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
- 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)
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.
We would like to think that your stint of working at Elliot Glacier had something to do w/ you growing out of your picky eating habits! I remember the day that Bill came home from work and was SO excited that you had tried the pulled pork sandwich :D the smells of that yummy pork just finally broke you!
ReplyDeleteHaha Mel, that may have been part of it. I think it was partially just part of growing up though. I'd say that moving to the South had more to do with gaining an appreciation for pulled pork though!
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