Purple, glazed

I've been talking a lot lately about raspberries, because it is summer, they are in season, and delicious.  Also, I remember when I was a kid and Dad would take off with two or three of those gallon ice cream buckets and come back hours later with each one piled high, even spilling over, with raspberries.  Later in the summer, it was blackberries.  At the time, I accompanied him sometimes, but not always.  Now, I wish I'd done more of that.  Dad goes to farms to get his berries now, because the wild bushes have been choked out by honeysuckle.  When he told me this, I finally understood his complete enmity for this invasive species.  He missed the berries; I do, too.  The bowl in the picture below has about two quarts of berries in it, all from Dad's yard in a single morning.  Honeysuckle is not welcome in Dad's yard.

If you finish picking black raspberries and your fingers aren't purple, you're doing it wrong, or not enough.

On the off chance that you've never picked your own raspberries, this is all you need to know about selection: try a couple off the bush.  If they are delicious, keep picking the ones that look like what you just ate.  If they look dried out, forget them.  If it looks like eight bugs have each chewed a tunnel through it, skip it.  If the berry is so plump and wet-looking that it falls off the stem, it's too far gone.  There should be just a little resistance, and they should look like this:

...unless they're red raspberries.  Then they'll be bigger, longer, red, and have different leaves.

Got it?  Great.  Go pick some berries, and I'll wait here.  If you only want to make this recipe, you'll need about 1 1/3 C of black raspberries.  If you want pie, get more berries.  It's ok to overshoot--you can just eat the surplus.

A few months ago I discovered Smitten Kitchen, who does all of this better than I do, and has a book out to prove it.  I don't remember what originally brought me to the site, but I know that my attention was focused on this phrase: Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls.  I wasn't sure I should go sticking bacon in them, but I wanted to try them, and I was going to buy a pie pumpkin anyway.  The results were so good that I made them again a week later to share with Dad.  Thinking of the bounty of berries in Dad's fridge this July, I was struck with an idea: swap pumpkin goo for mashed berries.  I also thought I should throw in some walnuts, because "raspberry-walnut cinnamon rolls" sounded pretty good.  This recipe is almost identical to SK's, because it's a first draft, and I knew that formula would work, but I already have some ideas for changes.  Instead of telling you what I changed, I'm going to leave that link for the original above, and write what you need for my version here.

Dough:

4 T butter, melted

1/2 C whole milk, warmed

2 1/4 t (one packet) active dry yeast

3 1/2 C flour (plus extra for kneading and rolling)

1/4 C granulated sugar

1/4 C packed dark brown sugar (you could use light brown, but why bother?)

1 t salt

1 t cinnamon

1/4 t nutmeg

1/4 t ground ginger

1/8 t cardamon (I might have had closer to 1/4 t in mine--I'm usually pretty generous with spices)

2/3 C mashed berries (you will need about twice this much pre-mashing)

1 large egg

oil or shortening for coating bowl

Filling:

2 T melted/really softened butter

3/4 C dark brown sugar

1/4 C granulated sugar

1/8 t salt

2 t cinnamon

crushed/chopped walnuts (about half a cup, but do whatever you want)

Note: I think I would have been fine with about half as much of both sugars, and it probably would have been a little easier to roll)

Glaze:

4 oz cream cheese, softened

2 C powdered sugar

2 T milk

1 t vanilla (optional)

How to make the purplest things you will ever bake:

• Combine the warmed milk and yeast in a bowl.  Set aside for 5-7 minutes.  Meanwhile, get a big bowl and combine flour, sugars, salt and spices.  Make a well in the middle and dump in the melted butter.  Mix in some of the flour from the sides of the well.  It will look like this:



If you change your mind about the rolls, this might work as wallpaper paste.

• The yeast should be pretty foamy by now.  Add it to your big bowl, along with the egg and mashed berries.

This spoon may never be un-stained.

• Mix the whole mess together.  This is about when I started laughing, because I really didn't expect the color change to be so striking.

If this were normal dough, you'd never notice all those unmixed white bits of butter and flour.

• Knowing I had reached a point where the spoon wasn't going to cut it anymore, this is about when I took the dough out of the bowl and started kneading it.  It is really sticky dough, and I handled this in the usual way: gradually adding flour, a little bit at a time.  I ended up working in 1/3 to 1/2 C of additional flour by the time I could easily handle it.  Grease a large bowl, and stick the purple Play-Doh doughball in to rise.  Cover it and give it about an hour, until it doubles in size.  Luckily, it will not double in purpleness.

I started laughing while mixing.  I continued to laugh at every stage of the process after that, including while I ate them.

• Just before you're ready to work the dough again, mix the sugars and cinnamon for the filling.  DO NOT mix in the butter.  You can mix in the walnuts, but I don't recommend it; it will be hard to spread.
• Punch down the dough, flop it on a clean counter (SK and others will advise a floured counter, but I've gotten by without the flour on every occasion I've ever made cinnamon rolls), and flatten it using hands or a roller to a rectangle that's about 15" x 10".  I'll level with you: I've never measured that rectangle.  I eyeball it, and if the rectangle is a little longer than my 9x13, I'm happy.  I've reached a point where I know the rectangle is the right size because of the dough thickness and the length, and I let the width take care of itself.

The flash pooched the picture, but that's a lot of purple.

• Drizzle your butter over the dough.  Using a spatula or butter knife, spread it over the rectangle's entire top surface except for a 1-1.5" margin along the back side (it will make it easier to seal the rolls later).  Do the same thing with your cinnamon-sugar mix.  If you decided to add the walnuts, sprinkle them on now, trying to get even coverage--don't forget the left and right edges, or you'll have a couple little rolls without much (or any) filling.

If anything spills off, or out of the ends while rolling and cutting, scoop it up later and dump it across the top of the rolls.  It will get hidden under glaze, and nobody will know.

• Starting at the long edge closest to you, roll the dough into a long cylinder.  It will look like a spiral from the end.  This recipe has a lot of sugar in the filling, and my walnuts were in pretty big pieces.  Both factors made rolling tricky.  The sugar layer was so thick that I had to be careful to not just push it ahead of the roll, and it kept the layers of dough from sticking to each other as well as they do with my other cinnamon roll recipe.  Be warned.
• Did I mention you should grease your 9x13?  No?  Ok, do that, then get a sharp serrated knife (I like to use a bread knife, but a steak knife will work, too) and carefully--using little to no downward pressure--saw the purple log into 15 roughly equal segments.  As you cut each one off the end of the roll, turn it on its side and put it in the 9x13.  You should get three rows of five rolls.  There probably won't be much room between them, and that's ok, because it means that as they rise, they will get taller.  When you have the rolls in and the extra sugar sprinkled over the top, you have two options.
• cover tightly and let them rise for 45 minutes
• cover tightly and stick 'em in the fridge overnight (so you can have fresh, piping-hot rolls for breakfast) and pull them out an hour before you want to start baking them.  Keep the baking time in mind when you tell people when breakfast will be.

just before baking.  You can see some of the surplus sugar in the second row.

• Take any covers you might have applied off the pan and bake at 350F for 25 minutes.  This is a good time to make the glaze.

Almost ready to devour.  The whole kitchen smelled like raspberries.  It was outstanding.  If they had turned out to taste terrible, I probably would have cried.

• Cream the cream cheese.  I know, it sounds weird, but it will make mixing easier.  Add the powdered sugar and mix this as well as you can.  It won't really go together well at first, but don't lose hope.  Add vanilla, if you feel like it.  Add the milk that you need (up to 2 T) to get a good consistency.  I only needed 1T this time to get a spreadable glaze.  More might get you a drizzly consistency.  Do whatever you want, then apply generously to the rolls.  Remember that they'll be easier to serve if you can see the edges of individual rolls.

No tears necessary.

However good you think these look, I promise that they tasted even better.  It's just as well that we live in an apartment and don't have a yard full of raspberry bushes, because if I were able to make these things all summer, I'd have a very hard time thinking of any reason at all why I shouldn't.