Get To The Point Recipe - Quick Cinnamon Rolls

 Ok, I'm desperately trying to meal plan, and actually stick to it (Thanks, out of control inflation!).

Here's today's breakfast:

https://www.thekitchenmagpie.com/quickie-homemade-cinnamon-rolls/

If you get through all the stories, and ads, and whatnot on her page, you find the recipe (this irritates the bejeezus out of me).

Essentially, here it is:

Preheat to 400F

Mix 2 cups of flour, 2 Tbsp sugar, and 4 tsp baking powder.

Cut in a half stick of butter.

Add a cup of milk and mix it into a ball. 

Turn out onto a "lightly" floured surface (more on that later) and roll out to 12" x 8".

Behind the scenes, mix a packed cup of brown sugar, 1/3 cup of softened (really soft) butter, and a Tbsp of cinnamon.

Spread this on the dough. Sprinkle with raisins (or NOT, definitely not, here) and roll it up 

Cut it into 12 pieces, pop the pieces into muffin cups, and bake until golden and bubbly (20 minutes if you don't want to rely on your judgment).


Simple enough, right?

So, here's where I tell you a story. 

I HATE when you have to scroll through the equivalent of 5 pages of ads just to find the recipe you want. As such, I'm going to start putting all the recipes at the TOP of my blog, and then tell you the story and show you the pictures afterward. 

Since no one reads my blog, and it's not monetized, I got nothin' to lose here.


Today's little story starts yesterday, actually. 
Yesterday, we had to go out to dinner with my husband's family to celebrate a bunch of February birthdays. It was nice to go out, but the food was meh, and if I'm being honest, spending $100 on ONE MEAL for our family of 5 was painful. The pandemic recession and inflation is killing me.  

Hence my desire to REALLY TRY to be better at meal planning. 

I wasn't in the best of moods upon arriving late to the party (we are ALWAYS late, no matter how hard I try - this time, husband and kid #1 were in the woods tapping Maple trees, and didn't hear my repeated phone calls that it was time to come back). We were only 12 minutes late, which for this group is practically on time, but unfortunately, that meant that we got the crappy end of the giant table, and I was forced to only interact with my own children.

Before you jump on me for not wanting to deal with my kids, they are blessings, blah blah blah, I am with my children ALL THE TIME. They are homeschooled. I spend quality time with them NON. STOP. 

We spent the time waiting for our food playing tic tac toe, and making a list of things we needed to do when we got home. 

Item one: Prep Cinnamon Rolls for Breakfast.

Yeaaaaaahhhh. That didn't happen last night. 
But the kids were jazzed about cinnamon rolls, and I had to deliver. 
This set me on my path to find a "quick" cinnamon roll recipe, i.e. one that doesn't require yeast and hours of rising time. 

Enter The Kitchen Magpie. 
Link again in case you missed it: https://www.thekitchenmagpie.com/quickie-homemade-cinnamon-rolls/

This was a disaster to make this morning.
Let me show you. 

It started out ok. I had a clearish place on the kitchen island (aka The Island of Doom). I had all the ingredients. There was a clean mixing bowl. The cheese grater was clean. 

The cheese grater will make sense later.

I mixed my dry ingredients, all was well.
Since I'm lazy, I would MUCH rather just grate a half stick of butter into my dry ingredients than attempt to find my pastry blender and deal with that. 
Seriously. Grate your cold butter. It works so much better.

Anyhow, things were looking good.

I added the milk, and that's when things started to get iffy. I was left with a REALLY wet dough that I knew would be a nightmare to try to roll, pat, or otherwise turn into a rectangle.

I did the logical thing which was to add a touch more flour and try to dry it out before I turned it out onto my parchment paper.
That I forgot to flour.
Until it was wayyyy too late.

It was at this point at which I decided I was screwed.

But I soldiered on and added the filling, thinking it wouldn't be too bad to scrape it off the parchment and roll it.

HAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

It's blurry because my preschooler was having her first tantrum of the day because I wouldn't let her help.

This was worthy of Nailed It! It was a absolute disaster. 
My attitude probably didn't help.

Seriously, y'all. Flour the parchment paper.

It was so bad. I gave up on rolls, and just made globs. Beautiful cinnamon globs. In Halloween muffin papers. Because that was what was on top of my cupcake liner stack.

While they were baking (20 minutes, btw), I made a quick cream cheese icing, instead of the icing in the recipe. I use softened cream cheese (there was never a shortage of it
here!), a dash of real vanilla extract (Beanilla.com is the best), and enough powdered sugar to make it the consistency I wanted. 

I neglected to get a good picture of them done. You know, the pretty picture that makes you want to make the recipe. Instead I got a picture of the immense amount of melted butter that I will be digging out of the muffin tin.

Overall, these were actually really good. They ended up like a cinnamon monkey bread, essentially. I'm not usually a fan of quick breads over yeast breads, but time dictated that I make a quick bread this morning. 

3/3 kids liked it and ate seconds.
That's a win around here.