Basic Dough Variation: Cinnamon Rolls!

First off, let me apologize for how long it has taken for me to get this recipe up. It's been a rough month, but we've moved to a new house and things are looking up. Once I dig us out of the piles of boxes and heaps of homeless things, we'll be good to go! :)

Cinnamon Rolls

1 tablespoon yeast
1 cup milk
3 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup sugar (can replace with 1/3 cup of honey)
1-2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 1/2-3 cups cups flour
1 teaspoon salt

Prep time: 3-ish hours
Oven: 375 degrees F
Bake time: 15-20 minutes
Yield: 2 dozen cinnamon rolls (1 9x13)

Note: I originally wrote this recipe out for a friend who didn't have a mixer, so that's why it's a bit different.

Measure your 1 cup of milk into a microwave-safe bowl and add the 3 tablespoons butter.  Microwave for about 1 minute--you want the butter to melt into the milk but you don't want it to get too hot!  I almost always kill my yeast the first time around on this by microwaving my milk and butter too long.  You'll need to stir the milk until the butter has melted completely. The thermometer in my mixture reads 105 F, but my thermometer reads 5 degrees low, so this is actually 110 degrees F.

Place yeast and sugar into a largish bowl (or your mixer's bowl) and pour the milk mixture over it.  You might want to let this mixture sit a while to make sure the yeast wasn't killed by the milk, but I don't necessarily do this.  Add flour, cinnamon, and salt (make sure to sprinkle the salt evenly to help with it mixing in). Remember, this dough is normally very soft, you'll want a slightly stiffer dough for rolling it out, so add a bit more flour to accomplish that.

Mix, mix, mix until the dough has come together into a fairly non-lumpy dough. It will be very soft, feel free to add flour until you like how it feels.  Turn out onto a floured surface and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic.  This should only take a few minutes and shouldn't be too difficult. (OR just turn on your mixer with the dough hook attachment and let it mix and knead the dough until it's smooth and elastic.)

Grease a large bowl and place your ball of dough into it, turning to coat. Cover with a wet towel and let rise in a warm place. I prefer to boil some water, pour it into a bowl, and put it in a warm oven with my uncovered bowl of dough--it works better for me.  This dough is very slooooow. I think mine took 2 hours on the first rise to double (note: it only took about an hour the second time I made this recipe). I did a second rise (out of necessity since I had to put my daughter down for her nap), which only took 30-45 minutes.

Once you've let your dough rise as much as you desire, turn it out onto a well-floured surface and roll out until thin. I made mine 1/8-1/4 inch thick (my piece of dough was 19ish by 14ish inches).  Now, for filling, I don't use any exact measurements.  I do about 1/2 cup soft butter, 1/3-1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/4 ish cup of white sugar, 1 tablespoon ish of cinnamon, and some flour if I feel like it. Sometimes I throw in some cloves and nutmeg, too. I mix it all together and sprinkle/rub it onto my dough.  If I don't like the coverage, I sprinkle more of the sugars and cinnamon over it all.

Starting at a long side, roll the dough up.  Now, for cutting, I prefer to use thread or floss, but a knife should work just fine.  With the thread, I run it under the roll of dough and cross it over the top and pull and it cuts nicely from all directions (make sense? Probably not unless you've done it before).  You'll want to cut the roll into 24 pieces.

Grease a 9x13 (or two 8x8s) and place the rolls into it.  Cover (or place in a warm oven with boiled water) and let rise until you like how much they've risen.  I let mine go 30-60 minutes, but they could go longer if you really want them fluffy.

Before rising:

 After rising:

Bake at 375 F for 15-20 minutes.  The tops of the rolls should be nice and brown.

Flip out onto a foil-covered cooling rack and allow to cool. Here's how I do it: place foil over the top of the pan, then put the rack over the foil. Grasp the pan's handles, foil, and rack on each side with hot pads and quickly flip it all over.

 Once you've got the whole thing inverted, slip a knife under one of the pan's handles and lift. Quickly grab the handle with a hot pad and lift it away from the rolls. They should all come right out without sticking, assuming that your pan is still nice and hot.

I don't do any icing or topping, but you certainly can. If so I suggest pouring it on while the rolls are hot. :)  The rolls will be gooey and sticky and slightly doughy in the middle. Enjoy once they're cool enough to touch! Careful not to burn yourself!

Feel free to post in the comments if you have any questions! If anything sounds confusing or odd, it's probably because I'm sleep-deprived; please, please, please point it out to me!

A special thanks to my friend Katrina for being my tester for this recipe! :)

~Regina

Pizza Variation: Pizza Pockets

Let's face it: after a while the plain, old pizza pie gets kind of boring. So, I try to come up with ways to make pizza new and exciting to eat. I got the inspiration for this idea from Ourbestbites.com's Stuffed Pizza Rolls. I made the rolls and found them yummy, but very time-consuming, so I set out to figure out something faster and easier. This, my friends, is what I came up with.

 Pizza Pockets

If you do not have my pizza dough recipe and want it, it's over here.

Prep time: 1 hour 15 minutes (from beginning to mix the dough to putting the pockets in the oven)
Oven: 425 degrees F
Bake time: 8 minutes
Yield: approximately 4 dozen 2x3 pizza pockets

So...make a double recipe of pizza dough, whatever is your favorite dough, but I highly recommend my own, linked above. :) Let it rest and rise a bit and get your toppings prepared while you wait. Once it's rested about 10 minutes, pull it out and divide it in half (so you have two single-pizza crust dough lumps) and rolls one out on a well-floured surface.  And I mean well-floured because, well, you'll see...

A quick note on rolling dough out: I've found it easiest to press the dough out into the approximate shape I want it before rolling it thin. So with this dough, I pressed it into a small rectangle before going at it with my rolling pin. Obviously, the picture below does not show a rectangle--I didn't think of taking a picture of me pressing it out! This is just a lump of dough...

Roll it out and flour it on the top--we don't want this sticky at all!  This dough was rolled rather thinly, about between 1/4 and 1/8 of an inch. The sheet of dough was roughly 16x24 inches. I didn't measure it precisely--I'm not really into precision on these types of things--so just do whatever looks good to you (or whatever you have space for!).

Now, here's why you floured it so much: you need to be able to set aside the already rolled-out dough. If you have a nice kitchen with plenty of country space, you don't have to do this, but you do need to be able to move this piece of dough onto the top of the other piece of dough in the near future, and I've found it easiest to move large sheets of dough by rolling them up.

OK, so we set aside the first sheet of dough--on to the next one! Re-flour your surface and roll out your second lump of dough. You want to try to get it about the same dimensions as the first one. 

Now, take those toppings you got ready and place them on the dough in a kind of grid. I imagined that I would make my pizza pockets about 2.5x2.5 inches, so I tried to space my toppings accordingly.  You'll notice that I left the cheese out of a couple of the soon-to-be pockets--that's because my daughter and dairy don't exactly get along the greatest, but with the pizza pockets, it's easy to make some for just her.

I did just basic toppings: cheese and pepperoni. We aren't supreme pizza kind of people around here.

Now, take the sheet of dough that you rolled up and set aside and bring it back over to your work area.  Match up the edges of the dough sheets and unroll the top one.

Oops! I ran out of dough! No problem, I'll just use some of the scraps that I cut off later to finish the lonely pizza pockets.

Press down the dough in between all the toppings to seal them into their little square pockets.  Of course, the toppings are now inside their pockets, so I guess they're fillings, not toppings....oh well, let's not get hung up on technicalities. ;)

Ready for cutting!  I like to use my pizza wheel to cut my dough. I've found that it's much easier than using a knife. It doesn't pull through the dough like running a knife through it would and, since this is a non-stick pizza wheel, the dough doesn't stick!

Cut out all the pockets and trim off excess dough. Set aside the excess so that you can finish off the pockets that the top crust didn't quite reach.

Transfer the individual pockets onto a cookie sheet. I like to line my sheets with parchment paper, so I don't have to grease them. But if you use plain cookie sheets or foil-covered cookie sheets, you'll want to grease (and possibly flour or cornmeal) them so that everything comes off of the sheets easily (especially that melted cheese!).  Poke holes in the tops of the pockets to let steam escape.

Bake at 425 degrees F for about 8 minutes. Adjust the time for your oven so that you get nice golden brown pizza pockets.

Let them cool a little and pull them off the sheets onto a plate for serving. Mmmm! I'm hungry!

Dip them in pizza sauce or just eat them plain!

This recipe fed our small family of 3 for 2 full meals and another of just me and our daughter.  At each meal my husband and I each ate about 7 pockets and our 21 month old daughter ate about 4.  We reheated the pockets in a 350 degree F oven for 8-10 minutes and they reheated VERY well. This recipe definitely got 5 stars for our family.

~Regina

Feel free to post a comment if you have any questions. The comments are moderated, so I should see any questions, no matter how long it has been since this post was published.