Cinnamon Rolls

A big thanks goes to Aunt Mikki for hooking me up with this delicious friend/awkward moment maker. But more on that after the recipe. Here are the cinnamon rolls made for our staff meeting last Tuesday.

Ingredients:
1 room temperature egg+enough water warm to make a total of 1.5 cups
1/3 cup oil
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons of yeast
1 1/5 teaspoons of salt
4 1/2 cups bread flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 Tablespoons of cinnamon
1/2 cup of butter

Directions:
Whisk egg and water together. This should be warm like a baby's bottle.
Mix in the sugar and oil.
Mix in the yeast and let it bubble. (I left it all in the big measuring cup I measured the egg and water in.)
While that bubbles, mix together the flour and salt.
Add the liquid to the flour and salt mixture and knead until smooth.
Let it rise in a warm place (I let my oven run while I did all the mixing and then turned it off and put the covered bowl on a cookie sheet.)
When it has doubled in size, punch it down and roll it into a thin rectangle.
Rub butter on the dough, leaving the top inch dry.
Mix together the cinnamon and brown sugar.
Sprinkle and rub in the cinnamon and brown sugar mixture, leaving the top inch dry.
Looking at the rectangle horizontally, start rolling from the bottom up as tight as you can with the dry inch at the top. (It will get the stuff squished out as you roll.)
Grease a pan/pans you need. We ended up using a normal sized pan and then another smaller one.
Cut your delicious cinnamon log into 1 inch thick circles and place them on your greased baking sheets.
Cover them and let them rise once more.
Bake at 350 for about 15-20 minutes.

Icing
Ingredients:
3 cups powdered sugar
3 Tablespoons of milk

Directions:
Beat together the sugar and milk. I had to use more milk and then gave it a splash of vanilla. Mix until it runs, but is a thick enough...you know what? If you don't know what cinnamon roll frosting looks like, then shame on you. Go eat your lettuce or something.
I put mine in an icing bag and drizzled it over.




It's a lot of direction, but we made our dough and cut it up the night before and put out the stuff for the icing. Then we baked them in the morning and mixed the icing and voila, an instant friend maker at staff meetings.

So, they make friends, but they also make for an awkward moment at staff meeting. Due to lower financial giving, we had to let our worship pastor, Mike, go. We were all a little blindsided at this on Tuesday when Pastor Kevin told us. Mike had a thought it might happen, but it came out of nowhere for us. So, it was a hard staff meeting, and not a fun day. So I felt bad when the thought of Why aren't they eating the cinnamon rolls? came into my head. So, it made for awkward moments within myself, but not for others. Hopefully they made the hurt of losing Mike a little easier. We'll miss you Mike!