cinnamon buns

I could tell right off this dough is different. Maybe I shouldn't have added that blackstrap molasses. 

This is a sweetened brioche. You know how you take heated water and add yeast, well, this has milk instead. It also has butter and egg. These two additions will not help gluten network formation. Orange-colored sugar left over from the peach cupcakes turned the dough a strange darkened color, not altogether incongruent with cinnamon buns. Blackstrap molasses was added on impulse. It seemed like a good idea. 

The dough started with 1 + 1/2 cups milk and everything devolved from that. Sifted flour was added by the cup until the dough pulled away from the bowl, which because the dough contained molasses resisted pulling away until there was more flour than would ordinarily go into bread dough causing it to be stiffer than I would prefer. See? Live and learn, eh? 

The dough did not cooperate with stretching into a rectangle as an ordinary looser wetter dough would have. Eventually I resorted to a rolling pin. 

It was really hard to decide how many cuts to make into the roll and what size pan to use. I'm not sure I made the right choice. 

Pineapple frozen previously from the time they were on sale for $1.00 each.  ↓ Chopped up to be suitable for a topping. Brown sugar, cinnamon, pieces of cold butter, and a trace of clove are combined. If I had pecans I probably would have used them. 

The dryness of the dough that was necessary because of the sticky molasses prevented the dough to widen out and flatten as regular wet dough would have. The rolls remained monuments to dough tensile cohesion and strength. That is to say they didn't flop out, softly expand to the edges of the pan and connect to each other as I expected. And that teaches me something about, um, something. I don't know. Maybe it'll come to me on the next couple of tries. 

Here is where the project becomes a regrettable mess. I knew I should have planned this better but when I was planning it I thought, "I'll deal with inverting the goop tray when the times comes." Then when the time came I thought, "I wish I had planned this better." The pan must be inverted because the gooey topping is on the bottom, but the pan is larger than my largest platter which means some of it is going over the edge and the sugar-goop is hot. And so is the pan. 

You know what? It just now occurred to me. The gooey topping can be heated separately stovetop after the rolls are baked, then poured over the finished rolls thus nicely avoiding the pan inversion problem and its attendant mess. 

The whole idea of cinnamon buns arose from having a jar of sugary frosting in the refrigerator that must be gotten rid of.  Earlier for the peach cupcakes I whipped a stick of butter and nearly a whole package of that Neufchâtel cheese (slightly more sour than Philadelphia cream cheese) along with three cups of confectioner's sugar, possibly more, maybe four cups. That produced a pint, and I must say, it is every bit as good if not better than the frosting you buy in tubs, which I have quite a lot of in the pantry and could have used back then for the peach cupcakes but decided not to. 

These cinnamon buns are the sort of thing I actively avoid. They are everything bad all at once. Almost 100% sugar and near-sugar, they can only be deleterious to one's physical wellbeing. Which probably explains why they are so goddamn delicious. I must say, the pineapple/brown sugar/butter combination was a masterstroke. It suggests a whole world of alternate possibilities for sweet roll toppings. 

I remember thinking when I was a little kid, "All bread should be cinnamon bread." God, I was little dumbass.