Cape Breton Cinnamon Rolls (and really cheap wine)

When you live in a Frat, far away from your grown-up kitchen, sometimes you have to improvise, especially when you have a food blog and are trying to pretend that you’re some kind of big-time cook.

So when you decide that you want to bring your mother’s famous cinnamon rolls to your final writing workshop, your first challenge is rounding up the ingredients in your pathetically stocked pantry. When you finally find everything, you grab your too-small mixing bowl and cut your butter into the ingredients with a fork instead of a pastry cutter.

Once things are mixed together and your dough is kneaded out onto your postage-stamp sized counter, you realize you have no rolling pin to roll the dough into a pie-crust thickness. You consider trying to flatten it out with your hands, but your mother would be embarrassed at her recipe being bastardized in such a thoughtless manner. And if you did that, the rolls would have no uniformity. They might taste good, but you know they’d look like shit.

After all, you’ve had so many great wonderful pictures, Secret Caesar Salad, Biblical Banana Bread, Garlic Shrimp and (really cheap WINE.) Of course! The proverbial light bulb goes on. You can use the wine bottle!!

Luckily, because you are able to exercise restraint in your wine consumption, you still have a few bottles of really cheap wine left in your cupboard.  You pull out a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and get to work. It makes a perfect rolling pin!

With these handicaps behind you, the rest of the cinnamon roll construction is seamless. Of course, there will be those who prefer the yeasty richness of the sticky Cinnabon-style cinnamon bun, but this recipe was the staple of your childhood, your children’s childhood and the staple of any good Cape Breton tea.

Recipe (adapted from my mother and grandmother and the Bible)

2 cups all-purpose flour

4 tsps baking powder

1 tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

1/2 cup slightly softened butter (my mother uses crisco)

1/2 cup buttermilk (or soured milk….add a tsp of vinegar)

1 large beaten egg

1 tbsp sour cream (if you don’t have any use a bit more milk)

Topping:

Soft Butter

Brown Sugar

Cinnamon

Method

Mix the dry ingredients together and then cut in the slightly softened butter with a pastry cutter. If you don’t have one, use a fork. Cut in the butter until the consistency is slightly mealy.

Mix the wet ingredients together and add all at once to the dry ingredients and mix with a fork until you have a  slightly sticky ball of dough.

Turn out onto a floured surface and kneed gently about 10-12 times until the ball is smooth.

At this point make sure the surface is well-floured and then take your bottle of wine (a full bottle is always better than an empty one!) and roll the dough out until it is about 1/8 of a inch in thickness and resembles a poorly drawn circle.

Now the fun begins (see toppings). Spread a thinnish layer of soft butter covering the whole of the surface to the edges. Add a few good scoops of brown sugar and spread on top of the butter. Shake cinnamon on top. Don’t be shy. Cinnamon, sugar and butter taste good.

Roll the dough and toppings into a long tube-like shape (tucking in the edges as you go). Hopefully you’ve floured the surface well enough because if not it will stick and you will get upset.

Cut into 1 or 1.5 inch pieces and put on a cookie sheet leaving enough room for the rolls to spread out once they’re cooked.

ps. The dough can also be used as a great biscuit recipe (without the toppings, of course.) Roll out into a 1/2 inch thickness and use a round cookie-cutter to make biscuits. (my kids loved it when I egg washed the tops and sprinkled sugar on top before putting them in the oven)

Bake at 425 for 10-12 minutes (rolls or biscuits).

When you take your goodies out of the oven you you may also discover that you have no rack to put the cinnamon rolls on to cool. For this there is no answer other than to let the cinnamon rolls cool on the cookie sheet. Of course, this will make them stick slightly so you must gingerly chisel them off the tray and onto a pretty plate, making sure to eat any that you destroy along the way. For the ones that you only partially destroy, hide them on the bottom and hope that some starving MFA student will eat it anyway.

You could, of course, also open the wine at this point, unless it’s 10 am at which point you should probably pour a frosty glass of milk and leave the wine for later.