The Cinnamon Roll Test

My boss has brought in these wonderful, fluffy cinnamon rolls to work before and I had asked him for his recipe, hoping to bring those to Grandma's house for dinner.  I made up Dad's bread dough recipe the night before and let it rise.  This is the part I've done many times before.  

Then the directions got a little fuzzy.  "Combine milk and brown sugar until it's spreadable."  I made a brown sugar and milk slurry.  Evidently, there was too much milk.  It looked fine on the bread dough rolled out.  I make a pumpkin roll usually a few times every holiday, which involves rolling a cake in a flour sack, letting it cool, unrolling it, smothering it in frosting, re-rolling it up, and slicing it to serve in these beautiful little pinwheels of deliciousness.  Ergo, rolling the cinnamon rolls up and then slicing them into individual rounds made sense.  

The problem came in the rolling.  

As I started to roll it up, the slurry started to move in slow, sloppy wave with it.  And it didn't stay in a round kind of roll, instead falling like a deflated tire, more of the slurry oozing out the ends.  

This was the "pretty" pan.

This resulted in some urgency in the slicing, where it was a race to a) cut it before everything oozed out and b) get it over to the pan without more of it dripping on to the floor, since the only place there was room for the pans was on the counter behind me.  Some of the rolls dissolved into a sad puddle.  I picked those up, squeezed some of the brown sugar and milk slurry off, and made some cinnamon crescent rolls instead (featured in the bottom of that picture). 

However, this left the pool of slurry on my counter.  It was viscous enough that I could take sweep it up and cup a few handfuls over into the sink.  Three times, no less, taking handfuls of brown sludge over to the sink, remarkably not dripping much at all.  

Thankfully, everything was water soluble, but it really did take about as much time to clean that up as it did to bake them, once they had some time to rise again.  

So, about those slurry puddles that formed around my rolls?  Yeah, that made a kind of caramel at the bottom of my pans.  I found that the pan I started prying up from first was much easier than the second one I did, since it had a little more time to cool.  It did not make the chewy, stretchy kind of caramel--it was rock hard once it cooled.  There were many effort noises as I tried to pull them up in one piece AND not fling them up to the ceiling by accident because goodness knows that they would have stuck there, with the way my luck was going.  

Note sticky outlines.

And yet, for all of that chaos, they tasted well enough.  Dad's dough has been a favorite for a long time, and my boss's recommendations for how to make them cinnamon rolls was pretty good, if not any kind of precise (with all kinds of love, Chuck!).  I have a few ideas on how I'm going to make this better next time, including not flattening out the bread dough quite that far and using a LOT less milk in making my brown sugar spread.  It was still edible and enjoyed.  And we've officially gotten to the "well, that was pretty hilarious" space, recounting the adventure and the sheer mess of what I made in the kitchen.  I have left the scraping of those pans for another day, thanks.