Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Saving the world with cinnamon buns

Oh so warm and drippy and sweet.

Get your mind out of the gutter. Today I'm writing an ode to cinnamon buns.

I found this great recipe for dinner rolls on allrecipes.com. Yes, their recipes are often waaaay overrated, in my opinion. This one, though, deserves it's five stars. I've been making these rolls for a few years, and they are regularly requested at family dinners.

A while back I followed other allrecipes people into the realm of cinnamon bunhood using the dinner roll recipe. I decided today that morale is sofa king low at work, and I am feeling so weary and tired and like a very, very bad leader, that a little offering might be in order.

So, tonight I made them again. It's been a long time.

I've missed that soft stickiness. It's been so long since that sweet earthy cinnamon aroma and yeasty yeastiness became one with my senses. It envelopes me, and I envelope it. I curl my body around that pan of puffy, pillowy curls of swirly sweetness, hugging it like the bread hugs it's sweet surprise of brown sugar and butter and cinnamon. Oh! What's that? Oooooo that's right, I made that drizzly frosting -- molten icing sugar, really -- to drizzle drizzily on the warm rolls.

I've eaten three, because they're the end pieces and I would never subject my staff to the end pieces. Really, when you're going through reorganization and it's getting stretched out longer and longer than so much raw dough, people already feel like end pieces. It's the least I could do.

I hate to put the foil over the pan, to be sacrificed tomorrow morning. How I would love to keep them home, adopt them, give them names, nuture them, pick them up lovingly and cradle them before scarfing them down.

But, it's what I have to do. Will it be worth it? Time will tell. Tomorrow, if I can sit at my desk and send out that email and then hear the pitter-patter of feet racing to the kitchen, joking and giggling about who gets there first, and hear the mmming and the licking of fingers and the heavy sighs that come with comfort food, and they have this one moment of feeling hugged and cuddled and nurtured before they go back to become end pieces, it will be worth it.