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Cinnamon Nut Rolls
Prepare the mixture for Nut Coffee Cake. After it has raised the second time, turn onto a moulding board dredged with flour and cut in halves. Roll one-half without kneading, into an oblong shape about one-third of an inch thick. Brush with Mazola, then with Karo, dust with chopped nut meats, any kind, then with cinnamon. Roll like jelly roll and cut in slices an inch thick. Place cut side down in bread pans oiled with Mazola, allowing the rolls to almost touch. Let rise until double in size and bake from thirty-five to forty minutes in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F. When partly cool, turn out. Boil one cup Karo with one-fourth teaspoon cinnamon and one-eighth teaspoon soda until it threads, and pour over the rolls. Let them stand until cool before serving.
A yeasted sweet roll from a corn-products promotional cookbook, so the fat and the sugar are both brand names. Everything here works with pantry staples once you know what those brands were.
- Mazola and KaroMazola is corn oil, still sold; any neutral vegetable oil does the same job for brushing and greasing the pans. Karo is corn syrup; the recipe does not say which grade, and light corn syrup is the usual assumption, though the darker grade would also work in the filling and glaze.
- The recipe you need firstThis is a variation, not a standalone: you must make the Nut Coffee Cake dough from elsewhere in the book. Any enriched sweet yeast dough, taken to the second-rise stage, substitutes for it.
- Don't knead after the second riseThe instruction to roll "without kneading" is the hinge. Knocking the gas out and reworking the gluten at this point gives you tight, bready rolls; roll gently and the layers stay open and tender.
- Thickness and slicingA third of an inch is thin, which is what gives you multiple visible spirals in a one-inch slice. Use a serrated knife or unwaxed dental floss so the soft log is not squashed.
- Oven350°F is stated, so no guesswork. Thirty-five to forty minutes is right for a full loaf pan of touching rolls; the centre ones should reach about 190°F internally.
- The glaze"Until it threads" means the thread stage, about 230–235°F on a candy thermometer, when syrup dropped from a spoon forms a fine strand. The eighth teaspoon of soda is there to darken and slightly caramelise the corn syrup, not to leaven; it will foam up, so use a saucepan with headroom.
- YieldHalf a batch of dough at these dimensions gives about 9 to 12 rolls, enough for one standard loaf pan. The other half can be shaped as coffee cake or doubled up for a second pan.
This comes from the era of the corporate cookbook, when manufacturers of corn oil and corn syrup published whole volumes of recipes in which their own products stood in for butter and sugar at every turn — hence rolls brushed with oil and syrup. Corn syrup was heavily promoted in the early twentieth century as a cheap, reliable sweetener that resisted crystallising, which is exactly why it behaves so well in the boiled glaze here. The rolled-and-sliced spiral itself is much older than the brands: it is often likened to the German Schnecken that Central European bakers brought to American cities, adapted here to a book selling ingredients rather than tradition, and presented as breakfast fare because sweet yeast rolls with coffee were the standard American morning table of the period.