Cinnamon Log

A cross between a loaf of bread and a cinnamon roll, this breakfast item is sweet without being sugary, thick without being dense, and the perfect accompaniment to a Sunday morning....

The key part of a cinnamon log is using yeast.

For those who haven't used it before, it can be tricky to get your bread to rise while using it. To activate the yeast, you need to add it to warm water, before adding it to you bread mixture.

For this recipe, I boiled butter, sugar, milk and salt, and added that to the yeast to create the liquid part of the bread mix. The heat from the initial yeast and water, followed by the butter mixture, causes the yeast to react the way we want it to!

After that, I mixed both whole wheat and white flour, and an egg to the liquid mixture. I also added golden raisins, which will compliment the cinnamon that will be added to the bread later. Then, its time to knead the dough! Kneading helps create the structure of the bread, and turns a lumpy mix like this.....

into this.....

Then its time to let the dough rise. This is where the yeast comes in, creating a reaction within the dough to make the dough double in size. Since yeast reacts to heat, letting the dough rise in a warm place, like a low-temperature oven, helps the reaction take place. I set my oven to 150 degrees, and let the dough rise in a covered, greased bowl for an hour.

Now its time to turn normal bread dough into a cinnamon log!

After rolling out the dough into a large rectangle, I sprinkled a mixture of white and brown sugar, with loads of cinnamon all over the dough.

Then, I rolled it up, starting at the narrow end, to create the log shape.

Now if you wanted to make this recipe more like a traditional bread, you could let it rise for another hour, letting it double once more in size. I wanted mine to be a bit denser than that, so I went right ahead and baked the cinnamon log in a 350 degree oven for about a half an hour.

When its done, just slice the cinnamon loaf into pieces, and try not to eat them all in one sitting :)