arw, help!
I made these
cinnamon rolls again on the weekend. It was my 3rd or 4th time. I keep getting requests for them. This time for the first time, I made a full batch instead of a half batch, because I was going to give most of them away.
When I took them out of the oven, I could see that they didn't look the same as the previous times I'd made them. The brown sugar/cinnamon/butter filling didn't get all nice and liquidy and gooey, and there wasn't hardly any leakage in the bottom of the pan, which nicely coats the bottoms of them, and allows me to spoon it out and add to the top of the rolls. After trying one, I could see what the problem was - rather than go gooey, it's like the brown sugar in them didn't really melt, it stayed granulated, sort of having the texture of wet sand.
I decided to try to "rescue" them by heating some margarine, brown sugar and cinnamon in a non-stick pan, hoping it would get to the consistency that I wanted it to. It never did, the sugar stayed granulated, and the wet sand thing happened again.
I've looked online to see what could have gone wrong, but couldn't find anything. I don't expect everything I make to turn out perfectly every time, but I at least like to know where I went wrong so I can avoid it in the future.
The only thing I can see maybe happening is this - the first few times I made them, I had both brown sugar and golden yellow sugar in my cupboard. To me, these are practically interchangeable when a recipe calls for brown sugar, one's just a bit darker than the other, and I've never had a problem with substituting one for the other. I double checked what I used in the bad batch, and it was the yellow sugar. I was completely out of the brown sugar, so I'm thinking that maybe I used that up the other times I made it?
I've googled like crazy to see if I could find an answer to whether or not using the lighter yellow sugar could have been the problem, but all I've found is a description of the various kinds of sugars out there, and I know that brown sugar has a higher molasses content than yellow sugar. Could that be the problem, that it's the higher molasses content that makes it go gooey and delicious when it's heated, which the yellow sugar was lacking?
And would anyone like 10 crappy cinnamon rolls?