The session is over! I am so tired. This morning, Maia and I cooked the last meal of the session, which was cinnamon rolls. They required a lot of effort last night, but this morning all we had to do was bake them, cut strawberries, and put yogurt into bowls. The process of making cinnamon rolls was complicated, but actually really fun.
First of all, Maia’s recipe was in grams, which was incredibly unhelpful. Approximating the correct amounts for the dough involved a calculator and a conversion chart helpfully posted on the kitchen wall by a previous cook.
These pictures are for real.
Between converting from grams to cups, using powdered milk because we ran out of actual milk, and multiplying the recipe by eight, we created a dough that was impossible to form into a ball, so in the end we used nearly twice as much flour as my calculations indicated we would need.
Because it was the last night of the session and we were essentially finished with all of our hard work, we all kind of wanted to stay up and hang out in the kitchen, so other people took tons of pictures of cinnamon roll action. There were a couple of disheartening moments when we thought that we may have to have cauliflower and/or leftover berry cake for breakfast, like when the dough didn’t form, or when it didn’t seem to be rising, but in the end they turned out really well.
I won’t try to give a recipe, per se, because converting everything was a bit of a disaster of inexactness. But let’s go through the process step by step. First, we combined flour, sugar, salt, yeast, melted butter, dehydrated milk + water, and eggs in a bowl. That became the dough that would not form into a ball, so we we combined in some more flour. Because of the scale we cook on, we divided the dough into two bowls during the rise. While that was rising, we created the filling, which included butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon. We must have gotten the proportions on the dough really wrong, because we ended up needing to make more filling about 3/4 of the way through. The first time we melted the butter, but the second time we creamed it, which was far more successful (not to mention faithful to the recipe).
Once the dough rose, we rolled it onto the floured counter.
Then we spread the cinnamon-brown sugar- butter on it. Action shots!
Because of the amount of food we were working with, we rolled twice, once in each direction.
Then we sliced it into rolls, which we put on oiled trays. On a smaller scale, cookie sheets would be appropriate.
We left some of them in the oven, and some of them in the refrigerator for the night. When we woke up just a few hours after going to sleep, we were greeted by normal looking rolls from the refrigerator, and these super puffy ones from the room-temperature oven.
Once they were baked, they turned into these beautiful things.
… I guess beautiful is a bit of an exaggeration. But I was quite pleased. I think that some time I would like to try to veganize these. Based on my experiences with this and pizza dough, there is absolutely no reason for the dough to have milk and eggs in it. I think I would just make this without eggs or milk, perhaps add some vanilla extract, and use earth balance for butter. I’ll let you know if this ever happens.
Because kitchen staff are exempt from cooking during intersession, I may be taking a bit of a hiatus, which will feel really long to me because of how time passes here, but actually only be a couple of days at the most.
All Around The Larder 