Cinnamon Rolls

                Soft, warm, gooey, and heavenly. If you’ve never had the pleasure of eating a cinnamon roll hot out of the oven, you’re missing out. There’s nothing I love more than waking up in the morning to their smell. Every Christmas, my family would go down to my aunt and uncle’s house and right after we opened our gifts, we would eat hot out of the oven cinnamon and butterscotch rolls my grandmother made.

               These days, we don’t travel for Christmas, so as the baker of the family, making cinnamon and butterscotch rolls has fallen onto my shoulders. The only problem is after years of making them, I still can’t make them like my grandmothers.

               The first time I made them, was the first time that I ever worked with yeast. To this day, it is one of the scariest things for me to bake with. There are so many ways that it could go wrong, and you wouldn’t know until the very end. I followed my grandmother's recipe to a T, though it was a handwritten recipe, so there were some spots up for interpretation. I let the dough rise for the maximum amount of time possible, yet when I took it out of the oven, instead of being greeted by giant fluffy rolls I got small and dense rolls. So frustrating. I just spent the past two days rolling and proofing the dough to end up with these disappointing weaselly things.

               The next time my grandmother visited she brought down all her supplies to teach me how to make them. Turns out that there was a lot I did wrong.

               “Actual mashed potatoes!” I exclaimed as she pulled out two russet potatoes from her bag.

               “Yes! Instead of making it from instant potato flakes, I use actual potatoes and mash them” she told me, and here I was thinking I just had to throw the instant mashed potato flakes into the dough. At the end of the baking, of course, we had some gorgeous cinnamon and butterscotch rolls to eat.

               So next Christmas, after my private lessons with the pro, I was determined to get it right. I did everything that my grandmother had shown me, and even used special tools for bread making that I had recently bought. It was looking promising, rising correctly, and rolling as it should, but I didn’t want to get my hopes too high until I saw the final product. As I watched them bake, my hopes were crushed. None of them were growing big. When I pulled them out of the oven, they looked just like my first attempt.

               I did it exactly as I was taught and yet it still didn’t work. Usually, at this point, I would discard the recipe and find another one or simply stop making it, but it was my grandmother’s, so I couldn’t give up on it.

               I had started working with bread more and had picked up a few tricks along the way, so I had a few more ideas of how to do it differently to get the perfect cinnamon rolls. For the first day of school, I decided to make the rolls so I could get some practice before Christmas day. Using the tips I had picked up from making bread and the notes I had taken from when I watched my grandmother, I was feeling more confident than ever. Everything looked good as I kneaded the dough, rolled it out, and proofed it. I even set up the oven so it would help the dough rise even more, yet once again the outcome was disappointing.

               It’s been a year since then and I’ve kept at it, but I haven’t seemed to make any improvements. At this point, it has become more of a game than anything to make them. What other crazy ideas can I come up with to make it work? It’s become one of my favorite things to make although, I can’t make it quite right, I know I’ll continue to make it as I grow older.