Cinnamon Rolls

It is winter here and I was feeling a little homesick, so the only effective way I know to cope with that is through food.

Wednesday night I came home and Mary had recently pulled a homemade loaf of white bread out of the oven. It was magnificent. We buy wheat or wheat with grain bread at the store, so the combination of fresh baked bread and the sinfulness of white bread was pure heaven.

This weekend, I thought I would follow her lead and try to make cinnamon rolls.

It is at these times, I search through my recipe box and find it lacking. I never really paid attention when my mom and sisters were making the cinnamon rolls when I was growing up. I remember watching them do parts of the process, but I wasn't directly involved. So, I had to go back to my compendium of all classic recipes--Irma S. Rombauer's "The Joy of Cooking".

I searched through her tome and found she didn't have a specific cinnamon roll recipe either; but for rolls, she suggested using a milk bread dough so I went with that.

The only missing element at this point was the gooey caramel my sisters used to put on the bottom of the pan to really jack-up the calorie load of the roll. The rolls would bake in the pan and the caramel would bubble up, infusing the bottom of the roll with a chewy sugary saturation that goes perfectly with the buttery icing on top.

It was Friday night on this side of the planet, which meant it was Thursday morning back in Wisconsin and everyone I called was off to work. I couldn't get in touch with anyone to ask how to make the caramel. I was finally able to reach my Aunt JoAnn in Idaho and she gave me some pointers, but as I suspected, she told me there was no real recipe for it. You just have to know the right proportions of butter, sugar and cream to add, then how long to boil them for--as if this is some magical substance that if written down would fall into the hands of someone dangerous and upset the natural balance of the bread world.

I tried my hand at the caramel thing. After an initial failed attempt, my second batch was actually some pretty good caramel--but it wasn't the stuff that my sisters used to make. I still muddled onward, undeterred and made the rolls anyway with my second-rate caramel bottom.

Everything else was lovely. The rolls were light and fluffy, the icing melted perfectly; it was just the thing to start off a Saturday morning. I won't be putting Cinnabon out of business though.