The Best Sweet Dough Recipe! Homemade Cinnamon Rolls! - The Appalachian Way

Come on in and pull up a chair. Today I'm making cinnamon rolls with my sweet dough, and there's one little old mountain trick in here my mama used that most folks pour straight down the sink. This is the softest, most forgiving sweet dough I know, and in this video I'll walk you through it start to finish from our kitchen up on Cane Branch in western North Carolina. You'll see how to wake up the yeast the old way, why I don't use all milk for the liquid, what four fresh egg yolks from our hens do for the texture, and exactly what the dough should feel like under your fingers so you never second-guess it again. From there we roll it out, butter it to the edges, pile on the brown sugar and cinnamon, and I'll show you the sewing thread trick for cutting clean rolls without squashing them, plus the cook's roll that nobody gets but me. We talk fillings, from apple butter and sorghum to peaches and pecans, the plain old-fashioned powdered sugar icing I make with cream from our neighbor's Jersey cow, how to pre-bake rolls the night before so they're hot on the table come morning, and everything else you can make with this one dough, from raisin bread to a braided Christmas loaf. There's a story from the church kitchen's Wednesday night suppers, a grandson who's about to walk through the door, and a black bear that got into our apple tree and gave Hollis a fright. Old-time baking, homemade bread, from-scratch cooking and a little mountain life thrown in. By the end you'll know why my mama never threw out that jar, and you'll never be afraid of homemade bread again. Tell me what you put in your cinnamon rolls, because Kaylee reads every one.