We all have different motivators, ok? Mine just happens to be cream cheese frosting.
One of the bright spots of 2020, for me, has been the breadmaking. Not my personal breadmaking – the few attempts I’ve made have somehow gone incredibly poorly – but observing the success of others from afar, mostly via Instagram stories. Jenna Fischer (Pam Beesly) has some mad sourdough skills, y’all. My sisters are also exceptionally talented at crafting loaves. (My little sister described my big sister’s quarantine sourdough starter bread as “A loaf borne of the air” which is just about the most beautiful phrase I’ve ever heard.)
Yeast, like toilet paper, quickly became a treasured commodity in the early months of the pandemic as hordes of home bakers stocked up to try something new, or simply to avoid a trip to the grocery store for bread. I felt a little guilty about this – I had purchased a pound of yeast at some point before The Bad Times and suddenly found myself with a cache of gold. I foisted as much of it on friends and family as I could, but I still have copious amounts. Which, as it turns out, is good for me because it means I can make all the cinnamon rolls I want.
A few weeks ago, during a rare trip out to the grocery store, I spotted a can of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls and snatched them up. I was pretty excited, but determined to save them for a weekend morning. With cinnamon rolls on the brain, I stopped at Woods Coffee the next day and treated myself to a chai tea latte and a cinnamon roll. It was delightful. Big, fluffy dough and cream cheese frosting. I felt God in that Safeway parking lot. So, you can imagine my disappointment when I got up on Saturday morning and made my pop-can cinnamon rolls. Don’t get me wrong, I still ate a couple of them, but the small, dense pucks of processed dough and watery sugar frosting could not possibly live up to my expectations. I was left with a deep feeling of unfinished cinnamon roll business. Something had to be done, so I started Googling and found this recipe. It made big claims, but I had the yeast and was ready to tackle the project.
I decided we’d have cinnamon rolls with Sunday morning football, so Saturday night I got out my stand mixer and got to work. I finished the dough and I set it aside to rise. I had to make a trip to Whole Foods for cream cheese, so I scooted off to do that, jauntily browsing the aisles with neither a husband nor baby in tow. I was on my way back home when my ulcer-which-wasn’t-an-ulcer started acting up. By the time I got to the house, I was nearly doubled over in pain. I got the groceries unloaded, found my Tums, and crawled to the couch. The timer I had set for the dough rise went off, and I squeaked at Google to cancel it. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. I laid there, desperately not wanting to get up and finish making my cinnamon rolls but equally upset at the thought of letting dough go to waste. These were supposed to be the best cinnamon rolls ever, dammit, I was not going to over-proof my dough. So I got up. I finished prepping the cinnamon rolls (wincing the whole time), put them in the refrigerator, called the nurse line, and went to bed without dinner.
Sunday morning, I got up, feeling only marginally better. I gingerly fed the baby and asked Rick to get the cinnamon rolls out of the fridge to rise before we baked them. “I have to make them while they’re still going to be good,” I said. He sweetly and dutifully did as I asked. We got the cinnamon rolls baked and I managed to pull myself together and make the frosting. “Thank you for making these, even if you’re not going to eat them,” Rick said. With the pain I was experiencing, I had barely eaten a proper meal for days. I looked right at him and determinedly said “Oh, I’m eating one.” I had come too far, pushed to carry on with my project in the face of my discomfort because of my unwillingness to let my yeasted dough fail. Yeast is a bully, but damn that cinnamon roll was good.
Hickmans at Home 