Homesick, hurricanes and sympathy baking.

Week 44. Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls.

I’ve been feeling really homesick lately. I’ve moved around a lot, and not many of the places I’ve lived have felt like home.  One that has  been “home” is Brooklyn, NY and it’s a place that I miss often.  I think the increase in homesick-feelings of late is due to being in a new city, the emptiness left by not living with RMT, and having not been back to NYC in 10 months.

I’ve spent a good portion of the last 24-36 hours watching Sandy – and strangely, I keep finding myself wishing I was there riding out the storm with my friends and preparing to help clean up the city that I love so much.  I’ve been checking out news, videos, twitter and FB , and making phone calls to the loved ones on the east coast; more than once I’ve found myself expecting to look out side and see rain and debris flying through the air rather than the sunny blue skies of Southern California.

Beginnings.

Week 1. My Great-Grandma B’s Cinnamon Rolls.
It’s fitting I started this project with this recipe.  I have heard about this recipe for as long as I can remember.  Around all the winter holidays, or whenever a cinnamon roll was present (at any time of the year), my Dad would bust out the story of how whenever he and his sibs would go to their Grandma’s house, she’d always have cinnamon rolls for them “made with real cream and real butter and we could smell them, sitting on her old stove” (at this point my Dad would close his eyes and purse  his lips as if he could taste said cinnamon rolls just by recalling the memory).  His siblings would similarly recall these memories (well, at least his butter his sister has a bit more sense to her).

It was a tall task to undertake, learning this recipe.  For starters, I will never, ever make these cinnamon rolls as good as my Great Grandma did. It’s just not possible to recreate that memory. Secondly, the recipe wasn’t so much a recipe as a list of ingredients, rough (out dated) amounts, and a rough guide  of what order and how to put them together.

Luckily, I had my aunt to teach me the way.  Someone who’d tasted these mythical cinnamon rolls, and a professional baker to boot. I was 14 or 15 the first time we made them.  It was my first experience with a yeast dough, and I’m glad I had a good teacher!

I’ve made these countless times in the last 15 years, adapting it (brown sugar instead of white in the filling, buttermilk instead of cream, sorting out yeast amounts) along the way, and attempting to put together an actual recipe so future B’s can keep making these.  This past Christmas I was visiting family and had the opportunity to teach two of my cousins, the M’s, how to make these (at their Dad’s insistence, he too has told them the tales of Grandma B’s cinnamon rolls…).  The M’s are roughly the age I was when I first learned how to make these so it was a real treat for me to be able to pass this recipe and memory onto them.  Hopefully we’ll have plenty of chances to make these together in the years to come! They’ve become a staple around the winter holidays, and I’m glad I’ve been able to help keep this beloved memory and recipe alive for my Dad and his sibs.

I forgot to take a picture of the finished product.  But these are sitting on a bed of brown sugar, butter and cream, which turns into a delicious caramel topping once baked and flipped over.