dead yeast

The overnight dough for cinnamon rolls didn't rise. I fail at Christmas.

About those cinnamon buns

Okay. So. eternaleponine has very few sacred holiday traditions, but one of them is Cinnamon Buns On Christmas Morning.

Her preferred cinnamon bun is Pillsbury. From the tube. Preferably the big ones. Cream cheese icing.

Well, all they had left at the store yesterday was Reduced Fat. And, as we all know, reduced fat packaged foods are hardly worth eating.

So I offered to set them up from scratch.

Now, in the past, whenever I've done cinnamon rolls in a commercial setting, they've been plain or pecan sticky buns, done from brioche dough. And usually they have enough napalm glaze that they don't get icing.

I was not about to do brioche dough at home. MAYBE I had enough butter and eggs in the house. Maybe I didn't. But I wasn't up for taking my "fills a 5 gallon bucket" recipe and trying to cut it down.

Also, while brioche sticky buns are very good, they aren't quite the right sort of cinnamon bun.

So I turned to my Joy of Cooking. And they suggested using the dough for Overnight Rolls. So I looked at that. And aside from calling for lard -- nope, but I've got vegetable shortening -- and 4 1/2 cups of flour -- no, we don't need THAT many cinnamon rolls, I cut everything in half -- it looked plausible enough.

The yeast I had in the freezer didn't proof very strongly. I went ahead anyway, figuring the long rise would take care of any problems.

Nope.

When I took it out of the fridge this morning, it hadn't done ANYTHING. Fail.

Disappointment was met with Boston Creme Doughnuts, and I left the bowl sitting on the kitchen table while we pursued Movie And Chinese Food. I wasn't ready to scrape it into the trash just yet.

Now, my house is not really very much warmer than a refrigerator. Oil is expensive, and shrink-wrapping the windows only does so much.

When we got back from the day's excursions, I took another peek at the dough. Hey! What about that? It had risen some!

It had risen slowly enough that I figured it'd probably still be active tomorrow morning. But eternaleponine is working one of her Saturday shifts tomorrow. So she convinced me to do it tonight.

Rolled it out, rolled it up, cut it into 12 pieces, stuck it in muffin tins with some brown sugar in the bottom. Let it proof while I did the dishes and made a little cream cheese icing. It didn't exactly look like it was proofing, but I haven't got a lovely temperature-and-humidity-controlled proof box in my kitchen, or even a deck oven running at 375 where I can park it on top to keep it warm. Best I could do was to sit it on the stove top while the oven was preheating. Stuck it in the oven at 350 for 30 minutes, just like the book said.

Oven spring!

Managed to turn them out onto some parchment without napalming my hands on the melted brown sugar. Failed at patience for the frosting. They are definitely not the world's most attractive cinnamon buns. They are not the most attractive ones I've ever made.

But we did, in the end, achieve something closely resembling a cinnamon bun.

I'd better put yeast on the shopping list.