cinnamon rolls

March 24, 2020 Rice and Coffee3 Comments

Well, it’s How-To Tuesday! And after waking up before six worrying about things I have absolutely no control over, I decided to dive into my trusty List O’ Things To Do for some inspiration, and thought, what could possibly be better than trying my hand at cinnamon rolls?

I have been trolling around the InterWebs searching out a recipe that didn’t require me to have cream cheese for the frosting, as that was not an ingredient that made the Quarantine Grocery List cut. (Five bags of tortilla chips, however, did. What does this say about me?) I ended up settling on this cinnamon roll recipe from delishrecipes.net because it met my “no cream cheese” criteria and didn’t require an unreasonable amount of butter. (My father says there is no such thing as an unreasonable amount of butter

Now, before I go any farther, it is absolutely imperative that you understand that I am an obsessive Great British Bake-Off fan. It is my go-to show, and I’ve seen the whole series to date I-don’t-know-how-many times. (The Vulcan does not share this passion, much to my never-ending sorrow.) So I went into this Cinnamon Roll Challenge with a couple of objectives:

Take photos of different steps in my process, because that is what you are supposed to do, I guess, when you make a recipe and post it on your blog. (Please see: every food blog ever.)
Pretend I am on G.B.B.O. while doing it. (OBVIOUSLY.)

As everyone knows, the first step in creating your food blog post requires you to take a photo of your ingredients like so…

Also, I have to point out my flour and sugar jars are vintage West Bend Bread Co. I love them.

It’s worth pointing out that I forgot I was supposed to do the ingredient shot with every stage of the recipe and only took the picture of the dough ingredients. Notice my open butter box and the fact that, while I remembered to put a bowl in the shot (which I did mostly because I am fiercely proud of my vintage Pyrex,) I neglected to include a spoon… Additionally, I hope you appreciate my attractive, stylized backdrop featuring my knives and chopsticks. It lends that certain je ne sais quoi.

Then I combined ingredients to make the dough. It should be said that, if this were G.B.B.O. I would most certainly be the contestant who comes in last in the technical because I failed to read the ingredients accurately…as in, I accidentally put the egg in with ingredients that had to be heated in the microwave. This may or may not have resulted tiny bits of slightly cooked egg being sprinkled throughout my batter.

You may notice the handy use of my wooden ruler, retrieved from my desk drawer to make sure I rolled out the dough to the right size…

Because I’m so nice, I did my sleeping husband a huge favor by foregoing the dough hook on my KitchenAid and instead hand-kneading for a few minutes. I may have imagined the G.B.B.O. music in the background while I did this, except I don’t look nearly as expert at it as anyone who’s ever been on the show. (I did reflect that, between baking and yoga, by the time I get out of the quarantine, I’m going to have some serious muscles.) Then I had to roll it out to a 12″x16″ rectangle. I learned it is very hard to roll out something that looks like a rectangle with a rolling pin, but that there are few things on this earth that butter and sugar can’t fix (particularly when it’s slathered all over the top of something.)

The rolling up process was more stressful than necessary, due in no small part to the fact that I’ve watched way too many people get in trouble with Paul Hollywood for not rolling things tightly enough and leaving big gaps. Admittedly, my primary audience (the Vulcan) is not nearly as exacting, but it’s the spirit of the thing! I cut the roll into something more appropriated cinnamon roll-sized using string (another neat trick I picked up from watching the show,) covered them with foil, and put the pan in the oven to prove. This is the bit I’m worst at, because it’s just sitting around and waiting and doing really un-fun things, like cleaning up after oneself (which I did,) and possibly eating some tortilla chips while I waited, because that’s what responsible grown-ups do.

The many states of the cinnamon roll: (L-R) cutting it apart with string, in the pan pre-prove, and post-prove. Check out that beautiful swirl! I am a master!

The baking itself (I did use the steam bath mentioned at the bottom of the recipe–I was taking no chances with possible dried out cinnamon rolls) was the easiest bit. The Vulcan (with his usual uncanny timing) managed to wake up just as they were coming out of the oven to fulfill his duties as official household taste-tester. Because he is a wise man, he gave them his (somewhat sleepy-eyed) seal of approval. I have to say I think they’re pretty good, myself.

So if you’ve got some time to kill (and since we’re all in some level of social quarantine, who doesn’t have some time to kill) might I highly recommend the cinnamon rolls? Not only were they not overly complicated, people think you’re a genius. If my social media feeds are any indication, everyone is making bread. Be the original in the group and make something delicious and decadent! (Just make sure not to put your egg in with the ingredients that need to be heated in the microwave…) Happy baking!

See you tommorow!

Emily

Baking · Kitchen Culture · Kitchenware

Bake it off

March 9, 2017 Rice and Coffee9 Comments

There’s always that one person. You know–the one who insists on doing it the long way. You know them, because they’re the one who would rather spend twenty minutes trolling around the grocery store looking for something rather than ask someone who works there where to find pizza sauce. Or the one who spends twenty-five minutes doing math longhand because it’s “just too much trouble” to get out a calculator. The person who still has a Rand McNally Road Atlas. Like I said. You know the one. And I’m here to tell you…

…I’m that one person.

I’m sure there’s some really smart, psychological reason probably linked to when I learned to walk or the fact that I refused to eat peas until I was 20, but I prefer to think it’s because I’m a rebel. I have to go my own way–march to the beat of my own drummer. Put the wind in my sails and sail off toward the horizon. It’s all very romantic and much more dramatic than, say, potty-training.

So, tonight my old, Watch-Me-Be-Difficult self did it again. I decided to bake this peanut butter, chocolate chip bread I found on Pinterest to take into work tomorrow. I got the stuff, pulled up the recipe tonight and it told me to use…an electric mixer. Now, I do (somewhat begrudgingly) own this pretty hip, 1949 handheld mixer that weighs about a ton, but I will be honest with you. The prospect of cleaning the darn beaters means I avoid using it for anything short of meringue.

So when this recipe suggested I use a mixer for a quick bread, I instantly decided that a spoon would be fine. I have this one wooden spoon I got at a garage sale when I was fresh out college. It’s a great spoon–it looks like it’s about a million years old, it has a nice long handle–and it is my official “baking spoon.” So I got out the Baking Spoon, laughed in the face of this recipe, and stubbornly insisted on blending peanut butter, brown sugar, and two eggs by hand.

Well, I can tell you it worked just fine. It took maybe three extra minutes, but I don’t care. My friend, Kelly, has this spoof on the Taylor Swift song “Shake If Off” hanging in her kitchen, that popped into my head as I was mixing this batter. I’ll be diplomatic and say that T. Swift is not exactly in my top ten favorite artists of all time…or any time…but tonight, after successfully defeating a “mixer only” recipe, I found myself literally dancing around my kitchen singing,

“Players gonna play, play, play, play, play…And haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate…but I just bake it off, bake it off!”

Baking · Food · Kitchen Culture

Banana Bread

March 13, 2016 Rice and Coffee8 Comments

Yesterday, I made banana bread.

I didn’t wake up planning on it, but little projects like unplanned quick bread tend to crop up when I take an in-house Saturday. In-house Saturdays are not the norm for me. They generally involve me not leaving the house before one or two and I’m usually still in my jammies right up until I have to put on real clothes to go somewhere. It should here be noted that “real clothes” on Saturday are usually leggings and a sweatshirt, only slightly domesticated pajamas in their own right, so I’m not sure why I resist. I think I do it because, as a teacher who’s generally out the door by five ’til seven, I feel like I’m “stickin’ it to the man” when I lounge around in official P.J.’s until noon.

In-house Saturdays, I usually forget to eat breakfast and sometimes lunch, because I’ll brew a giant pot of coffee and dedicate most of the morning to drinking all of it. It proves that coffee as an appetite suppressant is a real thing. Also that I can still function when I am literally bouncing off the walls with caffeine.

You will notice I haven’t labelled in-house Saturdays with the culturally traditional descriptor of “lazy,” and this has been intentional. They aren’t. The days I stay home usually involves a whole sea of projects that need to get done–not all of them needed to get done right then, but they needed to happen.

Which brings me back to the banana bread, and how I hadn’t been planning on it when I woke up. I was sitting at my kitchen table, coffee mug and To-Do List in hand (I am a fiend for lists. I don’t know how teachers survived in the pre-Post-It age), when my gaze fell on my fruit bowl.

I went on a big banana kick for a few weeks, but in the last couple days it’s kind of fizzled out. A girl can only eat so many bananas. And they were starting to get super brown and spotty, and I know there are those purists among you who will tell me that that’s when they’re finally “good,” but I’m persnickety about bananas. I have a very limited banana-consumption window. Bananas more brown than yellow do not fit through that window.

So I decided that making banana bread probably should be a “thing.”

This would not always have been the case; I am not a quick bread junkie, and even six months ago, I probably would have just left the bananas in the fruit bowl until they were all brown and I began to wonder if it were possible for bananas to actually mold, then tossed them away just to be on the safe side.

This was before the new year, when I read an article entitled “57 Small Things to Do for Yourself This Year” on the (really fabulous, fancy) food blog website Food52. (You can read the full article here.) The article gives lots of great, little ways you can enrich your life, but the one that really stuck out to me–and the only one I remember in mid-March–was #48: “Never throw away edible food.”

I took that to heart. I was really convicted of how wasteful Americans are (and I am, particularly) when it comes to food. How many times have I thrown away perfectly good leftovers because I wanted the pan for something else? How many times have things gone bad in my fridge because I didn’t end up with enough time to make the recipe I bought them for? How many times have bananas gone bad in my fruit bowl because I just didn’t feel like eating any more bananas?

Lots of people all over the world cannot even fathom the abundance that is at our fingertips whenever we walk into a grocery store. It just struck me as disrespectful to them not to treat this privilege with the respect it deserves.

So I decided to make banana bread.

It has been my personal resolution in 2016 to try use up what I buy. It means I’ve had to get creative sometimes, and that I go scouring through my cookbooks and the internet trying to find recipes that call for one green pepper or half a bunch of cilantro. It also means I’ve actively had to chop up veggies I’m not going to use before they go bad and stick them in my freezer in Ziplock bags so I can use them later. It means being what my yoga teacher would call “mindful.” It means being what, to my students, I call “responsible.”

So I made banana bread.

I got out a bunch of cookbooks and hunted up the one that called for the most bananas and I still had all the ingredients for. I mashed up the bananas. I mixed everything up. I put it in the oven, then took the finished product when I went to visit my parents yesterday to see my baby brother who is home from college. The banana bread was a big hit. I can’t take a picture of it today because it all got eaten. You can just thing tasty, banana-bread-y thoughts, though.

I know that not wasting things isn’t a big solution. I know that sometimes, I do just really muck up a new recipe and have to toss it because when I take it for lunch, I opt instead to eat the candy in my desk because I just can’t stomach the thought. I know that me using my resources well isn’t suddenly going to keep people from starving in Sudan. But out of respect for them, I get creative. I try not to abuse the incredible gifts I’ve been given, to respect the abundance that is at my disposal, to try to be responsible.

And so I make banana bread.