This week in baking!

I have found that not only am I a stress eater, I am a stress baker. I like the straightforwardness of it. You follow the recipe, and the outcome is more or less what you expect. At least that is how it usually goes.  Today I guess my stress level impaired my ability to read a recipe all the way through. I found a really good looking recipe for cinnamon pull apart bread , but somehow I missed the part about the dough needing to be refrigerated for a few hours up to 24 hours. I didn't have time for that. Brian was going to help Grandpa Branch hang up a swing and I really wanted them to be done for him to have breakfast and take some over to share.

Not wanting to get discouraged too early, I decided to try to make it with another cinnamon roll dough recipe that I use all the time. The dough came out alright, but then I messed up the recipe again and I cut the dough it all wrong. I really just wasn't reading well this morning. I tried putting it in the loaf pan and it just wasn't working. There wasn't enough dough and the strips weren't fitting right. With tears in my eyes, I started doing some positive affirmations that went something like this:

 "Wait a minute! You are a baker wife! You have all this perfect cinnamon roll dough (even though it is all cut up), and you can fix this!"

So I pulled out a muffin tin and rolled up those little mistake pieces of buttery, cinnamon and sugar goodness and let them rise and bake. I could just as easily pitch them after I saw how they turned out. Luckily for me, and one of the only good things that happened today, they turned out okay. Brian ate two and Matt came upstairs and grabbed three before disappearing back to bed. Here is what the finished product looked like.

I actually kind of made up this recipe! It could use a little perfecting, but a facebook friend gave them a name that I love! "Cinnamon Runt Cakes!" SO PERFECTLY CUTE!

Last week, on Friday night, I made cinnamon swirl bread and then I used it to make french toast for the boys on Saturday morning. It killed us all! It was so heavy, but good. They each ate three whole pieces, my two thin ones sent me back to bed for a mid-morning nap!

Then this week we were having pasta one night so I made these cheesy garlic bread swirls .  I need to branch out and do more than bread, but coming back to the stress relief thing, I really do like to just get in there and knead it. So therapeutic. And the boys are really benefitting from all this stress baking!

They were so perfectly soft inside!

That was our week in baking. In other news, I had to finally break down and call a patient advocate for all the trouble we are having with Brian's neurology office. Thanks to a sweet friend from high school, I was able to get in touch with the right people and they were very kind and sympathetic, not to mention disgusted with the issues we are having, but that is a different post and I have not cooled down sufficiently to tackle that one. Also, remember the awesome scholarship I received?  Well, ICC decided that I have too many credit hours from an associate's degree I earned eight years ago (and paid for with no financial aid whatsoever), and so my scholarship is terminated pending a painstaking appeal process that I have to get started first thing Tuesday morning. Way to stress me out on a holiday weekend. But that is also for another post. I'm saving it up for the next "bump" in the road of which I honestly feel like we have had our fair share of in just shy of two years of marriage.

Have a good and safe holiday weekend friends!

Love, Lindsey