Serious Eats: Sweets
Wake and Bake: Cinnamon Sugar Crescents
[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]
Sometimes I think my tastes have become too refined, my grocery shopping habits too eco-hippy, my desire for healthy products too pronounced. I mean now I look for "all natural" products. (Lame). I try not to buy foods when I don't know or can't pronounce most of the ingredients. (Excuses.) I'm weirded out by bread that stays soft and fresh for a month. (Isn't that what you call progress?) Ah, what a shame. What happened to the Zebra cake-loving girl of my youth?
I mean that girl would have eaten Pepperidge Farm's Cinnamon Raisin Swirl bread all day and night if you'd let her. And it's not hard to remember why. That bread was the best. Eaten straight from the bag, each soft, cinnamon swirled slice kind of compressed into a ball in your mouth, becoming a sweet if mushy ball of dough. (Bread+spit=texture of doughnuts. There's one word for that, and it's genius.) But toasted and buttered, the PF bread really shined. If I was feeling indulgent, I'd add a sprinkle of sugar over the top. It was the perfect blend of spice and sweetness, and the butter made it taste almost like pastry. Seriously, who needs fresh-from-the-bakery bread when you can have pre-sliced slices (so convenient!) of cinnamon-y heaven that take forever to go stale?
But now I try to be "responsible," and I can't remember the last time I actually bought that bread. Still, I haven't lost my love for cinnamon-sugar. That's why I love these cinnamon sugar crescents.
These morning rolls start with a simple sweet yeasted dough and, with minimal effort, become something much more exciting. You roll the dough into a circle, paint it with butter, and sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar. The circle is cut into wedges that are rolled, rugelach-style, into crescents. They bake up soft and fragrant. When you take a bite, the roll even has the visible cinnamon "swirl." Sure, they go stale in about a day, but at least I can tell you what's in them.
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About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios
