About a month ago I decided that, much like Martin Luther King, Jr., I had a dream. I was going to include Mariah Carey in that sentence because I thought her song Love Takes Time began with the phrase “I had a dream but I let it slip away”. Sadly, I was mistaken. She sings, “I had it all but I let it slip away”.
So now I actually have two dreams. First, my original dream that I haven’t mentioned yet, and, secondly, the ability to accurately remember the lyrics to Mariah Carey songs.
I’ve always believed that if you’re going to dream, dream big.
Here’s my original dream.
Back in June, I spent the weekend at my friend Ree’s ranch. We had a great time and I had the opportunity to ride a horse named Peso in what was possibly the worst display of horsemanship ever exhibited on their land. It makes my bottom hurt just to think about it.
The morning we left to head back to the big city, Ree brought us four pans of her homemade cinnamon rolls. I’d seen the recipe on her website at least a year before but was all, whatever, I have a friend named Mrs. Baird who totally sells her cinnamon rolls at the grocery store in plastic packaging and why would I want to spend all kinds of time making homemade dough and hoeing crops in the hot sun?”
Not that you have to hoe crops in the hot sun to make the cinnamon rolls, but my thought was that if you’re willing to make your own dough then it’s not a stretch to assume you might hoe some crops.
But then came the fateful morning that I actually tasted one or eight of those cinnamon rolls and I knew my life would not be complete unless I could eat them whenever I wanted. And since the rising cost of fuel prohibits us from using our personal lear jet as much as we used to, I knew it wasn’t going to be an option to fly to the ranch every morning for fresh baked cinnamon rolls.
Also, I wasn’t invited to fly to the ranch every morning.
I told Ree I would love to make them but was frightened by the dough-making process because it seems to be a task that requires “skills” and “cooking ability”. She assured me that it was very simple, but I didn’t really believe her because she seriously has written her very own cookbook that’s about to be published and everything like a real piece of literature. I figured Ree telling me making dough is easy was the equivalent of Michelangelo listening to someone rave about the beauty of the Sistine Chapel and saying “What? That old thing? No big deal. I just had some extra time and paint on my hands. A monkey could have done it.”
Months passed since I’d had one of those cinnamon rolls, but I couldn’t quit thinking about them. And somewhere deep inside my soul or my stomach, a dream was born. A dream of making pans upon pans of those homemade cinnamon rolls, wrapping them in festive green and red cellophane tied with ribbon so sparkly it practically screams “MERRY CHRISTMAS”, and giving them out to every neighbor, garbage man, and UPS delivery man within a twenty-mile radius during the holidays.
I believe my feelings about it are best summed up in these classic words from Mariah, “I don’t want a lot for Christmas, there is just one thing I need.” The need to make homemade cinnamon rolls.
All I want for Christmas is you.
As with most lofty dreams, I had to conquer my fears. My fear of failure and packages of active dry yeast and recipes that call for nine cups of flour and use phrases like “if it starts to splurge out of the pan, just punch it down”.
I’m sorry, but I generally stay away from foods that may need to be wrestled to the ground. With the exception of Lifesaver Gummie Sours because everyone knows if you get two of those suckers stuck together, it’s going to take some effort to pull them apart.
I officially began my journey last Thursday when I went to HEB with a list of all the required ingredients. Everything was pretty straightforward until I began to peruse the selection of yeast. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d use.)
I had no idea that yeast came in so many forms. Who are all these people making delicious things from scratch and why aren’t they bringing any of it over to my house?
Ultimately I decided to purchase the packages of Fleischmann’s Active Dry Yeast and you can imagine my delight when I got home and realized that’s exactly what Ree uses for her dough. I’m clearly a natural.
The only thing I couldn’t find was maple flavoring. HEB doesn’t believe its customers have any need to make anything with a hint of maple flavor. (They also don’t believe people need to purchase Tyson Roasted Chicken Breasts which is a whole other issue that I won’t get into right now) At times like this it would be really convenient to just run to another grocery store, but here in South Texas we don’t have another grocery store. Unless you count the Walmart.
Which I don’t.
Also, Walmart didn’t have the maple flavoring either.
I decided to move forward in spite of this little hitch in the process, especially because it wasn’t going to be an issue until I got to the part where I make the icing and I wasn’t really sure I’d ever get that far because the dough might beat me to a pulp and leave me hanging on to a very thin thread of sanity in my kitchen.
Here is how I spent Friday morning in what is truly a horrendous food pictorial.
I started by scalding some stuff in a pan.
Once it was scalded, I added eight cups of flour. EIGHT CUPS.
And then I covered it up and left to go to Target for about an hour. I came home to this.
I can’t lie. It scared me. I’ve never dealt with foods that grow of their own free will. Other than vegetables obviously, but they don’t grow in a pot in my kitchen while I’m looking at Mossimo merchandise.
But I didn’t let it get the best of me. I punched it down, grabbed half the dough and began to roll it into a rectangular formation on a well-floured surface just like the recipe said.
I can’t even explain how much I had to fight my desire to cut it into a perfect rectangle. A rectangle that would make geometry teachers everywhere weep with joy. But I fought my OCD tendencies and just went with it.
I poured butter over the surface of the not-at-all-shaped-like-a-rectangle shaped rectangle of dough.
And that’s when tragedy almost struck.
I came within millimeters of sprinkling my precious dough covered in butter and sugar with a healthy dose of cumin instead of cinnamon. Something tells me it wouldn’t have been the start of a new taste sensation because it’s so rare that you hear anyone say, “You know what would taste great? A sweet pastry that tastes like taco meat.”
Fortunately, it all turned out okay and I began to roll up the rectangle into a big roll.
And made one heck of a mess in the process. I think I used a superfluous amount of butter if that’s even possible.
Then I began to cut the dough and, next thing I knew, I had this.
And, ultimately, I had these.
P sampled them when they were fresh out of the oven and declared them to be delicious. His only complaint was the icing was so sweet that it kind of made his teeth hurt. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it might be because I substituted Aunt Jemima maple syrup for maple flavoring.
I was desperate.
SInce I still had half the dough left, I decided to wait until Saturday to make the rest of the rolls and figure out a solution to the shortage of maple flavoring in my area. Sophie suggested that I might want to try Whole Foods and, sure enough, I was able to find all-natural, completely organic maple flavoring that had been harvested by beavers just that morning for approximately the cost of Caroline’s college tuition.
I baked the rest of the rolls and iced half of them with Ree’s icing that calls for the maple flavoring. And then, because I am totally adventurous, I iced the other half with a recipe that called for 2 cups confectioners’ sugar, 1 (3 ounce) package cream cheese, 1 tablespoon butter, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract and 3 tablespoons milk.
Either way, they were delicious.
By Saturday evening I had eight pans of cinnamon rolls when all was said and done. I’ll never tell how many we ate as opposed to how many I gave away.
Ree was right, they’re actually pretty easy to make. I mean, I did it and I’m a person who spent thirty minutes trying to make a decision about active dry yeast and jumped back in fear when I saw dough rising out of a pot.
In the words of Mariah Carey, I had a vision of love (or cinnamon rolls) and it was all that they’ve given to me.
You can find Ree’s recipe by clicking here.
