Thursday, March 24, 2011

Tuesday Morning Cinnamon Rolls


Tuesdays mean cinnamon rolls for breakfast. My older daughter used to do most of the baking but then she got married and I had to start baking again. A couple of months ago, my younger daughter and I were wanting to make cinnamon rolls for the boys. We were out of yeast and because of our lack, something wonderful happened. We discovered a new (and better) way to make cinnamon rolls. My whole family says they are the best ever. We used biscuit dough instead of a yeast dough. Probably any biscuit recipe would do but we like how we make biscuits and with only one variation its the exact recipe we would use for regular biscuits.

4 cup flour
6 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt (regular recipe calls for 2 tsp salt)
1 cup butter
1.5-1.75 cups milk

Bake at 450 in a preheated oven for 15-20 minutes.

Mix flour, baking powder and salt. I use stick butter and I use my cheese grater to grate the butter into the flour mix. My pastry blender broke so I use my hands to work the butter into the flour. I mix in enough milk to make a nice dough that is NOT wet.

Spread flour on the counter and I roll the dough out as thin as I can get it. I don't worry about perfect measurements or perfect edges because when it all comes out of the oven, no matter how the rolls look, no one ever comments on how ugly they are...only how good they are.
Smear softened butter onto the dough. Don't be stingy with the butter. Butter makes everything better.
I mix 1 cup of brown sugar with 2 TBLS of cinnamon and sprinkle it on to the dough.
I start with the long side that is farthest from me and roll up the dough.
Cut them up and put them on a buttered cookie sheet. To grease the cookie sheet I used the wrapper from the softened butter. It works pretty well.
While the cinnamon rolls are baking, I mix up some sort of frosting/glaze. This particular morning the frosting consisted of left over cream cheese (about 4 oz) a little bit of softened butter, milk and powdered sugar.
When I went to the cupboard to pull out the powdered sugar, I discovered, much to my dismay that only a few tablespoons of powdered sugar remained in the bag...and just who put the bag back in the cupboard in this condition? My oldest daughter who was visiting over the weekend and made the cream cheese frosting to go on a carrot cake for her daddy! Anyway, I looked on google to figure out how to make powdered sugar and found it was easy and quick and only dirtied up the blender.
I made one cup at a time. Put it in the blender and set the speed on high.I did hold my blender and move it around a bit to get the sugar moving more. It only took a few minutes.

When the rolls come out they look like this. We don't put sprinkles on the cinnamon rolls. Silas thought I might want them from the cupboard so he brought them to me. :)
Then we frost them.
And the little ones look like this:
And after the pan looks like this.
I noticed as I was fiddling with my pictures to get them lined up right, that Silas is licking the rolling pin in several of them. HAHA! Just so you know, if your coming to dinner and I'm making food, I don't let my children get their paws in there like I do when I'm cooking for just my family.

7 comments:

  1. Oh so good!! My mama always made cinnamon rolls with biscuit dough and of course we had plenty of homemade butter to use, making them all sticky and sweeet. So of course I like these better than yeast rolls. Don't little children just love to help!

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  2. They look soo good! I have never made them,but just may give these a try. Blessings jane

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  3. I'm going to have to give these a try.

    Love the pictures of all your interested little helpers. Too cute!

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  4. I am going to make these too! What temperature and how long do you bake them??

    I noticed Silas right away and thought it was really cute!

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  5. Duh, I found the directions, sorry about that!!

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  6. OK, made them this morning for breakfast! They turned out really yummy! I think I would still prefer yeast bread cinnamon rolls, but these sure are good and you can make them lots faster!!

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  7. Love, love, love the the pictures of your little man licking the rolling pin! ADORABLE!

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