Tag: breakfast

Cinnamon Raisin Rolls

My mother made a lot of cinnamon raisin rolls. Most of the time, she would use her ordinary white bread dough. She made a double batch of bread twice a week when I was growing up, so she would take a quarter of the dough for rolls and we would enjoy a pan of dinner rolls for supper or cinnamon raisin rolls for dessert. Warm from the oven, they tasted wonderful.

But every once in a while she would stir up a batch of “sweet roll dough” to make coffee cakes and rolls. They tasted like the rolls you get with this recipe. I ate a lot of these too.

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup water
3 tsp. yeast
2 cups milk
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup shortening
8 T butter, divided
2 tsp. salt
2 large eggs
5 1/2 – 6 cups all-purpose flour
Brown sugar
Cinnamon
Raisins

PROCEDURE:

Put a half cup of warm water in a cup. You can test that the water is not too hot by letting a drop fall on the inside of your wrist. It should feel only slightly warm. Stir the yeast and a pinch of sugar into the water and set it aside to proof. Put two large eggs into a bowl of warm water to bring them to a warm room temperature.

Heat the milk to steaming and put it into a large mixing bowl. Add the shortening and four tablespoons butter and stir until the butter has melted. Stir in the sugar, salt and two cups of flour. Beat this batter until it is smooth.

Beat the eggs until they are lemon colored and stir them into the batter. Make sure that the batter is not too hot, then stir in the yeast. Beat in the eggs, then add additional flour a cup at a time to make a soft dough, stirring each cup in completely before adding the next.

After stirring in five cups, add the final cup a small amount at a time, stopping if the dough starts to pull completely away from the sides of the bowl. You may even need a little more than six cups of flour to get the dough to the point where it begins to pull away from the sides of the bowl.

Let the dough rest in the bowl for five or six minutes. Turn it out on a floured surface and knead it for one to two minutes. The dough will remain somewhat sticky. Grease the mixing bowl and return the dough to the bowl. Cover it with a damp kitchen towel and let it rise until it has doubled in bulk.

Melt four tablespoons of butter and have the brown sugar and raisins ready. With some of the melted butter, grease baking pans with enough capacity to hold at least two dozen rolls.

Turn the risen dough out onto the floured surface and divide it into two or three pieces. Put one or two back into the bowl and shape the other piece into a roughly rectangular loaf, turning it on the floured surface to keep it from sticking. Roll the dough until it is a third to a half inch thick.

Paint it generously with melted butter, sprinkle generously with brown sugar, cinnamon and raisins and roll the dough into a log. Using a sharp knife, cut the log into sections an inch and a half to two inches long and stand each section in the prepared baking pan. The sections should be touching each other in the pan. Repeat the process with the other two pieces of dough.

Cover the pans with a damp kitchen towel and allow the rolls to rise in a warm place until they have approximately doubled in height. This will take anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half, depending on how warm it is in your kitchen.

Preheat the oven to 350º while the rolls are rising.

Set the pans on a center rack and bake the rolls for about twenty-five minutes or until they are golden brown on top. Unless you are concerned about your sugar intake, glaze them with a powdered sugar glaze. To make it, stir about two tablespoons of milk, half and half or cream into a cup of powdered sugar. Add a half teaspoon of vanilla extract and stir until smooth. Drizzle over the pan of rolls while they are still hot.

NOTES: These rolls are best eaten warm and slathered with butter. They taste fresh the next day if you give them a few seconds at reduced power in your microwave.

This dough makes wonderful filled coffee cakes too. Just roll it out to about a quarter inch thickness, paint all but a half inch on the edges with butter and spread your favorite filling over the center of the dough. Moisten the edges with milk or water and fold one side of the dough slightly past the center line of the filling.

Do the same with the other side of the dough. Seal the seam and ends and lay the cake seam side down on a baking pan. With a sharp knife make three or four slashes about two inches long in the top of the cake to let steam escape.

Bake it with the rolls for about twenty-five minutes. Drizzle glaze over the cake if you like, or simply paint it with a little butter after taking it from the oven.

Mennonite Waffles

Making waffles is a pretty straightforward business, assuming that you have a waffle iron and follow the recipe below. However, you should observe two common-sense rules when you make them.

RULE #1: Don’t put your hand into a hot waffle iron. Pam, my youngest sister, learned this the hard way when she was a little girl. “I also remember getting a bad burn when the top closed on my hand. Little fingers in the wrong spot. Mom told me it was hot but did I listen? NO.”

RULE #2: When beating the egg whites with an electric mixer, make sure that it is turned off before lifting the beater out of the bowl. The splotches on the pages of waffle recipes in our copy of the Mennonite Community Cookbook are mute but eloquent testimony to my once ignoring this rule.

A couple of years after we moved out to the country, we got a waffle iron. It was a round chrome machine with a thick cord and I think there was a thermometer in the middle of the lid that told you when it was hot enough to make waffles. Mom was probably the person who bought it, as she loved kitchen equipment from apple corers to lemon zesters. Dad was happy with Mom’s pancakes.

My sisters Barb and Patsy agree that we didn’t have waffles very often, but I think that my enjoyment of waffles and sausage for Sunday supper may stem from good memories of waffle suppers when I was a kid. I do remember that the waffles sometime stuck if you didn’t grease the iron properly and especially if you tried to take them out before they were done.

Today, of course, most waffle irons have non-stick coatings which virtually eliminate the sticking problem, and improvements in waffle iron design by 1969 when Jerri’s mother bought us our waffle iron made even the the metal grid machines like ours pretty trouble free. I miss the thermometer, but the “idiot light” that goes out when the waffle is done does mean fewer overcooked waffles.

Here is the recipe we use for waffles.

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
2 T sugar
4 tsp. baking powder
6 T butter
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups milk

PROCEDURE:

The eggs and milk should be at room temperature. You can warm the eggs in a small bowl of warm water for a few minutes and heat the milk for a few seconds in a microwave. Melt the butter.

Turn on your waffle iron and follow any instructions for use that came with it. Start warming the maple syrup.

Sift the flour, salt, sugar and baking powder into a mixing bowl. Separate the eggs into two bowls. Beat the yolks until lemon colored and then beat them into the milk. Stir the milk and egg mixture into the flour until you have a smooth batter. Stir the butter into the batter.

Beat the egg whites until they are stiff but not dry. When you turn off the mixer and lift the beaters from the egg whites, you should see peaks with just a tiny curl on the top. Fold the egg whites into the batter with a spatula. Use the spatula to lift the batter over the egg whites, using a figure-eight motion until you have a light fluffy batter.

Bake the waffles and serve each one as it comes off the iron with butter, warm maple syrup. Bacon and breakfast sausage are delicious with waffles.

NOTES: You need butter to make waffles that taste like real waffles. If you merely want waffles that look like the real thing, you can buy them in the freezer section of your neighborhood market.