Some mornings are worth honoring with protracted ritual. Perhaps the night before you found a duffel bag full of gold bullion and fancy cheeses, and are in the mood to celebrate. Or maybe you woke up with a chipped tooth and your eyebrows shaved off and just need to do something active while reevaluating your life. Whatever the reason, there are fewer activities more befitting the day's early hours than patiently following the steps necessary to craft a batch of homemade cinnamon rolls. Indispensable among these is the leavening of dough.
Ancient Egypt is home to the first recorded instance of leavening, or adding yeast to dough to rise bread that would otherwise be hard and flat. Protected from the west by the Sahara Desert, east by the Red Sea, north by the Mediterranean, and south by the rugged terrain of the African heartland, the Egyptians had little incentive to do much more than build monuments to themselves and drink beer. The fermentation of bronze-age hooch traditionally occurred in the same physical quarters as bread, and thus we can see how civilization grew out of humankind's natural appetite for fat loaves and strong drink.
So get started:
Phase I: The Dough
1 package (9 grams) active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water
1/2 cup room temperature milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup room temperature butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
3 1/2 cups flour
Dissolve yeast into warm water in large bowl. Let sit for five minutes. Stir in milk, sugar, butter, salt, egg, and two cups of flour. Beat until smooth. Mix in remaining flour to firm up dough. Place dough on lightly floured surface, knead about five minutes until smooth and elastic. Place in greased bowl, then flip so greasy side is up. Cover bowl with a cloth, let rise for 1 1/2 hours or until double in size in a warm area, i.e. by a radiator or vent.
Phase II: The Butterscotch
1/2 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
4 tablespoons corn syrup
1 cup pecan halves
Heat butter until melted, combine with brown sugar, corn syrup, and pecan halves in medium bowl. Pour mixture into two 9x9x2 inch pans.
Phase III: The Rolls
1 wad of dough (above)
4 tablespoons of room temperature butter
1/2 cup sugar
4 tablespoons ground cinnamon
On lightly floured surface, roll dough into two 15x9 inch rectangles. Spread butter on top surface of each rectangle. Mix cinnamon and sugar, spread over rectangle. Tightly roll up rectangles into fifteen-inch long cylinders, slice each roll into nine separate pieces. Place pieces in butterscotch-coated pans. Let rise for 40 more minutes. Heat over to 375 degrees. Bake until golden brown, 25-30 minutes.
Phase IV: The Glaze
2 cups powdered sugar
3 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Mix powdered sugar, milk and vanilla in medium bowl until well combined. When the baking is completed, remove the pans from the oven and turn them upside down over a large plate so the rolls plop down into a gooey pile. Drizzle the butterscotch coating over the rolls, followed by the glaze. Serve hot. Makes eighteen.
Cinnamon rolls are but a modest extension of bread's humble beginnings, though with a little more complexity, as suits our superior culture of napalm and billboards. The leavening can be time-consuming, but that combined with the baking allows you to relax, make coffee, read the paper, doze off, and almost burn the house down. Should worse come to worst, the adrenaline jolt triggered by the smoke alarm will probably keep you fully alert until bedtime, a successful state of affairs if there ever was one. But should your rolls actually survive and mature to completion, rest assured that you've framed your morning well, both with a memorable process and an incomparable plate of soft, warm, sweetness.
