Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Hawaiian Rolls. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.  The original recipe can be found over at Seeded at the Table.

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was Nance’s choice. It was originally titled (in the email she sent to me), “Crockpot Hawaiian Rolls.” Except – and this is key – when I was looking at the recipe last week, I found that there was NO crock pot involved. In the comments over at Seeded at the Table, someone asked where the crock pot instructions were, and Nikki said she’d never made them in a crock pot, so apparently somewhere, someone added “crock pot” to the title for reasons known only to them. Because I am such a nice person (YES I AM), I alerted Nance to the fact that there was no crock pot involved. Now I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t told her, because I’m sure the swearing would have been EPIC.

I was worried that this recipe was NOT going to work out for me, because no sooner had I gotten all my ingredients lined up on the counter when one of the eggs bellowed “BANZAIIIIII!” and rolled off the counter and smashed on the floor. Cleaning up broken egg with one hand while holding off kittens with the other is NOT my idea of a good time.

So anyway, your ingredients:

Pineapple juice, dry yeast, sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla, salt, flour, and a very old jar of ground ginger.

Why is it, can someone tell me, that recipes often call for “instant yeast”, but there is NOTHING on the shelf that is labeled instant yeast? There’s “active dry” and “rapid rise”, but NO “instant.” (Google tells me that rapid rise IS instant, and when I typed in “Is rapid rise”, it auto-filled in the rest for me. So either recipe posters need to get their shit together, or yeast makers need to add a line of text that says “Yes, dumbass. Rapid rise IS instant!” to the packet.)

That pineapple juice was going to be an ISSUE for me, by the way. I was at the grocery store looking for the damn stuff and ALL I could find was this tiny bottle of pineapple juice that cost almost $7. And I was like “SERIOUSLY?” and then I was like “Oh, I am going to give Nance SOME KIND OF HELL FOR THIS”, but then I saw the big-ass can of pineapple juice for less than $3, and all was well. Crisis averted!

I took no pictures of the first few steps because I am a slacker. Basically beat your sugar and butter together, add the yeast and pineapple juice. Add in 3 eggs, the vanilla, salt, and ginger that is so old it could probably register to vote. Toss in 3 cups of flour and beat ’til smooth, then stir in another 2 1/2 cups of flour to make the dough easy to handle.

Then get out your hook attachment for your mixer and knead that dough! What do you do if you don’t have a hook attachment? Well, I guess you knead that dough by hand. SUCKS TO BE YOU.

While it’s kneading, add up to 1/2 cup of flour if you need to. How do you know if you need to? Well, you want your dough to be tacky, but not sticky. Which is to say that you don’t want your dough to be so sticky that it’s sticking to your hands and making a big-ass mess. I actually ended up adding all the flour, but I was just being an impatient asshole, as I am wont to be.

Kneady dough.

When the dough is done, place it in a large greased bowl and turn the greased side up. I greased my bowl with olive oil – dumped a healthy squirt of it in there, then spread it around with a piece of paper towel. Put the dough in, then turn it over. Voila, greased side up!

Cover the bowl with a (clean!) kitchen towel and put it somewhere warm and draft-free until it’s doubled. I put my bowl in the microwave, because it tends to be warm in there – draft-free, too. Unless someone turns the microwave on (don’t turn the microwave on, dummy.)

An hour and a half later, I had this:

You know it was ready for the next step ’cause I poked it and it didn’t giggle like Poppin’ Fresh. It also stayed indented.

Deflate the dough by punching it down (also known by me as “burping the dough.”) (the dough doesn’t actually burp. But it should!). Then divide it in half and divide each half into 9 equal(ish) pieces.

Close enough to equal sizes, as far as I’m concerned.

Roll each piece of dough into a ball, and then pull the surface tight by tucking the dough in at the bottom of the ball. I am sorry to report that I didn’t take a picture of my tucked-in dough.

Place 9 pieces of dough in a greased 9-inch round cake pan (I greased mine with butter), tucked side down. Repeat with a second cake pan and the other 9 pieces of dough.

Cover the rolls and let rise about an hour or until they’re doubled. Back in the microwave mine went!

Here they were, an hour later:

Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Lightly beat an egg in a small bowl and brush over the rolls. Sprinkle with a pinch or two (I used two) of sugar. Bake!

Inspector Arya, inspectin’.

I didn’t get any pictures of the rolls once I pulled them apart, sorry. I was a real slacker this week, huh? Also, my pan is ugly and stained and I bet that goddamn Nance is going to use some BEAUTIFUL piece of pottery to bake hers in, damn her. Always showing me up! (Granted, it’s not hard to do so.)

The verdict? They were good… BUT. They were kind of dry. I don’t think that’s the recipe’s fault, I think it was my fault. I think I added too much flour, and I cooked them a little too long. I only cooked them for 30 minutes, but I’m pretty sure they could have come out a few minutes earlier.

We both liked them, but Fred LOVED them and even said that I should make them for Thanksgiving. We put the second pan of rolls in the freezer to eat in the future (probably with Sunday dinner!) I also froze the leftover pineapple juice in freezer-safe ziploc bags, 1 1/4 cups in each bag. I got enough to make the rolls three more times!

Also, I don’t know enough about the King’s Hawaiian rolls you can buy at the grocery store (I think I’ve only had them twice), but I think that the ones from the store are lighter and sweeter than these turned out to be (though if I hadn’t added as much flour, they may not have turned out as dense as they did!), so keep that in mind.

PS: Fred reports that the rolls are particularly good when eaten with Muscadine (grape) jelly.

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Nance’s Take:

This recipe was supposed to be for dinner rolls that were made in a crockpot. And then I got an email from Robyn telling me that my happy ass is making Hawaiian Rolls and there is no crockpot involved.  WTF?

What do you think happened?  Personally, I think Robyn changed the link because she was craving something with Polynesian flair this time. Please recall: The multitude of Asian inspired recipes on this site. Ahem.

I also think she didn’t want to go with the crockpot recipe because she’s worried about Amanda’s approval.  Trust me, this recipe should get the Amanda C. (see you next tuesday!) Recipe Award for sure.  So much time involved.  Way too much time involved. Right up Amanda C.’s alley.

Peace heard there was cooking going on in the kitchen and she is all about the food. During our vet visits we have met two beagles and they were both overweight. At the time I would have loved to see Peace weigh as much as they did. Now? I’m starting to worry that she’ll eat herself into morbid obesity quicker than shit. I had to say no.

She does not appreciate that word.  At all.

Hey, I bet you’ve never seen butter mixed with sugar on this site before, huh? It happens.

The fat chick inside my head (and on my ass) is screaming at this nonsense. Why would anybody want to destroy the beauty that is creamed butter and sugar with something like fruit juice? You might as well pour in a V-8, for chrissakes!

Around here we buy our yeast in bulk. I use it to make dough for grilling pizzas and this family loves grilled pizza. We’re fancy that way. If you’re nice, maybe we’ll invite you out for one of our hootenannies. There are corn-hole games and shit-talking involved.  Be jealous.

I had my doubts about this one. Juice + butter = gross.

The recipe said, “Blahblahblah, whateverthefuck” so I figured this was about the right time to shut that shit down in order to switch to a dough hook and add more flour. I don’t know. I pretty much picked this time based on how loud the mixer was and when it started to get on my nerves.

Just passing through and looking for a hand-out. See also: Sad, disappointed, verklempt.

This is when I had enough of making this freaking bread. I went through a phase when I first got this mixer where I was making a shit-ton of bread for our family. The result? Really good bread, we all gained a lot of weight, and it turned out to be cheaper to just buy regular bread from the grocery store. Now I get pissed off at anything that has to do with waiting on bread to rise, etc. I know it’s hard to believe that I don’t have patience for this kind of stuff.  Especially when that’s pretty much what I’m known for.

This is what it looked like when I knew it was ready.

It said something about your finger leaving an indentation. Yes, I stabbed that bitch.

I was ready to rock and roll. But then I saw something that made my brain seize right the fuck up.

This is one of my biggest PET PEEVES IN THE WORLD. Someone was frying potatoes the other day and I don’t want to name names, but they damn well better cut the shit.  You know that patience I bull-shitted about up above?  Yeah, RIGHT.  I have a zero tolerance policy in effect when it comes to stupid shit like this.  Just ask my kids how I deal with peanut butter that ends up in jelly.

And please tell me that you guys have assholes at home that do these kinds of things, too.  I don’t want to be the only one.

When it came down to halving that shit and then making 9 different sections and OHMYGAWD, it’s ROLLS, NOT SURGERY! I hacked through it the best that I could with a pizza cutter and called it done.

I will not be shocked to find out that Robyn’s are all perfectly shaped. I hate her.

I consider these to be raised high enough and ready to bake.

Oh, pretty! But I have to admit that my brain could not wrap itself around pineapple and ginger being inside a roll that has been egged and sprinkled with sugar.

Something went wrong here. I think I might have done too much of the egg wash and it dripped down and baked the buns right to the pan.

As soon as they cooled, I threw them in a ziploc bag. The ones that I let sit out longer got hard as hell and had to be pitched. Here’s the thing. They’re not bad. I can’t taste pineapple and I can’t taste ginger. I can taste a sweet roll and I’m thinking that I might just try this recipe again, but with some cinnamon and brown sugar rolled up in it. Just a thought.

I let this one wear me down and I gave her a bun. An entire bun. She paid me back by shitting in my kitchen. Not once, not twice, but three times. I’ll keep the recipe, but I won’t be fooled by this little knucklehead again.  Thank God I woke up in the early, early AM or Shirley would have stepped out of her bedroom into a steaming pile of poo. That would have ended badly for all of us.