So, um, those cinnamon rolls…
They didn’t turn out very well. The flavor was fine. (Well, okay, I could have added more butter.) But they didn’t rise. And they were hard. Even with the cream cheese frosting…. it was like biting into a cinna-frisbee. Bleh. Maybe I boasted too much about kicking the dough’s butt?
So. With a bowl of cream cheeese frosting in the fridge, I probably should have made a quick bread or something and used up the leftovers. But no. I needed dessert redemption. I had to make something else, something that was not a bread. Something that had lots of butter and sugar and required little work. Something with the name “Betty” in the title.
Seriously: How cute is the name Apple Brown Betty? Even before the Cinnamon Roll Disaster of 2009, I’ve been wanting to make some. My friend Jesica was entranced, too, so today she came over, we cued up The Pioneer Woman and got to work.
Apple Brown Betty is basically a gooey, buttery, sweet apple casserole, with bread crumbs holding everything together. Pioneer Woman’s recipe called for cubes of wheat bread, but if I make it again, I’d probably use white breadcrumbs. Something about little chunks of wheat bread didn’t sit well with me.
None of that even matters, though, because the best part was the two scoops of love on top: Homemade cinnamon ice cream, y’all. (Insert swoon.) My mom got me the ice-cream-maker attachment for my KitchenAid mixer before I left for Mexico, and I finally unpacked it and put it to use. It was actually amazingly easy: Cook the batter (and ignore the massive amounts of heavy cream); chill it overnight; then pour it into the frozen mixer bowl and watch it churn. Thirty minutes later, done.
And when we stuck our spoons into the ice cream bowl…. man. Oh man. This was creamy, delicate stuff, whispering of cinnamon. Jesica even admitted that she wasn’t even that excited about cinnamon ice cream in the first place, but this stuff — it kind of socked you upside the head, you know? In a good way.
I promise, my dessert spree is over for the next few days. I’m dreaming of mamey ice cream, but I’m going to log 5 hours at the gym before I do it. The gyms re-open tomorrow, yay!