{Double Batch} Cinnamon Rolls

swirly and cinnamony

Rejoice, for Lent is OVER!! I can now eat all the sweets I want! Chocolate and ice cream and the box of Samoas I stashed in the garage freezer 40 days ago, oh my!

And now I have a MASSIVE sugar hangover.

To be fair, I wasn’t quite as strict this year as I have been in previous years and slipped up occasionally. Sometimes a girl just needs a milkshake on a Friday afternoon when she was traipsing around New York City with out-of-town coworkers until 4:30am the previous night. Can you blame her?

Usually, I want to break Lent with chocolate — I made an Almond Joy cake for Easter last year and chocolate tiramisu the year before. This year, I made good on my word and ate an entire bag of Reece’s Peanut Butter Eggs before 9am on Easter morning and then proceeded to tackle these cinnamon rolls. Molls is right, these rolls dessert AND breakfast wrapped up in a sweet ball of dough — it’s the best of both worlds!

Cinnamon Rolls (adapted from Joy the Baker)

These rolls take a certain amount of patience to see all the way through because they’re a bit time consuming, but they’re definitely worth it!

for the dough

1 – 1/4-oz package active dry yeast

1/4 cup warm water (approximately 115 degrees F)

1/2 teaspoon + 1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup milk, room temperature

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 egg + 1 egg yolk

2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for kneading and rolling

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 stick unsalted butter, plus more to grease the pan

for the filling

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

2 tablespoons maple syrup

3/4 cup pecans, finely chopped

3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

for the icing

2 cups powdered sugar

1/4 cup milk

In a large bowl, combine yeast, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, and 1/4 cup warm water. Stir to incorporate and let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes.

Add the rest of the sugar to the bowl, along with the milk, brown sugar, vanilla, egg, and egg yolk. Mix with a whisk until ingredients are combined, then add flour and salt. Using your hands, knead the dough until all ingredients just come together to form a dough.

Add the butter and proceed to knead the dough — it will be come wet and sticky. Transfer dough to a well-floured work surface and knead about 1/3 cup flour into the dough. When dough is mostly smooth (a bit sticky is alright), transfer to a large, greased bowl. Place a damp towel over the bowl and put in a warm place to rise until doubled in size, about 2 hours.

While you wait ever so patiently for the dough to rise, make the filling! Combine sugar, brown sugar, pecans, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, and maple syrup in a large bowl. Set aside.

Grease a 13-inch baking dish and set aside.

When dough has risen, plop dough onto a heavily floured work surface. Add flour one tablespoon at a time until dough is no longer sticky. Place a damp towel over the dough and let rest for 5 minutes.

Using a floured rolling pin, roll dough into a 10 x 10-inch square. Brush the top of the dough with melted butter and pour filling on top of the dough, leaving a 1-inch border on the sides. Lightly press filling into the dough. Lift the edge of the dough closest to you and roll into a tight cylinder. Place roll seam side down and slice into 8 or 10 equal rounds. Place rounds in the greased baking dish, cut side up. Cover with a damp towel and refrigerate overnight.

The next morning, preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Take rolls out of the fridge, uncover, and let them sit at room temperature for 15 minutes. Bake until golden brown and sugar is bubbling, about 30 minutes.

While rolls are baking, whisk together powdered sugar and buttermilk until mixture is smooth.

Take cinnamon rolls out of the oven and transfer entire pan to a cooling rack. Brush with melted butter and drizzle with icing. Allow rolls to cool long enough so they won’d burn the insides of your mouth, then devour as quickly as possible.

{Double Batch} Orzo + Arugula Salad

a springy salad for your troubles

For the third year in a row, I have given up sweets for Lent. For the third year in a row, this 40 days without sweets is TOUGH. For the third year in a row, I know I will feel better at the end of these 40 days only to consume an unhealthy number of Reece’s Peanut Butter Eggs at 7am Easter morning (because Reece’s in egg form are just so much better than the normal peanut butter cups).

By the time Lent comes along every year, I’m usually in need of some kind of detox. Thanksgiving bleeds into Christmas (pies and cookies are abundant), Christmas topples onto New Year’s Eve (my Hungarian family sustains on sugar), there are many birthday celebrations to be had come January (hello, birthday cake), then my birthday (hello, more birthday cake, cake balls, and Momofuku cookies), only to conclude with an indulgent Mardi Gras celebration.

The difficulty with eliminating sweets is defining what exactly “sweets” encompasses. Does it mean solely desserts? Does candy count? What about breakfast pastries? Are you giving up all (heaven forbid) sweet-tasting things?! For my purposes, desserts, candy, and breakfast pastries count as sweets, but I get my sweet fix from fruit and honey in my afternoon tea.

So as I count down the hours until the Easter Bunny sneaks into our house and leaves a basket full of Fudge Kitchen fudge, peanut butter eggs, and Cadbury goodies outside my bedroom door, all Double Batch posts for the month of March will be salad-related (thanks to the ever-brilliant Molly). This bright pasta salad is a great springy recipe especially when the date says winter SHOULD be over, but it’s still 35 degrees with impending snowstorms every day.

Orzo + Arugula Salad (adapted from Love & Lemons)

vinaigrette

1/2 cup olive oil

2 cloves garlic, chopped

2-3 tablespoons champagne or white wine vinegar

2 tablespoons grated lemon zest (plus a bit more for garnish)

2 tablespoons fresh thyme, chopped (plus a bit more for garnish)

juice of one lemon

salt & pepper to taste

pinch of red pepper flakes

salad

1 box orzo

1/2 cup pecorino, shredded

1/2 cup sun dried tomatoes, chopped

1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted

2+ cups arugula

In a small bowl, whisk together ingredients for vinaigrette and set aside — you want the flavors to marry before using the dressing.

Cook the orzo in boiling water for about 7-10 minutes until pasta is al dente. Drain almost all pasta water from pot (leaving about 2 tablespoons) and transfer orzo into a large glass bowl. Add cheese, sun dried tomatoes, and pine nuts to the orzo and toss until incorporated. When orzo has cooled a bit, add arugula. Pour dressing over salad a little at a time and toss. Serve with garnishes of shredded cheese, lemon zest, and thyme. Enjoy immediately!

This pasta salad is best if eaten the day it’s made, but will keep for 1-2 days in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

garnish with more cheese, lemon, lemon zest, and thyme

 

Easter sweets (Lent is over!)

It’s no secret that I have a monster of a sweet tooth.

That said, I’m not going to waste my dessert cash and calories on just anything — I’m kind of a dessert elitist.  Most days, I don’t even eat dessert. But if it’s a special occasion or there’s a dessert I can’t pass up (such as German chocolate cheesecake with chocolate cookie crust and coconut topping), I will surely indulge.  I’m a strictly dark chocolate girl, will always choose chocolate over vanilla, and salted caramel anything trumps both of the former flavors.  Hershey’s chocolate tastes like plastic to me, and I’m not one to buy a candy bar in the grocery store.  Sour patch kids?  Dots?  Sour belts?  Gross.  Give me tiramisu or butterscotch pudding  and then we have a deal.

Because I love them so much, I usually give sweets up for Lent.  Logical, I know.  I like a good challenge every once in a while, and 40 days and 40 nights is a perfect length of time to cleanse my system of sugar and focus on some other things.  Also, Lent usually starts a few weeks after my birthday, so it’s a good time to detox from copious amounts of cake and champagne I undoubtedly consumed during my birthday week.

While 40 days of Lent isn’t unbearably long, it’s just long enough induce vivid dreams of brightly-colored, candy-covered trees and chocolate rivers a-la-Willy Wonka.  And by the time Easter comes around, I need to bake.  It’s as simple as that.

Last year, I tried my hand at my very first tiramisu courtesy of Bon App’s Italy issue.  To sweeten the deal, it was CHOCOLATE tiramisu, which is a totally non-traditional take on the classic Italian dessert.  Perhaps next time I’ll try my hand at salted caramel tiramisu.  Although I’m not sure how well those flavors would work together.

This year, I drew inspiration from my blogger friends Rachel and Joy and made an Almond Joy Cake.  I saw the recipe on Rachel’s site a few weeks into Lent, and knew immediately that I was going to make that for Easter Sunday brunch.  I decided to do a yellow almond cake and chocolate frosting, so used Joy’s best chocolate buttercream frosting recipe from her new cookbook.  And she was right — it’s the best chocolate buttercream frosting ever.

I also dove into the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook and made Christina Tosi’s cornflake-chocolate chip-marshmallow cookies (which Rachel also made).  They were unreal.  Bonkers.  Cray.  You get the picture.  My favorite part of the cookies was the cornflake crunch, which consists of toasty crushed cornflakes, sugar, milk powder, and melted butter to make sweet and crunchy additive for the cookies.  After incorporating the cornflake crunch into the cookies, I had some left over and miiiiiight have overdosed on the stuff.  But Lent was over so it’s fine.

Happy Tuesday.  Here’s some I’m-super-happy-Lent-is-over food porn for your viewing pleasure.