Quick(er) Amish Dinner or Sweet Rolls – A two-fer
Quick(er) Amish Dinner or Sweet Rolls – A two-fer
Amish cook Lovina Eicher, whose syndicated newspaper column Lovina’s Amish Kitchen we distribute from MennoMedia, had a recipe that tipped me off to a bagged “raised donut mix.” It is available in many bulk food stores, very handy to have around, and keeps well in the refrigerator.
She used the baking mix “straight” for what she called Rise and Roll Bars, which you can find here. I made those with excitement wondering if I had found a shortcut to the famous “Amish Crack” Rise N Roll Doughnuts I wrote about here, but the texture of the buns was more like a tray of prepared, purchased rolls out of a grocery’s prepackaged section. They were okay and very sweet and tasty, but for me, not to die for.
Since then, I have adapted the roll mix to make both plain dinner rolls and also cinnamon rolls. Typically I make little sweet rolls almost every Sunday morning using canned biscuit dough, recipe here. You can see I’m not adverse to shortcuts in the kitchen.
But there’s something special and delicious about real bread dough rolled into cinnamon/brown sugar/butter-slathered goodness that beats my biscuit-made sweet rolls. I also added a portion of whole wheat flour for a little more fiber and nutrition. Now these, I’m excited about! This is pretty much my own concocted recipe. If you try them, let me know if they turn out or whether the recipe needs tweaking. These are small quantity recipes.
Dinner rolls
2 cups “raised donut mix” (check your favorite bulk foods store)
1 package fast rising yeast
1/3 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup white flour (and up to 1/3 cup extra flour for kneading and rolling out)
1 egg
½ cup warm water
Mix yeast in ½ cup warm water. Let sit for 5 minutes until the yeast action begins. Put flours and raised donut mix into large bowl. Add slightly beaten egg. Add water and yeast mixture. Stir together well. (I don’t use a mixer for this quick dough). The dough should form into a soft clump of dough, almost sticky. Add up to an additional ¼ to 1/3 cup flour to keep dough from sticking. Knead slightly on flour covered board or counter.
Place dough in greased bowl for rising. Cover with clean cloth and set in warm place to rise until double in bulk, about 45 minutes – 1 hour. Punch down and form dough into round shapes, about the size of an egg. Place close together in greased baking pan, so sides of rolls will touch after rising. (This makes rolls with softer sides.)
Let rise again, for about 30 minutes or until double in bulk. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or less. Watch that they don’t get too brown.
Makes about 16 dinner rolls.
Sweet rolls (mixing the dough part is exactly the same as the above recipe.)
2 cups “raised donut mix” (check your favorite bulk foods store)
1 package yeast
1/3 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup white flour
1 egg
½ cup hot water
Mix yeast in ½ cup warm water. Let sit for 5 minutes until the yeast action begins. Put flours and raised donut mix into large bowl. Add slightly beaten egg. Add water and yeast mixture. Stir together well. (I don’t use a mixer for this quick dough). The dough should form into a soft clump of dough, almost sticky. Add up to an additional ¼ to 1/3 cup flour to keep dough from sticking. Knead slightly on flour covered board or counter.
Place dough in greased bowl for rising. Cover with clean cloth and set in warm place to rise until double in bulk, about 45 minutes – 1 hour. Punch down and roll out with flour covered rolling pin to make oblong piece of dough about ½ inch thick. (Can also be spread out just using hands/fingers.)
Topping for dough
¼ cup melted butter
¾ cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Melt butter. Spread over dough. Sprinkle dough with brown sugar. Sprinkle brown sugar and butter topping with cinnamon. On long side of oblong dough, begin rolling up dough. When it is formed into a long tube, pinch dough together. Slice off rolled up dough into 1 inch slices. Place each roll on its side (so you see the spiral of brown sugar/cinnamon) in greased pie pan or baking dish.
Let rise again, for about 30 minutes or until double in bulk.
Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or less. Watch that they don’t get too brown. Remove from oven. Can put on serving dish or frost (see below) right in the pan. Makes about 16 sweet rolls.
Frosting
1 1/4 c. powdered sugar
2 tsp. milk or half & half
¼ cup melted butter
Stir powdered sugar, milk, butter together. Should be slightly runny. Add more powdered sugar or milk til you get a consistency you like. Drizzle over warm sweet rolls.
Approx. total time from beginning to serving for either recipe: two hours.
Maybe these are some ideas for a special treat this Father’s Day weekend!
What’s your favorite Sunday morning breakfast or brunch? Recipes? Or is Saturday morning when you take time for treats and a more leisurely breakfast? Who cooks?
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More lovely bread recipes can be found in my book, Whatever Happened to Dinner?
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Like my coffee set? This Vietnamese-made pattern came as a gift from Artisan’s Hope, a fair trade store in Harrisonburg.
findingharmonyblog 
Given your work load it boggles the mind that you can find time to blog and bake too. Maybe you are like author Louise DeSalvo who maintains that cooking/baking makes possible her writing.
My husband’s early rising hours make possible my extracurricular writing. 🙂 And as I got further into blogging, I felt like people are looking for something of value–a reason to keep coming back. I am enjoying having a reason to cook and bake things beyond the rather boring meals I cook for my husband and myself.
You are such a loyal blog friend–and don’t feel like you have to comment on all my recipe blogs! But I appreciate each and every view and comment! Have a lovely weekend. And now I’ll check out Louise DeSalvo!
Crazy in the Kitchen is a book I read recently that describes her dramatic tales of an Italian-American upbringing. She’s a wonderful story-teller – and chef (well, cook at least.)
Just a somewhat related question here as you mentioned the Lovina column. I tried to read it but I could not find an archive, nor a way to subscribe to the column. It was difficult to follow as had to keep paging back to find the beginning of a section of letters and then paging down to the oldest and reading upwards. Is this how it is supposed to be? An archive would be nice, as all other blogs seem to have.
Athanasia, you are so right!! I will look into it–I can’t believe no one has ever complained before about not having a subscribe button, and sometimes our powers that be don’t “listen” until we get a comment or complaint from a user. 🙂 Thanks for pushing us to it! I’ll let you know what transpires. Bless you!
Saturday is our day for a bigger breakfast, cooked by husband and children. Today we had buckwheat pancakes with blueberries. We had the last of the sausage we picked up 1 1/2 years ago at a relatives in Iowa. They raise pigs. We’re using up the last of our blueberries from previous summer. The maple syrup comes from one of my husband’s sibling’s maple syrup production. He goes up and helps for days at a time when they are in full swing. We get a gallon of syrup in return. We order blueberries from Michigan as they do not grow well here. I am making a blueberry pie later. I mixed up 10 crusts last night.
Today is errand day so we don’t really have an organized lunch. Organized is a word my youngest came up with when the older ones were starting Jr and Sr high and they seemed to be late and missing more dinners due to school activities. The youngest is always the table setter and she wanted to set the table proper, no more no less. Sometimes on Saturdays we drive to auctions or estate sales. My husband looks for anything he could use in his woodworking business; I look for fabric, sewing supplies, green depression glass, books. We didn’t see of one today that looked interesting, though there is a moving sale we might check out.
Sunday we traditionally have coffee cake and hard boiled eggs. We mix up the dry ingredients Saturday night for the coffeecake, like the cake portion, struesel topping if needed (I make multiple batches of struesel topping and keep them in the freezer) and add in the wet ingredients Sunday am. Sometimes I do a yeast raised coffeecake or rolls and let them rise in the refrigerator overnight then bake Sunday am.
I am slow in the mornings, every morning, so whether it is the weekday or the weekend, I am not the breakfast maker. I may have made the food, like the bread, rolls, pancake mix, baked oatmeal, jams and jellies, granola, granola bars, whatever, the evening before but everyone else gets the morning preparation done for me.
I do like your coffee set. I like blue and white dishes. I have the set of blue and white Currier and Ives dishes, that my mother started back in the 60’s buying a piece at a time at the grocer.
She had all the basics minus what had broken over the years. Then in about 1987 we were at an estate sale and they had a setting for 8, complete with every piece including a sugar bowl with cover (we had broken the cover long ago) and platters and serving dishes and we bought it all. Now we have service for 16 and it looks very nice against a white tablecloth.
Thanks Athanasia for all the snippets from your life and confession that you are “slow” in the mornings. How wonderful to have a family that kicks in and gets breakfast on the table after your prep from the night before. And I love that you were able to complete and fill in the missing Currier and Ives dishes. How very special! I have one dinner plate from that collection–but I wasn’t aware it was grocery store stuff. My “china” was grocery store stuff until 2008 after we moved to our new home and we finally had a dining room. Finally, I would love your “homegrown” breakfast and knowing where my syrup, my berries and my sausage all came from. Nice. Hope you had a great weekend.