Let’s make dinner rolls in different shapes and sizes!

Posted on June 9, 2008
Filed Under Breads Biscuits and Rolls

Are Mondays crazy for you, too? They always are for me and I’m not sure why. Extra cleaning up from the weekend, more laundry, lack of energy? Anyway, today was one of them days and so the post I wanted to post this morning is happening now instead.

Speaking of Mondays, my family rarely gets anything special for supper on Monday evenings. In fact, I almost always make the same thing… fried chicken breasts and veggies and bread to go with it. That meal can be made from chicken-still-in-the-freezer to eating in under a half hour. That timing fits in well with my Monday schedule. Or lack of schedule… I don’t want to give the wrong impression here.

Last Friday evening, we tried something new. My sister was here and my mom and dad were coming for supper, so we decided to get fancy with the rolls. And if they didn’t turn out, it didn’t really matter because our extra people for supper were comfy guests. And my mom always likes kitchen experiments anyway. I took 2 loaves of thawed frozen bread dough (does ‘thawed frozen’ make sense?) and split each loaf in half, making 4 equal 4ths (I think my English is having a Monday, too. 4 equal 4ths sounds weird).

4th #1: Divide it into 4ths. Divide each 4th into 3rds. Put 3 3rds each into 4 ‘holes’ of a muffin tin. Did you at all get that? It should look like this:
 Should’ve rolled each ball a bit longer to get them more smooth, but they looked better in real life. At least I didn’t notice the roughness.

4th #2: This was the easiest one. Divide it into 4 balls. They seemed too big, so I pinched some off of each ball and gave it to Lexi to play with. So, now that the 4 balls are the right size, put them in the muffin tin. Then take a scissors and snip it almost the whole way thro’, first one way, then the other way. It should look like this:

4th #3: You’ll need a bit of help from 4th #4 for this one, so don’t save it till last! Put the 2 together and roll into a 12″ circle. With a pizza cutter, cut it in half. Cut the one half into 4 or 6 triangles, then roll each one up starting at the wide end. Should look like this:

4th #4: Roll it out into a rectangle about 6″ x 6″ and butter it. With a pizza cutter, cut it into 4 strips. Then stack the strips on top of each other and cut the other way, making 4 square stacks. Lay each stack sideways into a muffin cup. Should look like this:

And now, you should have a total of something like this:

Then, let them raise for about 45 min…

Bake them for 25 min at 350.

And you’ve got yourselves a fine assortment of rolls to pick from! Those stacked ones separated while baking, must’ve been because of the butter. Next time I’d skip the buttering. Lexi and Tiffany made the crescent rolls. The reason there are 6 crescent rolls and only 4 of the other kinds is not a thought-thro’ culinary reason. It’s simply because I’d have run out of room in the muffin tin and I only have one. They would’ve been a better size divided into 6ths instead of 4ths though. Some of them got pretty big.

They were fun to make. And it added more character to the meal. Ok, that may have bumped it up a level, saying a meal had character. The rest of the meal was glazed meatloaf, twice-baked potatoes in a casserole dish (instead of putting the potato mixture back into the shells), and peas. Our dessert was chocolate peanut butter milkshakes later in the evening.

Off-the-subject tidbits:
I’m still going to do ‘Out of my Comfort Zone’ posts, but they’ll be more hit-n-miss now instead of weekly. Also, I figured out a way (um, after talking to my tech support husband… maybe that should say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’) to do printable recipes now, so one of these days, I’ll start adding one to each post. And eventually making one for each recipe all the way back to the beginning. That last sentence makes me want to run and hide. Just kidding. It’s fun.

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