The Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls are worth the effort

Daring Bakers KitchenLast month’s Daring Baker’s Challenge was to make Cinnamon Rolls, which finally gave me an excuse to make the The Pioneer Woman’s Cinnamon Rolls. They’ve been on my radar for literally years. I don’t know why it took me so long to try them, but now that I have? I’m pretty sure they’re what got the Food Network’s attention and launched the Pioneer Woman empire. They’re that good.

I wouldn’t call the recipe difficult, but it does take some time to come together so make sure you have time for rising and resting and rolling before you give these guys a go. Also, there’s a chance that you’re going to make a serious mess. If you enjoy cleaning as much as I do, you might want to tell your loved ones you’ll make them some cinnamon rolls if and only if they’ll clean up after you.

So the first thing I did was

making cinnamon rolls

And then I

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Finally, I took a bite. And I involuntarily did this:

Bill Cosby dancing

I’m 100 percent serious. Prepare your hearts, minds and funky sweaters for a Cosby dance.

The recipe calls for baking powder, baking soda and yeast, and it yields a terrifically rich and ridiculously soft cinnamon roll. I only ran into a few problems. The first was that I didn’t have any maple flavoring on hand, so I used vanilla in the icing instead. This turned out to be not-a-problem-at-all; the vanilla + coffee in the icing ended up tasting like a vanilla latte. Which is to say: It was scrumptious.

The other problem was that I’d looked at the recipe and thought, “Oh, that’s far too many cinnamon rolls! I’ll make a half-batch!” That’s how I learned that, in fact, there is no such thing as far too many cinnamon rolls. Even if you aren’t prepared to eat two dozen of them on your own, you’re certain to find friends who will help.

So I made them again.

This time I made a full batch. I put half of the dough in one big pan and sent it along with Rockford on his Father’s Day golf excursion. I split the other half of the dough between two pans — one for the kids and I and the other for my father-in-law. I left the coffee out of the icing on the kids’ pan, because Poppy asked me to, but I made up for that by using coffee almost exclusively in the pan for my father-in-law. All three pans were joyfully received and consumed.

This month the Daring Bakers kept our creativity rolling with cinnamon bun inspired treats. Shelley from C Mom Cook dared us to create our own dough and fill it with any filling we wanted to craft tasty rolled treats, cinnamon not required!