Thursday, September 13, 2012

Doubled Cinnamon Rolls

This is the usual cinnamon roll recipe I make, the one that my family absolutely loves, and one I think cannot be beat. It is a rich biscuit dough with a cinnamon and brown sugar filling with plenty of melted butter brushed on the rolls. The standard recipe makes only nine cinnamon rolls, and they are all baked together in an 8x8 inch square pan, which keeps them soft and fluffy. Nine cinnamon rolls is not very many, and they certainly do not last long in this house. I have made two consecutive batches of these cinnamon rolls before. I whipped up one batch, put them in the oven, and made up the other batch while they were baking. When the first batch came out, I baked the second batch. However, I found this to be quite time consuming, a lot of work, and a little bit confusing. I decided to try doubling this cinnamon roll recipe, and simply make one double batch of these cinnamon rolls. I figured this would make eighteen cinnamon rolls, and I could bake them all together in a 9x13 inch rectangular pan. Unfortunately, this seemed to pose a few problems. This is a picture of all of the cinnamon rolls together.
I mixed up the dough as I usually do, double checking each ingredient carefully to ensure I had correctly doubled the amount. When I went to knead the dough though, the dough was quite liquidy. I mixed in an additional half cup of flour, and the dough was still quite sticky. I ended up adding quite a bit of extra flour, which I hoped would not affect the texture too much. I was able to knead the dough and roll it out. I decided to divide the dough in half, and roll each half out separately, spread each with half of the filling, roll it up, and cut it. Then repeat with the second half of the dough. The first half went smoothly, but the second half stuck a little bit, which made for some not quite as nicely formed rolls. I also cut each half into more than nine pieces, because I found that cutting it into nine would make the rolls way too large. After this though, the rest went fairly smoothly. All of the rolls fit nicely into a 9x13 inch pan, and they baked perfectly, just as usual. They also came out tasting great - just like they usually do. The only drawback was the look - some of the rolls are not very nicely formed, but they still taste great. This incident proves as a little reminder that not all recipes may be doubled successfully. The same goes with halving a recipe, as I once discovered with my chocolate cake recipe. In particular, candy recipes should never be halved or doubled, only made as is. They do not set properly when each ingredient is just doubled, there is more science to it than that. Like in this cinnamon roll recipe, either more than double the flour was needed, or less than double the liquid was needed. Luckily, this case worked out in the end. This is a picture of the best looking cinnamon rolls of the batch.

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