Pioneer Woman Cinnamon Rolls

If you know me, you know I've got a fear of yeast.  I'm afraid to bake with it even though I've never even tried it.  There's something about the temperamental nature of it, the fact that the yeast is ALIVE and using the ingredients you've prepared to grow.  I don't know why, but it just gives me the creeps.  That and it's a lot of responsibility.  These are living organisms that have nutritional needs!  It's almost like kids!  Except for the putting in the oven and eating part.  I'll leave that to Jonathan Swift thankyouverymuch.

I'd seen this recipe a while back, it's actually what got me started on The Pioneer Woman, and decided that if I was going to try baking something with yeast it would definitely be these cinnamon rolls.  The only trouble is, my tiny kitchen doesn't have enough room for me in it, much less me and lots of yeasty dough.  Enter my mom and her fabulous new kitchen.  Since it's Christmastime and she was taking requests/suggestions for meals, I asked if she'd be willing to let me take over the kitchen and attempt to make these while we were all home for the holidays.  Thank goodness she did! 

After trying to figure out how many rolls the recipe would make, you need nine cups of flour, we decided to just go ahead and make the whole thing.  If there were leftovers, we'd give them away.  Dominique and I made the dough on Wednesday night (or Christmas Adam as my friend Kristen put it) and assembled them on Christmas Eve morning.  As you might be able to tell from the pictures, our first two pans weren't that pretty.  They tasted delicious though, that's for sure.

The directions say to split the dough in half, much more manageable that way, so we knew there would be time to make adjustments.  After some discussion it was decided that we'd add some more flour to the remaining dough to make it more firm during the rolling process.  It was a huge improvement over the previous try; perhaps I lost count while adding all that flour in the beginning?  We won't talk about that though.  Look how pretty the third pan turned out!  

 

One note about these, we assembled them on Christmas Eve and then froze the dough overnight.  We took them out with plenty of time to thaw and rise before baking on Christmas morning and I couldn't tell a difference, aside from the fact that they were prettier and considerably more uniform in size than the pans we baked right away the day before.

The pictures are courtesy of my step-sister, Amanda.  She's got some talent with that camera of hers and I appreciate that she took these pictures for my little blog so, thanks Amanda!
 
Speaking of blogs, check hers out!