March 30th, 2020

I guess I did it for a number of reasons.  First of all, as everyone knows, I love to bake ;)  Secondly, I have not made this particular recipe for quite some time mostly because Thirdly , it is rather time consuming and I don't always have a lot of time but Fourthly, right now I have a LOT of time on my hands (as does everyone).    And Lastly, because I had some yeast on hand that was nearly expired and that makes it a use it or lose it proposition.

I speak of cinnamon buns.  I use to make yeast breads and rolls all of the time.  When the boys were young and we lived on a farm, I was kind of, Pioneer Woman-ish.  I made my own jams and jellies, planted, grew, harvested and canned a zillion or so jars of vegetables of all sorts every summer and made all of the breads and pastries and desserts that we ate. Which means that I made bread several times every week.  And when you do it that often, it becomes second nature.  

I made yeast breads of all sorts, white breads, oat breads, wheat breads, rye breads, rolls, coffee cakes, donuts and my own personal favourite, cinnamon buns.  But those days are long gone and we don't as eat nearly as much bread nowadays (trying to avoid carbs -  mostly) and it would be a shame to work that hard to make beautiful bread only to throw it away because it had gone stale.  So I buy bread.  Just ordinary bread. I mean decent quality of course.  But nothing fancy.  Which means, I've kind of lost my touch with making bread.  I just don't have the bread-making confidence that I used to have.

So when I came across the short dated yeast packets in the pantry, my first question was, why do I have yeast?  Then when does it expire (or did it already)? Then it was...what shall I at least attempt to make because I don't like to waste anything!

So I scrounged up my old favourite cinnamon bun recipe.  I read and re-read and re-re-read the the instructions to make sure I had it all firmly in my  head before I began.   Just so you know, it came out pretty well.

I photo documented the process:

I think part way through muscle memory took over because I noticed that I wasn't reading the recipe anymore, I was just making cinnamon buns, just like the old days.   We ate most them already (oink!) which is a really good reason, most  of the time, to NOT make cinnamon buns.  We have no resistance to them.   But me oh my, not to toot my own horn here (beep! but they are yummy!

I will, most  likely finish eating them today because, well, cinnamon buns are really good and I like them and there are only two left.  One for me and one for me.

If you should also happen to have some yeast in your pantry and are interested in this recipe, just let me know. I'm happy to share.

I leave you with this: