RISE ABOVE

Yeast that is. A little history behind my family and the troubles with yeast-related food items. There are those that have a green thumb when it comes to plants and there are those that don't. My mom has always said the same thing about yeast and trying to get it to rise. She claims she has something in her body that kills yeast upon contact. Maybe she's right. I'm no scientist so I don't know if that's even possible. What I do know is that I was deprived as a child of homemade yeast rolls, cinnamon rolls, and any other food containing yeast becasue of it. OK, deprived is taking it a bit too far but you get my gist. Up until now, I assumed I had inherited this yeast-killing enzyme in my body. Well my love of pumpkin made me put my theory to the test. I found this recipe for pumpkin cinnamon rolls and I just HAD to give it a try. This is where you should see the clouds part and the sun rays shine down because my Christmas miracle came early - my cinnamon rolls ROSE, and rose a lot! In fact, they rose so much I realized later I should have used a bigger pan than this recipe called for. I have always skipped over cinnamon roll recipes in the past because of (a) the yeast factor and (b) because I assumed the process was too long and complicated. Wrong on both. You already know I conquered the yeast issue and this recipe was certainly not hard. The hardest part was the waiting - isn't that a song? And haven't I said that before on here?! So some Saturday afternoon, when you have nothing to do, and your child is napping, go in the kitchen and whip these up! You'll be so glad you did!

Note: The recipe calls for sugar and molasses in the filling. That's because she didn't have brown sugar and that's a substitute. I just used 1/2 cup brown sugar.


My little helper "cleaning" the icing off the beaters!