As I’ve probably mentioned before, I kill yeast. (All plants, really.) My husband is responsible for the breads in our household, including cinnamon rolls. And he has a great recipe for them, from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. (Note: when I say “cinnamon rolls,” I mean sticky buns. I’m not a white icing kind of girl - I believe cinnamon rolls should be covered in caramel & pecans.) They’re lovely. Soft and tender, and the caramel is buttery and gooey and cools to a hint of a crunch by the time you finish eating the roll. Perfect. 

However, the recipe makes a bazillion. And in our house, there are only two of us eating them. The kids are at the stage of toddler-hood where “I haven’t tried that” is rendered “I don’t like that.” Really. My just-about-4-year-old who lives for milk and/or sugar just recently had his first ice cream. I’ve been offering it for years, and it took watching his just-about-6-year-old cousin eat some, then a few weeks of pondering, to convince him to try it. Anyway, Jon & I really just don’t need a 9x13 plus a few extra caramel rolls. 

Besides, with the mixing and the shaping and the rising and the baking, the recipe takes about 4 hours start to finish, and by the time we get up, have a cup of coffee, and feel up to getting started, we’re more in the lunch range. So even though we love these, and talk about them frequently, we’ve only made them a handful of times. That’s about to change.

Last Sunday was Jon’s birthday. I was pondering celebratory breakfast ideas (he leaves for work on the weekends around noon, and comes home around 2AM), and really wishing it could be cinnamon rolls. I did ok with challah a while ago, and was feeling bold enough to try yeast again. But the 4 hours … even if I got cracking as soon as the kids got me up, we’re still looking at 10 at the earliest. Then, a friend pinned something to Pinterest about make-ahead cinnamon rolls. Turns out, they can rise in the fridge overnight. OR, they can be shaped, then frozen, and left overnight on the counter to thaw & rise. 

If this worked, it could mean regular cinnamon rolls in the Sommers household. I had to try. So last Friday evening, the kids & I mixed up the dough. I put them to bed while it had its first rise, then mixed up the caramel topping and shaped the rolls. I divided them into two round cake pans, and tossed one into the fridge and one into the freezer. In the morning, I took out the fridge pan, and let it warm up on the counter for an hour or two (letting Jon sleep in a bit), then baked just in time to enjoy them with coffee andWeekend Edition Saturday. I got a little distracted by the kids asking that I sit in the armchair and read books with them, and the rolls were a little overdone, but decent. So, making the night before & baking in the morning works. Good to know. That meant that even if the freezing thing didn’t work out, I could still have them, say, every time we have company ever. 

So the freezer batch… I took them out when the kids & I got home from the high school football game last night around 9:30, and left them. But 7 this morning, they were gorgeous. Risen even better than the fridge batch. I kept an eye on the clock while they baked, and after 30 mins they were perfect! Perfect! I’m about to have sticky buns every Saturday morning for the foreseeable future, and I’m really unreasonably excited about that!