Grammy Rolls
These warm rolls have made Jenni Ridall's Christmas mornings forever memorable.
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When Jenni Ridall was a girl, the main event on December 25 wasn't the traditional midday meal, when they'd serve roast beef or pork. It was breakfast. She and her family would wake up to the sweet aroma of Grammy Rolls that had been rising while they slept. "My mom kept the original recipe for these rolls, which came from her grandmother, on an index card," she recalls. "They go back a long way in our family. It was always a tradition to prepare them on Christmas Eve to bake the next morning." When she was 10 or 11, her mother was busy raising three kids and stopped making them. "The recipe card was lost, and the rolls disappeared," says Ridall.
Years later, when she was in culinary school, Ridall and her mom tried to track it down. She asked some of her professors for guidance and attempted to re-create the rolls from memory countless times, with renewed determination. The recipe is essentially monkey bread, with balls of dough covered in cinnamon sugar. "I remember dipping the dough in melted butter and sugar. It was gooey, sticky, and fun, and it had the most wonderful cinnamon smell," she says. "My mom sent me her grandmother's thin aluminum tube pan, and I finally nailed it. I called Mom and said, 'We did it!'"
Prepared the night before and then baked first thing the next day, Ridall's cherished family recipe fills the house with cinnamon-scented cheer. These Grammy Rolls will be the sweetest start to your Christmas morning.