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Ok, I’d like to see a show of hands:

How many of you have procrastinated on something this week? Spill! :)

If you can only see me now, my hands and arms couldn’t be any higher! In August, my brain slows down, my discipline goes on vacation and I am stuck with a mid-summer love affair with someone called Procrastination or Cunctation. I call him CunkyPunky. (See? This is beginning to sound more fun than it really is.) I just have to accept that August is CunkyPunky time and I should just breathe and relax. Aside from procrastinating with CP, I’m also trying to balance bank accounts and to keep sane in the midst of paying even more taxes. I don’t even want to think about it, because aside from my already-planned trip to Blogher Food, there’s another event that I would love to attend: Foodbuzz in November. (I call it an injustice that they are both held in San Francisco! Woe is me, who lives across the north border.) Just when I need to “kick ass” in the making-money department, all CP wants to do is drag me to graze in the grass like spoiled cows living in a luscious Hawaiian ranch–that kind of downtime. I have to remind him that traveling involves money, which involves doing something.

Ayayay.

This super simple breakfast post was supposed to be up last week, but CP and I had a week-long rendezvous. I’m sorry. But I hope you’ll forgive me. It is very easy to do anyway:

Just cook berries in simple syrup of 1 sugar :1 water proportion, wait for it to thicken, then set it aside to cool down. Serve generously on top of your favorite yogurt.

In my case, it’s the Fage 2% greek yogurt. That’s it. No theatrics, just plain and simple food. I eat this for breakfast, as a dessert or as a snack. It’s a great way to save berries that might otherwise go bad this summer, especially if you happen to haul big boxes of them from the farmer’s market.

I’m still rallying to have Fage here in Vancouver. I have never seen it here. Hello– Fage?!?!?!

In case you were wondering– No, Fage isn’t a sponsor of this blog. I just happen to love it so much that I milk my parents, who cross the border several times a month, to bring me Fage. It’s that good.

And from hereon, feel free to call me the Patron Saint of Cinnamon Rolls for talking about and making way too much of them. Anyway, I think I’ve finally got my holy grail recipe sealed to perfection, after a several baking litanies. If you’re still searching for a cinnamon roll recipe to knock your socks off, I’ve updated the recipe with less flour, a different kind of sugar for the caramel, and a hint of lemon for the glaze. I’ve discovered the goodness of using turbinado sugar for the caramel by accident — because I ran out of golden brown cane sugar. Who knew it would make it extra extra gooey? I got the idea to add lemon because I add a hint of lemon when making sweet stuff like flan (which also has caramel) and it elevates all the flavors, plus it smells good. If you’d like an easy-to-print PDF copy, you can download it here » Ultimate Caramel Cinnamon Rolls with Cream Cheese Glaze.

Oh, by the way, would you like the recipes to be print-ready in PDF? We’re looking into incorporating that to get you cooking faster. What do you think? Your feedback would be helpful!

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Enjoy the rolls and happy weekend everyone!

Joy, cinnamon rolls again?! Yes, yes, I hear you. Haha. I’m sorry, but I just had to! I feel the need to share great discoveries when I find them. I know I’ve talked about cinnamon rolls for two days but can you blame me for revisiting it now that I think I’ve found the Ultimate Cinnamon Rolls ?! They are incredibly soft, fluffy, chewy, with just the right amount of sweetness and creaminess. It’s criminal to not share it!

When I posted about my dough failure a couple of weeks ago, Elle (who’s a total sweetheart) offered to give her friend’s mom’s recipe for caramel cinnamon rolls with a dough that hasn’t failed her. No kidding. The first rise of the dough made my heart skip beats, and even moreso the second one:

It is a thing of beauty. A moment of silence please. Ohm….
Oh, where was I?

I tweaked the cinnamon filling with more sugar and cinnamon, skipped the nuts, and used less caramel because I still wanted to top it with cream cheese glaze. Here it is right out of the oven and pan:

I wish I had a better picture or a photo of it with cream cheese glaze, but I was so excited that I dug right in and said to hell with photos! Time stopped with my first bite as it melted in my mouth. Ghee-Oh-Oh-Dee-licious. Need I say more? YOU HAVE TO TRY THIS NOW. It should be on everyone’s Things To Eat Before I Die list.

If you’re apprehensive about baking, making rolls, or attempting this, please…shove all these demons aside. Let me assure you that I’m no baker and I’ve had more flops with dough than I want to admit, but this one won’t disappoint. Elle calls the dough “forgiving”. I call it magical. These cinnamon rolls will make you feel like they were meant to be made and enjoyed to your heart’s content.

Have a go at it, why don’t you? [PDF download: Ultimate Caramel Cinnamon Rolls with Cream Cheese Glaze] Read the full story

I’m from the School of Perfectionism. Just ask Dan and he’ll tell you that when I don’t park straight, or the car is sticking out — it aggravates me and he’ll have to pull me away because I want to fix it. Let me fix it…just let me fix it! He finds it hilarious and tells me to let it go. Argh.

When the cinnamon rolls didn’t live up to my expectations, there’s no question I’d make them again until I get the results that other people achieved. I needed to know what I did wrong (as you can tell from my comments here, I did some research on the possible reasons for the non-rising dough) and make it right. The next evening, I worked on a new dough (Sorry, Bean) and paid attention to the details.

“Try and try until you succeed” was the corniest motto from gradeschool that I remember. I made fun of it a lot of times, but look who’s laughing now –

I’m just glad this second try was a lot better. It was a nice encouragement as a new baker.

Go ahead, take a bite…take a piece of heaven with that cream cheese glaze:

Mmm…enjoy the sweet taste of success: the batch of cinnamon rolls that gave me a good night’s sleep.

So what did I do differently this time?

1. I used less flour. No overzealous flouring this time. In fact, it was sticking to my hands, but I persisted.

2. I warmed up the milk really good (130ºF) AND dissolved the yeast in it. Dan’s mom reminded me to do this before I made them. I guess I didn’t warm it up enough the first time!

3. I mixed the dough manually — by hand. The recipe called for a stand mixer but we don’t have that. I used a hand mixer for the first mixing, then it’s all spatula and hand from there.

4. I made sure the “warm draft-free area” was really warm. The day I made the first batch, it was cold in the apartment. I placed the bowl with the dough in the oven, and realized after 2 hours that it was too cold in there. :( The second time I warmed up the oven, turned it off and let it cool off for about 10 minutes, then put the dough in to rise. I did the same thing for the 2nd rising to get these plump dough rolls [unfortunately, with melted butter, too]:

5. The dough after the first rise was light and airy, and smells yeasty as it should be. My hands and nose suddenly recalled the pizza doughs I made years ago (3 of them — my first ever rising dough)…it was like instant recognition. Eureka!

6. I didn’t over-flatten or over-roll the dough. I kept a light pressure to spread it into 1/4-inch thickness.

** What I would do different next time: Start checking the rolls after 15 minutes. Twenty minutes turned it too brown.

It doesn’t hurt to give a recipe a second try. It’s good to learn from one’s mistakes and make the necessary adjustments for next time. You just might be surprised with something so good and satisfying:

If you want to make these, I’ve included the recipe below. If you have useful tips for making cinnamon rolls, I’d love to hear them! Read the full story

In March Bon Appetit’s issue, Molly of Orangette had a recipe for homemade cinnamon rolls in her monthly column. Dan’s mom told me that she tried it and it didn’t rise the first time when she followed the recipe exactly, but the second time when she added the yeast into the warm milk before adding the other dry ingredients, it worked. This makes perfect sense to me from what I can remember when I successfully made believable pizza dough two years ago and I did that as well.

Unlike Molly, I do not have any fears of yeast except when I think about the experiments we made with yeast in school — makes me cringe. I’m okay with yeast, and I was confident and very hopeful about making these rolls even if the closest I’ve been to making them were the Pillsbury ones. Classy. I took a lot of pictures during the process. I was drooling and imagined arias of Thank You’s and You’re Wonderful’s from Dan when he tries them. [In my head, everything is theatrical. There's either a dramatic wail or a cry for joy...nothing in between. I blame being a Leo for that.]

Meet Bean, the promising seed of dough that I thought would come to life. He was very pinchable.

I think this is where my first problem lies: I could have put too much flour. After doing some research last night, I read that some people have a tendency to over-flour the dough for fear of it sticking to their fingers. Uh, that would me.

Read the full story