butter

At one point or another, most of my family has had some sort of dietary restriction. My sister was vegan for a while, my mother is mostly vegan currently and I don't eat meat and can't process most dairy. However, everyone forgets they have dietary restrictions at Christmas when my mom makes cinnamon rolls.

Before I started working in kitchens, I always thought cinnamon rolls were a lot harder than they actually are, which defintely stems from watching my mom make these every year. My child brain had a laundry list of questions while watching her start the process (What is that machine? Why is it so loud? How on earth does all the filling get in there? Why does it take so long? If it takes so long, it must be really hard, why is it so hard?). Later on, as I grew older and wiser, I had more questions, such as why my mom made her cinnamon rolls in a bread machine (please do yourself a favour and google bread machines from the nineties; as a person who has only ever made bread by hand, it is a wild ride, or maybe it's just me) and how on earth you were supposed to roll dough over filling to get it into a circle for later without getting it all over your hands.

My mom spends most of Christmas Eve getting the dough together and gets up early Christmas morning (if you ever read Series of Unfortunate Events, early here means " probably 7am", which my siblings and I always thought was Very Early every other day of the year) to put them in the oven so they were ready for breakfast between 9-9:30am. I remember watching with awe as she flipped them onto the large blue serving plate we still use (it has been dubbed the cinnamon roll plate, it gets used for nothing else year round) so the glaze side was up and the raisins that had all sunk to the bottom resurfaced. To this day, it is sort of weird to me that not everyone puts raisins in their cinnamon rolls.

I don't remember the first time I ever ate them but every year, my tastebuds anticipate exactly what it will taste like and I can only attempt at dignifying how they taste, how the warm richness of the butter envelops your mouth upon first contact, the way your teeth catch on the softness of the dough and encounter a raisin or two, the way there's never a clean way to eat them, the yearly fight for the ones in the middle and how, even though we know there's no way these are in any way healthy, there's never enough of them.

This communion of cinnamon rolls is special to me for so many reasons, and not just the obvious one of only getting them once a year. Our family has changed a lot over the years. My brother transitioned to a halfway house in Arizona to battle his addictions and mental health issues, and is unable to make it to Christmas breakfast most years. My sister got married and her husband joins us Christmas morning now. My partner always requests two cinnamon rolls set aside since he attends Christmas Day breakfast with his family. We changed the recipe to make it dairy free once. My mom tried making it without the bread machine she usually uses. My sister rolled and shaped the dough one year. We are always laughing when we eat them together, that has never changed.

Recipes and traditions like this one remind me time and time again of the importance of food in our homes, not just on holidays, not just when we can eat together or on holidays, but every day, and how lucky we are to enjoy something so rich as time, and egregious amounts of butter, shared together.