The BEST smell in the world

It all started a weekend or two ago, with a short conversation about Cinnabun.

Which evolved into a small craving.

Which grew and grew the longer I sat in church.

Which then exploded into an extremely long baking project.

Ok. Not really extremely long. But when you are craving a cinnamon roll the last thing you want to do is wait for dough to rise.

I wish I could say I came up with this delicious recipe myself, but I found it on allrecipes.com(one of my favorite recipe sites). There may have been walnuts and raisins involved in different stages of this recipe, but I choose to leave them out.

We started by putting the dough ingredients into the bread machine. These were the ingredients for the dough: 1 c warm milk, 2 Tb butter, 2 Tb sugar, 1/2 tsp salt, 3 1/3 cup flour, and 1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast.

This is Pasha's machine that none of us had ever tried using before (I used to make bread in my family's one, but its been awhile. Taylor and I managed to figure it out pretty easily. I can see why it was my kid cooking job now; the whole process is pretty simple).

After we put stuff in we saw the time come up for the cycle: 1 minute and 30 seconds? That seems abnormally fast. Oh, they mean 1 hour and 30 minutes. Got it. At first we kept taking peeks at the machine to see what it was doing (as if that would make it go any faster). Then we just watched 30 rock.

Then I made this sauce stuff for the bottom of the cinnamon roll pan (which will come later). I put 1/3 cup butter, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 2 Tablespoons milk in a sauce pan and melted it together.

Once it was ready we rolled it out and brushed it with melted butter (1/4 c). Then we sprinkled cinnamon (2 tsp) and brown sugar (1/2 c) all over. I decide to be fancy and add nutmeg, but went a little bit overboard. It smelled very nutmeg-gy. Be careful if you decide to add that stuff!

Then we rolled it up tight (see all that cinnamon-y goodness oozing out?). And cut it up. Which was an adventure. We tried doing with dental floss like they suggested but it never quite did the trick. We ended up making it work with a plain old knife.

We placed them in a 9 x 13 pan with the brown sugar/butter sauce in the bottom.

Then they went into the oven, and...

Ta da! Scrumptious cinnamon rolls.

The recipe suggests flipping the pan over so the rest of the brown sugar/butter sauce as the bottom drips on the rolls. But when we made ours the bottom absorbed most of the sauce (which made it very yummy and moist). Instead we whipped some powdered sugar and milk together for frosting, and then got to eating.

It was midnight by the time we finished, but trust me no one regretted it.

And then the next weekend ... we made them again! We had a much better idea of what we were doing so it got done a bit faster with less complications (I stayed far away from the nutmeg). Plus we had more friends helping :)

Currently writing: yet another research paper