While I was growing up, my mother made cinnamon rolls at Christmas time. Marking days off the calendar is all well and good, but the smell of cinnamon rolls baking was how we knew Christmas season was getting serious and the big day was nearly at hand. [Recipe updated Jan. 7, 2018]
While I was growing up, my mother made cinnamon rolls at Christmas time. Marking days off the calendar is all well and good, but the smell of cinnamon rolls baking was how we knew Christmas season was getting serious and the big day was nearly at hand.
Grandma Ashland grew up on a farm in northern Iowa. She married young and began raising her family on the farm. She was known for the big spreads she put on when our family visited, the holdover habit of feeding hungry farmers, no doubt. She specialized in the solid fare of farmlands everywhere, meat, potatoes, gravy, corn, beans, pickles, bread, jams, pies and more pies. I remember meals at grandma’s when I was young, the kind that leave eaters stunned, eyes glazed and belt buckles loosened.
In mid-life, she went to work in a cafe. She got up at 3 a.m. every day for many years to begin baking. “Eunice” was practically synonymous with “good food” in the Clear Lake area.
When I called my mother to find out more about the cinnamon roll tradition, I learned a family secret that left me shocked: The rolls my mother made all those years were not literally from grandma’s recipe, which it turns out only ever existed in her head.
“She was a wonderful baker. She developed her own recipes,” mom said. “But she didn’t use written recipes. She threw in a little of this and a little of that.”
My mother is no slouch in the kitchen (my wife Amy’s award-winning cookies, Dixie Doodles, are named for her), but she prefers to follow written recipes.
She didn’t know all the secrets of grandma’s cinnamon rolls, but one day she was invited to coffee at a neighbor’s house and was served cinnamon rolls.
“I thought, ‘These are just like my mother’s,'” she said, so she asked for the recipe and used it from then on. Those are the cinnamon rolls I grew up gobbling at Christmas.
Those are the cinnamon rolls we still gobble at Christmas, since Amy has been making them for 30 years.
Now, of course, the terrible secret doesn’t really matter. We’ve enjoyed the warm, comfortable aroma of those rolls as they come out of the oven for so long that they have come to represent the legacy of home, family and love that grandma left us and that Dixie and Amy continue.
They are grandma’s cinnamon rolls after all.