seems to focus mostly on the baking... I hope that eventually it will talk about the other stuff that goes on in my life, but really, there's not a whole lot else besides baking and wedding planning and work in my life right now. And since the baking is directly related to the wedding planning, and really the only part of the wedding planning that I really have control over right now... well, it just sort of works out that I end up talking a lot about baking. So I hope you're enjoying my baking and barefooting blog!

My best friend sent me the recipe for these Cinnamon rolls a while back. She made them in her bread machine and called me after they were finished to extoll their virtues and urge me to make them as soon as possible. I got all excited, bought the stuff I needed for them, and then remembered that I don't have a bread machine and they got tabled for a while. My last day off from work, I decided that I was in a baking kind of mood, so cinnamon rolls won out. Especially since I still had some Cinnamon Cream Cheese frosting left over from my Apple Cinnamon Cupcakes. This seemed to be the perfect place to use that up and for me to stop grabbing a spoonful whenever I walked by it in the kitchen.

Cinnamon rolls have an interesting history for me. When I was in elementary and middle school, before there was a ruling company that dictated what they provided for lunches, there was a sort of unofficial schedule to the lunches that we would learn after a while. Pizza every so many days, burgers every so many other days, I honestly don't remember most of it but I remember figuring it out and feeling very smart. One that we didn't have to figure out and occurred with perfect regularity every month was chili and cinnamon rolls on the last Friday of every month.

Now, I was a ridiculously picky eater as a child, and stupidly stubborn about it to boot. Telling me that I couldn't leave the table until I'd finished my peas only worked if you were willing to stay up with me until I broke, and at that time, I didn't really sleep either. My parents figured out other means to getting me to eat things I didn't like (which was basically anything that wasn't a starch) like Mashed Potato Volcanoes (more on those later!). Either way, the one thing that I would eat without fail or complaint was a peanut butter and honey sandwich. For this reason, I brought my lunch to school with me just about every day. And I had a peanut butter and honey sandwich for lunch almost every day from Kindergarten up through when I graduated high school. Seriously. I apparently don't like change.

There was one exception to my refusal to accept school lunch, and that was chili and cinnamon roll day. I wasn't really into the chili, and would usually try to find a way to dump it in the trash secretly or hide it somehow so that the teachers wouldn't notice that I hadn't eaten it. They usually caught me and I'd spend all of lunch recess sitting at the table because I couldn't get up until I'd finished my food. They underestimated the stubborn thing too, apparently. It was worth it for the gooey, sticky cinnamon rolls though.

I did have one complaint about the cinnamon rolls though. In between each layer of delicious doughy goodness, there was something evil lurking. Raisins. I wanted nothing to do with raisins. I got very good at peeling back my cinnamon roll to eat it layer by layer so that I could pick the raisins out, but I could not figure out why they would poison something so good with something so evil. At the time, I think I just chocked it up to adults being insane, or possibly just evil. Looking back, it was probably an attempt to slip something moderately healthy into something that they knew most of us would devour without thought. Guess I fooled them.

So in honor of the lunch ladies valiant effort to hide something healthy within something delicious, I give you Cinnamon Rolls with Apples. I adjusted the instructions for making it by hand, but if you have a bread machine, check the link for a much easier and less labor intensive way of going about it. Or, if you're strange like me and just really enjoy kneading things, give it a whirl the old fashion way.

Oh, and I did outgrow the picky thing eventually. I do still enjoy a good peanut butter and honey sandwich though. There are some things that just never get old.

Cinnamon Rolls
Borrowed from a recipe found here at AllRecipes.com


Dough

•  1 Cup warm milk
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 Cup margarine or butter, melted
• 4 1/2 Cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 Cup white sugar
• 2 1/2 teaspoons dry active yeast

 Filling

• 1 Cup packed Brown Sugar
• 2 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/3 Cup butter or margarine, softened
• 1 medium apple, diced (I used fuji, but I think something more tart like a Granny Smith would be excellent)

1. Dissolve yeast in warm milk and let sit for a few minutes until it starts to look slightly frothy.
2. In the meantime, mix together the sugar, salt, butter and eggs. Add the milk and yeast and combine well.
3. Add the flour one cup at a time and mix well. Once the dough is pulling away from the sides of the bowl and no longer sticky, turn it onto a lightly floured surface and knead for several minutes. I couldn't get all of the flour in mixing it in the bowl, so I used the kneading time to incorporate the last half cup, which works pretty well.
4. Put dough in a bowl, cover with a towel, and leave in a warm place for an hour or until the dough has doubled in size. (My house is rather cold right now since the weather can't decide what season it is, so I pre-heat my oven to 100* F, then turn off the oven and let the dough rise, covered, in the oven in a ceramic bowl. Plastic bowls + ovens don't work out well. Trust me on this one.)
5. While the dough is rising, combine the brown sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl.
6. Once the dough has doubled in size, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Roll the dough out into an approximately rectangular shape, about 1/4" thick.
7. Spread 1/3 Cup of butter over the dough, then sprinkle liberally with the brown sugar mixture. It should be completely covered by the time you're done. Sprinkle the apple pieces over the dough on top of the brown sugar mixture as liberally as you want, depending on how much apple you want in your rolls.
8. Roll the dough up tightly and cut into 12 rolls. Place on a lightly greased 9X13 baking pan.
9. Cover and let rise for another 30 minutes or until rolls have doubled in size.
10. Bake rolls at 400*F for 15 minutes in a pre-heated oven (if you're letting them rise in the oven because your house is cold, this gets tricky. I set mine in the microwave while the oven pre-heated after they rose in hopes that they would stay warmer in there than on the counter with the cold air all around them.
11. While the rolls are baking, make your Cinnamon Cream Cheese Icing and make sure that it's soft enough to pour, rather than the spreading consistency that we used for the cupcakes.
12. Remove rolls from oven when they are golden brown. As soon as they are removed from the oven, flip them onto a cookie sheet and let them sit for a few minutes. The filling will have dribbled down to the bottom while they were baking, and this helps to re-distribute it. I flipped mine back over after a few minutes into the original pan because I like the sticky side down and the crispy baked side up. You could leave the sticky side up though if you wanted.
13. Spread/pour the frosting over the warm rolls while they are cooling.

These turned out awesome. I ate about three of them before they were even cooled and then had to stop myself before I made myself sick. Definitely made breakfast a highlight of the next few days! I only use about half of my apple pieces (and put the other half in a smoothie so that I could pretend I was being healthy) but I'd recommend going heavier than you think you need as I could hardly find the apple in most of them. Another reason why I think an apple with a more outgoing flavor like a granny smith would be a good choice. Gravensteins would also be amazing, but those tend to be harder to find, and they rarely last long enough to make it into baked goods when they do find their way into my house.

Summer is here

I don't know if all that many people would agree with me on this one, but summer has arrived.

How can I tell? When I walked out of the store I work in yesterday it was sprinkling a little, not pouring down rain, but a soft kind of rain. Not unpleasant in general unless you've had a crappy day already and the rain is just one more thing on top of it. I put my coat on, figuring it'd be chilly out, and... it wasn't. It was a 65 degrees outside. And humid. The humidity is back. I am not excited about that.

But, on the upside, if summer really is right around the corner, then that means I don't have to worry about missing a run because of a blizzard again. And I'll be able to plant flowers soon. I've been itching to get out and try to create a garden in front of our house. I have no idea how well that's going to work, but I'm going to try. I'm tired of being just another ugly gray house on the street. I want SOMETHING to set us apart!

As for running, I'm starting week three of the Couch to 5k program today. I've done the program once before and it worked really well for me, though unfortunately life circumstances had me sidelined not long after I finished it. This time around I've got a plan for continuing afterward, since the half-marathon is my goal. The first time through  I used Robert Ullrey's C25K Podcasts and while they worked, he and I obviously have completely different tastes in music. I used it for the first 5 weeks or so until I was getting into longer stretches of running, then I switched to just my iPod and my watch. This time, I found Chris' Christian Indie C25k Running Tracks. The quality of the music varies, as you usually expect with Indie stuff. There are some songs that I can't wait to get through until the next week because I won't have to hear them anymore, but there have also been a few gems. Run by After the Chase might be one of my new favorite running songs ever. Unfortunately, it was only in week 1, but I can add it to my own running mix and run to it after I get done with the C25k program.

I have today off and I think it might be another day of baking adventures since it's still raining out. We're supposed to get some thunderstorms later, and I'm really hoping for some good thunder though. I miss the thunderstorms of the South. But it does mean that yard work is not on the top of my list. I've got a couple things that I want to play with today, but we'll see how it goes. Right now I'm just enjoying spending the morning hanging out on the couch with my dogs and not having anywhere I need to be!

Lemond Drop cupcakes = Epic Fail

Okay, that might be a bit of hyperbole there. I wouldn't really say they're an EPIC fail, but a fail none the less. Which is sad. I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I hate it when something that I'm baking doesn't turn out. I don't get so upset when something I'm cooking doesn't turn out, because I'm not a very good cook. Baking is a different thing though. I'm generally good at it, so it makes me mad when it doesn't do what I wanted it to, i.e. be delicious.

I got the recipe for these out of Better Homes and Gardens most recent cupcake issue. They sounded amazing and looked even classier. With a big glazed lemon wheel garnishing the top of the artfully done cakes, I was so excited about these cupcakes. You can see the picture and get the recipe here: Lemond Drop Cupcakes

Alas, my cupcakes didn't look like that at all.

Here's how it happened.

First off, my mistakes. I didn't use Limoncello because I didn't want to hunt around the local liquor stores for it, and since The Gamer doesn't drink at all and I rarely do, I didn't really figure I wanted a bottle sit around for the next four or five years until I got around to using it in enough things. I suppose there is a chance that I might someday have guests over that like to drink (most of my friends do) but that's beyond the point. I used milk instead and tossed some of the crushed lemondrops in it to try to give it some lemony flavor.

Next, the recipe in the magazine was not very well written. It left out the step at the end of the online one where you roll the finished cupcake in the crushed candies. Or how they could be replaced with those pretty lemon slices. They were right smack-dab in the middle of the recipe. "That's odd" I thought. "Oh well, lets just toss them in and see what happens." This was not the smartest thing I've ever done.

I also don't really have any kitchen implements that are appropriate to crushing hard candies. I put the candies in plastic bad and pounded on them with a hammer until they were mostly crushed. This worked okay, but there were still some pretty big chunks. I thought it might add some texture, so I left it.

I also over-filled the cupcake wrappers my first batch. Second came out better, and you can see a marked difference between the two.

First batch is on the left, second is on the right. They're much nicer. I also might have overbaked the first batch because I was waiting for them to spring up when I touched them, as cupcakes are supposed to do. The time given in the recipe was woefully short (granted, my oven runs cool) and even the good ones had the toothpick coming clean closer to 22 minutes than 18.

The biggest disappointment with these though, is that rather than baking into the cake and giving wonderful nuggets of awesome in the center, the lemon candies sunk to the bottom and melted onto the wrapper. Making it nearly impossible to pull the wrapper off without ripping off the bottom half of the cupcake. Which was very very sad.

I will say that the overall flavor of the cupcakes was nice and light and lemony, although I added about 2 Tbs. of lemon juice on top of the original recipe because the batter just wasn't tasting like I wanted it to. They were very light, almost too light to the point of being crumbly and hard to eat.

The lemon buttercream was also very tasty. Very strong lemon flavor without being too sweet or too tart, but very very rich. That's why I tried to give it a thinner coating with a smaller icing tip, because I thought a big ol' cupcake swirl would be too much and overpower the cupcake. Even trying to go light on the icing, I ran out about 3/4 through.

The biggest fail though, was the glazed lemon slices. Take another look at the ones from the recipe: lemon drop cupcakes

Okay, here's how mine turned out.

To put it mildly, not well.

I'm not entirely sure what I did wrong, other than obviously burning the sugar instead of glazing them. I'm going to blame it the fact that they were cooked on top of the stove instead of inside the oven. As I mentioned before, I'm not much of a cook.

So there you have it. My first cupcake failure. We're all human I guess, and I'm still looking for a rocking lemon cupcake recipe. If you know of one, leave it in the comments, I'd really appreciate it!