Cinnamon Roll?

Anyone who has tried to bake anything gluten free will know that the result is often not what you expected. This might explain why so few gluten free cookbooks have pictures - they want you to think that your going to get what is described in the recipe, but they themselves haven't achieved photo-worthy results though they're not about to tell you that.

And then there are people who actually do get good results, and they take pictures of amazing looking gluten free cinnamon rolls and then when I try to copy them I get an entirely different result. Okay, not entirely, but probably the only thing my cinnamon rolls had in common with these ones was the ingredients. How I could fail while following step by step instructions is beyond me.

A friend sent me the above link, and being the cinnamon roll lover that I am, and sadly deprived of said delicacy since my gluten-intolerance diagnosis, I decided to get over my fear of baking, my fear of gluten free baking, and my fear of yeast all in one blow and master this recipe. Well, everything went hunky-dory until I reached the step where I was supposed to cut the roll into slices and place in the baking pan. At this point it turned into a big, goopy blob of dough, sugar, cinnamon, and raisins.

I'll just ditch the individual roll idea, I thought, and just bake one big one and cut it in slices later. Pretty brilliant, I thought. So I placed my Cinnamon Roll on the baking sheet, covered it with a cloth (like the instructions said) and let it rise. I didn't stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the weight of the cloth might be too much for the gf dough, so when I went to check on my Roll, I wasn't expecting the result: it expanded all right, but in the wrong direction.

So, what came out of the oven was this:



I'm not the queen of improvisation, but the occasional burst of inspiration hit me, and I decided to make a brown sugar glaze and cut it in strips, and suddenly it looked like some kind of danish. And it was delicious.