Mennonite Monday - Cinnamon Rolls-Big and Soft

Mennonite Monday started because I wanted to make recipes from the Bethesda Mennonite Church Cookbooks (both the yellow and the white cookbook for those of you who own them). I also wanted to take pictures of each recipe that I made, so I would know for future reference what the recipe should look like. I am by no means a great cook, but I think it will be fun to try new and different recipes each week. Not all of these recipes are for ethnic Mennonite food, but the women from Henderson know how to cook, so I can safely say that these recipes will be good. Check back each Monday for a new recipe and feel free to leave a comment if you have a favorite recipe from these cookbooks, or if you have some tips on what I should make and how I should make it.

~

I finally have my cookbook back, so I have the long overdue recipe for Cinnamon Rolls-Big and Soft (pg 23W) for Mennonite Monday.  

Cinnamon Rolls Big and Soft

1 1/2 cups scalded milk

1 stick margarine

2/3 cups sugar

1 cup cold water

3 pkg yeast

3 eggs, well beaten

2 tsp salt

7 cups flour

Scald milk and melt margarine in milk.  Add sugar and cold water.  Mixture should be lukewarm, Add yeast, stir well and let stand 15 minutes or until it bubbles.  Add beaten eggs, salt and flour.  Dough should be firm, you do not knead this.  Stir well.  Let rise one hour.

Filling: 

1 stick margarine

2 tsp cinnamon

1 cup sugar

raisins - optionals

Roll out dough and spread with softened margarine, then sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon and raisins.  Roll up.  Divide into fourths.  Make 6 rolls from each fourth.  Put onto greases pan.  Dip hand in flour and smash down.  Let rise one hour. Bake 15-20 minutes at 350 degrees.  Cool. 

Frosting: 

1/2 cup water

1/4 stick margarine

1 tsp vanilla

powdered sugar

Simmer water and margarine.  Add sifted powdered sugar to make firm frosting.  

 Scalded milk 

 Adding margarine. 

Adding the Yeast

Beating the eggs

Adding salt to the flour to mix before adding it to the rest of the ingredients.

Adding the bubbly yeast mixture to my bowl.

Mixing in the flour.

The dough almost completely mixed together.

Before the dough had time to rise.

I still put the dough infront of the heater when it isn't very hot in the house

After rising for an hour

Rolling out the dough. It was nice to use my pampered chef mat, but I forgot to flour it, which made it harder to roll. 

Adding sugar for the filling.

Ready to roll with butter, sugar and cinnamon.  I skipped the raisins.

I had to deal with the dough sticking alot since I didn't flour the mat, but after some work I got it rolled.

The dough does expand when you start rolling, so you will need a large space for this part.

I cut my cinnamon rolls with a knife, but I have heard that people use unscented floss, but I didn't have any on hand, so I didn't try that route.

Before the rolls have time to rise they look a little rough.

Pushing them down with flour before letting them rise for an hour.

After baking. 

Water and margarine for the frosting.

Adding vanilla

Adding powdered sugar.  You will need a good amount of powdered sugar.

Once the frosting was thickened.

Fresh cinnamon rolls with a lot of frosting.

In my experience, making cinnamon rolls was not very hard, however it is a long process with letting the dough rise twice. If I were going to make cinnamon rolls for breakfast, I would start the process the night before. 

Henderson Night at the Saltdogs

Sunday evening we had Henderson night at the Lincoln Saltdogs games.  It was a great evening for baseball and a fun little community event.  Here are some of the pictures from our evening.

 Ava Tessman was the Mini Manager, so she hung out with the team before the game and they signed her baseball. 

 Steve Michel threw out the first pitch.  

 This wasn't your normal lob pass, he threw a fast ball that was a strike. 

 The Saltdogs coach talking with A*MEN before the national anthem. 

 The team lined up.

 A*MEN singing the National Anthem.  They did a great job. 

 Ava saying "Play Ball"

Homer liked giving Kellen a hard time before the game.  

Homer at the Farmers Market

Don't miss the Henderson Farmers Market tomorrow night, June14,  and bring your kids to meet Homer the Haymarket Hound Dog.  He will be hanging out at the Henderson Farmers Market promoting the upcoming Henderson Community night at the Lincoln Saltdogs Games on Fathers Day, June 19.

Don't miss the opportunity to meet this mascot up and personal on Tuesday, June 14, from 5-7 p.m. in at the Henderson Farmers Market in the Downtown Park.  

Oops

I wanted to post the recipe for Big and Soft Cinnamon Rolls for Mennonite Monday today, but I don't have my cookbooks, so I have no way of typing out the recipe.  In an effort to work on the Bethesda Preschool cookbook, which has over 100 dessert recipes, I let someone else use my cookbooks so I can't post my recipe today, but it will be coming soon.

Be sure to check back Wednesday for things I liked in May.

I Need Your Recipes

The Bethesda Preschool is creating a cookbook and we need your favorite recipes. In order to create the best cookbook possible, we need as many recipes as we can get to meet our goal of 500 recipes for the cookbook.

If you have a favorite recipe that you would like to share, here are a few ways you can submit them through my blog.

1) Send me an email with your favorite recipes at kelsey12184@hotmail.com

2) Leave a comment on this blog post with your recipe.  Type out the full recipe and put your name (so I know who it is submitted by) or if you are suggesting a recipe from either the white or yellow Bethesda Church Cookbook, leave a comment with the recipe name, page number and which cookbook it is found in.

3) Use the following Linky tool by posting your favorite recipe (or linking to a recipe you have already posted) on your blog and then linking it back to my blog below.  Be sure to include a link to this post so others can view the recipes and include their own.

Mennonite Monday started because I wanted to make recipes from the Bethesda Mennonite Church Cookbooks (both the yellow and the white cookbook for those of you who own them). I also wanted to take pictures of each recipe that I made, so I would know for future reference what the recipe should look like. I am by no means a great cook, but I think it will be fun to try new and different recipes each week. Not all of these recipes are for ethnic Mennonite food, but the women from Henderson know how to cook, so I can safely say that these recipes will be good. Check back each Monday for a new recipe and feel free to leave a comment if you have a favorite recipe from these cookbooks, or if you have some tips on what I should make and how I should make it.

~

With Mike training for a half marathon, I have kept a large number of bananas on hand, but the problem is that once in a while you can't eat them fast enough before they go bad.  I decided to use the opportunity to make Banana Bread (pg 28W).  This was a great quick recipe that created three small loaves of bread. 

Banana Bread

1/2 cup shortening

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

2 cup flour

3 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp vanilla

1/4 cup milk

1 cup chopped nuts

3 bananas, mashed

Cream together shortening and sugar.  Add eggs on at a time.  Add flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla and milk.  Mix thoroughly.  Add nuts and bananas.  Pour into 3 small prepared bread pans.  Bake at 350* for 30 minutes.  

 Unfortunately these pictures aren't very exciting because all the ingredients are about the same color, but you can at least see the texture change.  This is the shortening and sugar. 

 After adding the egg. 

 Adding the flour. 

 Adding the powder, salt and vanilla. 

 Milk. 

 My mashed bananas.  I did not put nuts in my bread because I didn't have any on hand, but I was thinking it would have been nice to add nuts to one or two of the loaves. 

 Mixed and in the pans.  I only had two pans so I had to wait to make the third loaf until these were done. 

The final product. It was amazing how fast these loaves disappeared.   One we gave as a thank you to someone for tilling our garden, and the other two went to coffee with Mike. 

1:37.03

Mike finished his first half marathon, which is 13.1 miles, today in 1 hour 37 minutes and 3 seconds. He ran the Lincoln Half Marathon with 8,000 people and an additional 2,000 people who went on to run the full marathon.  It was a crazy experience for him, as the runner, and me, as a spectator, with that many people participating.

For as many events as I run, it was amazing to see how organized this event was considering the number of people running, let alone the volunteers along the course, and the timing of events.  It is also amazing that 10,000 are willing to run 13.1 or 26.2 miles.

Here is my perspective of the day (2 hours).

Mike actually saw a girl from Henderson in his same starting group so he was able to run the first half of the race with her.  (She was not the lady wrapped like a baked potato)

Mike decided to run with the 1:40 group(those planning to finish the race in 1 hour and 40 minutes), so he was lucky enough to be in the first wave of people to cross the start line.  When you have 10,000 running it takes a long time to start, so some people didn't even cross the start line until 30 minutes after the canon started. 

 When the race started the whole group started moving at once in the first wave of people, but when I walked farther back towards the slower groups, I saw long lines of runners waiting for the bathroom because they wouldn't start running for another 10-15 minutes as the large group in front of them filtered through the starting gate. 

 In a matter of seconds it was almost impossible to see Mike with thousands of people filling in behind him. 

 This is the group of people in the 8 minute mile group waiting to start. 

 People waiting for the crowd to move even though the race has already started. 

 10,000 runners is a lot of people. 

During the race I walked downtown to get something to drink to warmup.  Some people try to go to different points in the race to cheer on their runners, but I was worried that I would miss seeing Mike cross the finish line, so I headed straight to Memorial Stadium to wait for him to finish.  

 On the big screen, they had a camera view of runners entering Stadium Drive, when they were close to the finish, which was nice because I could see Mike a head of time and knew I wouldn't miss seeing him finish. 

 At this point in the race the crowd of runners was fairly thin, after about 20 minutes this stretch was at least twice as full as this. 

 Mike entering the stadium in the back to the right. 

 Finishing strong. 

 Crossing the finish line.  While the clock above Mike says 1:38.25 that is the time from when the canon went off, since Mike didn't cross the start line until almost a minute later, his time was fast than the time shown here.