Sabbath Supper: The Ooey-gooey Post I Promised

12/04/10: Cinnamon Rolls for Saturday

I was hoping to post about these last week but so many things came up!

I think I will be keeping with my original writing style--with all the categories and questions I give myself--so I can remember the most important aspects. OK, let's get to it. . .

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Recipe details: These cinnamon rolls have a cinnamon, sugar, and butter filling--something you would expect, right? But these rolls have a little secret when it comes to preparation. You can make the dough in the bread machine!

Defining moments: This would be, if I remember correctly, the first time I made cinnamon rolls. It would also be the first time I allowed our bread machine to have a hand in the dough forming.

Recipe sources: I used two sources to make these rolls. The dough recipe (called Sweet Dinner Rolls), comes from allrecipes.com and the cinnamon roll filling comes from Annemarie's Betty Crocker cookbook.

What I learned: If you read the King's Arthur Flour blog often you will find that the bakers there sometimes use bread machines. Not only in baking bread from start to finish, but also to knead a wide variety of dough and to allow it to rise. PJ Hamel, one of the blog writers, said the following in her Beautiful Buns post:

For purposes of these photos, I always knead in a stand mixer; but if I’m not photographing, I knead in a bread machine. It’s easier (I can walk away and forget about it), and does a super job.

I second the motion! The bread machine does a wonderful job kneading. I can go and do something else with a free mind--which is a godsend when you are juggling lots of things at once. The only problem I have with it is that I can only do one recipe at a time. I usually have to make two recipes for my family so the overall preparation time is longer. But it less hands-on work, I should remember, and it creates the perfect rising environment.

To make this dough, I added all the ingredients to the bread pan (in the order of the allrecipes.com recipe--it matched my bread machine cookbook), placed the pan into the machine, selected the "Dough" cycle (#6 on my Corner Bakery machine), and pressed START. It took 1 hour until it was ready to shape.

I removed the dough from the pan and started rolling it out into a rectangle that measured 9" x 18". It is a very springy dough so I had a tough time rolling it out to those measurements. Perseverance!

I then smeared the dough with a 1/4 cup butter, sprinkled it with 1/4 cup sugar, and 2 teaspoons of cinnamon.

While the cinnamon aroma filled the kitchen (cinnamon is SO wonderful!), I rolled up the dough jellyroll like and pinched the opening closed.

Then I took my dough cutter (you can use a butter knife), and cut 1" wide pieces from the log. I usually got 12-14 rolls from one log.

I placed the rolls down into a 13x9 Pyrex dish, leaving a little space between each one. I covered the dish with plastic wrap and moved it to a warm area (on top of my stove in my case), for the 2nd rising. It took about 1 hour for them to double in size. My first batch took a long time to show some rising action; probably was caused by a too cold of kitchen.