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Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved cinnamon rolls. I remember a particularly glorious few days when my family went to visit my aunt and uncle and discovered that their son was working for Cinnabon that summer. Every evening he’d bring home left-over Cinnabons and my father and I would eat ourselves sick. Apparently love of gooey cinnamon pastries runs in the blood.

Despite my love affair with cinnamon rolls, however, I have never had the courage to experiment with them before. In part, it’s because yeast scares me (my early experiences with yeast bakes turned out poorly, to say the least). Mainly, it’s that I’ve never really had homemade cinnamon rolls that consistently turned out well. Mom would make them occasionally, but they were hit and miss; sometimes delicious, other times passable.

Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for my cholesterol levels, I have at last braved the cinnamon roll and discovered something wonderful: I make damn fine cinnamon rolls, and they’re really, really easy.

Like most of my recent excursions into yeast bakes, my cinnamon rolls start with Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (available via Amazon or on Kindle). I cannot recommend this book highly enough; it is a brilliant introduction to bread baking that makes the task not only easy but quick. Like any baking, it takes a couple tries to figure out exactly how things work, but although my first attempts at recipes and doughs typically don’t end up quite like I planned, I’ve only had a single total disaster (my first attempt at naan was carbonized thanks to following the book’s instructions to heat the skillet on high prior to cooking the bread). If you’ve tried and been frustrated with yeast baking before, you’ll understand what an astonishing track record that is for a beginning baker.

If you have any interest in making fresh bread, go buy the book. You’ll need it to make cinnamon rolls my way, anyway, because they rely on the dough recipes and preparation methods that are the core of the book. Specifically, Artisan Bread in Five provides a Caramel Sticky Buns recipe on page 187, which will be your starting point. The key is instead of the rigamarole of coating the bottom of the pan and turning things upside down once you finish baking, etc. you’ll want to use this easy cinnamon filling:

Cinnamon filling
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons ground cinnamon

Mix the brown sugar and the cinnamon together. You’ll have enough for 2-3 batches of cinnamon rolls (depending on how liberal you are with the sugar and how large you make the cinnamon rolls), so store it in a tupperware or similarly air-tight container for later.

After you’ve rolled the dough out into a rectangle as per the sticky bun recipe, spread all of it except for 1/2-1 inch around the edges with softened butter. I’m usually a bit more liberal with the butter if I’m using the master recipe, but particularly if you’re using brioche dough (which makes the richest, most desert-like cinnamon rolls) you’ll want to be a bit conservative with the butter. You just need enough to coat the dough with a thin layer.

Once you’ve spread the butter, sprinkle it liberally with the cinnamon-sugar mixture. You want to have enough cinnamon-sugar that you can’t see any dough or butter peeking through (except for the strip around the edge of the dough, of course). If you’re particularly liberal with the cinnamon-sugar, you’ll likely end up with a sticky goo at the bottom of the rolls similar to the stuff you’d find in a Cinnabon. Use a little less, and you’ll have a more subtly-flavored rolls that’s a bit cleaner to eat.

Roll and cut the dough as per the sticky bun recipe. I usually use a greased 9×9 glass pan, and always end up with nine rolls (counting the two end ones) each about 1-2 inches high. You can, of course, make more or less depending on how much dough you’ve got and the size of your pan. Place the rolls in the pan with a little bit of room between each one (they’ll spread out as they rise), and cover lightly with plastic wrap.

Whether the rolls rise or not will depend on the temperature of your kitchen. I often need to place a second 9×9 pan filled with hot water under the one with the rolls for 20-40 minutes of the rising time, since my kitchen tends to be cooler. Ideally, the rolls should rise upwards and outwards both, so that they are just touching their neighbors.

Bake according to the sticky buns recipe, about 40 minutes. Baking time will fluctuate depending on how large your rolls are, so start peeking around 30 minutes. Serve warm, preferably with some icing (I leave it to you to find a good icing recipe online; we typically just mix some powdered sugar with water and drizzle it over the warm rolls).

I’ve tried using brioche dough and the master recipe both, and the cinnamon rolls turn out great either way. As you would expect, the brioche-based rolls are richer and more buttery, while the dough of the master recipe rolls takes more of a backseat to the filling. I’m itching to try the challah dough because it’s in between the two as far as eggs and butter content goes.

The only downside to this recipe is that it takes roughly two hours from when you decide to make cinnamon rolls and when they’re ready to eat, thanks to the rising and baking time (even if it’s passive time, it still makes it hard to make cinnamon rolls for breakfast before work). If anyone has any ideas for how to prep the rolls in the evening and have them ready to bake in the morning, I would love to hear them.

Even if I never find a way to cut down on the rising and baking time, though, needing to think ahead two hours is a miniscule price to pay considering that the payout is a dish that has warmed, comforted, and delighted me since childhood.

After having finally seen the end of The Dark Knight yesterday (which we previously had missed thanks to a wide-spread and suspiciously well-timed power outage), my girlfriend and I were wandering homewards. What had seemed like the culminating moments in our first go turned out to be only about three quarters of the way through, and as a result it was quite a bit later than we had expected to get out. With no quick and easy entrees beckoning us home, we decided to try the local Mongolian Grill and see if it was any good.

The food was alright (although unlike any other Mongolian grill I’ve ever been to you didn’t get to make your own sauce, which was disappointing), but the best part of the trip was the poster displaying nine good reasons to eat frozen yogurt that was on the wall. Or, more accurately, “9 Reasons to Eat Y/O/G/U/R/T”. Your guess is as good as mine why they slashed it up.

1. Yogurt is easier to digest than milk

This seems to me like a decent argument for eating yogurt.

2. Yogurt contrubutes [sic] to colon health

Again, a healthy colon is certainly a plus in anyone’s book, although I’m a little perplexed why this is the second reason. It seems more like the kind of thing you’d slip tactfully in around reason number seven or eight.

3. Yogurt can boost immunity

We seem to be on a health kick here.

4. Yogurt aids healing after intestinal infections

Whozawha? “Aids healing in intestinal infections?” Purely aside from the fact that this seems more like something you’d find in a doctor’s office than a restaurant, how many of the customers here have intestinal infections? It must be a pretty significant number if the fourth reason you should eat yogurt is to help those pesky infections on their way. Suddenly the partially frozen meat that went into my dish is looking less and less like a good idea.

5. Yogurt can decrease yeast infections

Well, damn. As if the intestinal troubles weren’t enough, they wanted to be absolutely certain we knew the healing and preventative power of yogurt. Except that yeast infections are not something I want to think about when I’m eating. Yeast infections, in fact, manifestly put me off food.

Fortunately, though, after the first five reasons the author of the poster decided that they had extolled the virtues of yogurt for the digestive tract long enough.

6. Yogurt is a rich source of calcium
7. Yogurt is an excellent source of protein
8. Yogurt can lower cholesterol

Ah, now there are three reasons that a sheltered American like myself can appreciate. From Cheerios boxes to news anchors, calcium, protein, and cholesterol are all subjects safe for public consumption. Sure, they don’t have the shock value of yeast infections, but they’re also familiar enough that I don’t have to think about them. Which is nice. Because I still can’t get the thought of those yeast infections out of my head, and am cursing the impulse to add cauliflower to my meal.

9. Taste good

“Okay, there’s our list.” “But we said nine reasons, and we only have eight.” “Oh, fine, say it has a good taste. We already covered all the important bits like yeast infections.” “Alright. ‘Taste good’. Let’s go print this son of a bitch.”

Needless to say, despite nine very good reasons to eat y/o/g/u/r/t, neither my girlfriend nor I was tempted to try it.

It was probably because neither of us had a yeast infection.

(As an aside, this poster was almost certainly created overseas somewhere, and the cultural disconnect between Americans like myself, who value pleasurable flavors, and the authors, who evidently prefer restorative powers after intestinal infections, is quite telling.)

Take a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup (preferably the bite-sized version). Freeze it. Eat it frozen.

Tastes the same (aside from being very slightly colder and harder), but without the disgusting greasiness on the wrapper and outside that otherwise mars a perfectly decent candy. Brilliant.

Thanks to my girlfriend for introducing me to frozen Reese’s. Definitely the way to go. The only downside is that the inner wrapper is slightly more difficult to remove, but I’m willing to live with that.

I hate the fact that A&W now caffeinates their cream soda (caffeine makes me weird), so in my search for alternatives I picked up a 12-pack of Jones Cream Soda at the store the other day.

Unless you are a hummingbird, do not drink this stuff. It’s like drinking syrup (sans the viscosity). My girlfriend, who normally is of the opinion that more sugar equals more fun, ended up pouring most of a can down the sink. I drank a can with lunch, and while I made it all the way through the resulting headache argues I should have followed her example. This stuff is ridiculously sweet.

Perhaps Jones Soda has always been sickeningly sweet (I don’t know if I’ve ever tried it before, and lord knows there’s a market). If so, and you’re not already a fan (or hummingbird), consider yourself warned. As for me, the search for a lower budget cream soda alternative continues. I do love me the Thomas Kemper Cream Soda, but it’s hard to justify the cost for day-to-day consumption (as a side note, their Ginger Ale is also to die for).

I never used to buy Wolfgang Puck canned soup because Wolfgang Puck’s face on the can is seriously creepy. I mean, the dude is worse than some of the Reader’s Digest covers that I had to turn over so I could use the damn bathroom as a kid. Aside from not being the best looking dude ever, he’s got a sort of predatory, “I vant to suck your blood!” look to his eye. Not something I need to see when I’m opening the cupboard craving sustenance.

But last week, Wolfgang Puck was the only canned soup on sale, and I live on canned soup on the weekends when my girlfriend is off at work. Thanks to my father, I hate to buy one brand when another brand is on sale, so I got a few cans to try out.

And damn, this stuff is good! Not only does it taste better than Campbell’s or Progresso, but the serving size is way better for a single person. I can pretty easily eat a whole can of Campbell’s soup on my own, but I always feel just a little too full. Wolfgang Puck’s is the perfect size.

So now I’ve got a cupboard full of Wolfgang Puck soup turned so his face is to the wall. If only they printed the name of the soup on the back of the can in big letters, I’d be set.