Cinnamon Rolls!

The Finished Product!

So with the youth weekend coming up I thought that I could put a little bit of time in early in the week to make cinnamon rolls for the girls that will be staying with me. My recipe is out of my cookbook from Desdemona, Texas. It's really the only American cookbook we brought with us mainly because it was the smallest one we had. The recipes are absolutely wonderful because they were all donated by ladies from the local community which I think makes them really fun to try because I always feel like personally thanking the lady whose recipe I just used.

I had a hunch that this recipe was going to have a rather large yeild when I read the subtitle: "West Texas Fair Winner, 1972" and then saw that it require 11 cups of flour. I have made this recipe before but I have always cut it in half. Still I was not quite prepared for the sheer volume and I also failed to notice that I only have two large mixing bowls which I thought would be enough... So yesterday I began mixing and realized before I even put the dry ingredients in that the bowl I had would not be big enough so I got out one more bowl and split the dough and everything seemed to work out fine. After the first rising there was still plenty of room so I thought they would be ok overnight in the fridge until my husband opened the door the next morning and took this picture.

Needless to say this took quite a bit of creativity to fix but I have learned a few tricks thanks to this situation so I'd like to share. One: once you have dough that is ready to be taken out of the bowl I found it was easier to handle by coating my hands in non-stick spray as opposed to flour. I made this batch about 3 days in advance of when I really want to use it so I formed my rolls and then gave them time to rise once more before putting them in the freezer (I've never had to do this before so we'll see how it goes). Because I don't have enough pans I lined each pan with cling wrap and sprayed the wrap with non stick, the spray is very important if you don't want half the dough to stay on the wrap when you take it off. After the rolls rose to I slipped the pans into the freezer long enough to harden the dough while we went out for a visit When we came back I lifted the rolls out of the pan in the cling wrap and used the pan for the second half of the dough. Now all that's left to do is pull them out a few hours to thaw and then bake them. Hooray!