The Saga of the Cinnamon Rolls

My people (the Mariqueños – from a city called Marikina, which happens to be my beloved hometown) are notorious for their sweet tooth. We love and require desserts, add raisins to everything (done by Boomers and older, tolerated by GenX, revolted against by Millennials and younger), and we season with brown sugar.

But an article I recently read claims that our infamous sweet tooth seems to be a general Filipino trait. It accuses us Pinoys of sweetening everything, even dishes that have no business being even a little bit sweet.

I don’t know about other Filipinos, but many have remarked on the sweet menudo, sweet adobo, etc. that they’ve eaten at our Marikina fiestas, so that generalization may not be accurate.

Or it’s possible that it’s simply a matter of degrees. I remember one of the BTS members being leery about eating something foreign that’s rumored to be extra pungent. He said he didn’t like spicy food, but the other members assured him that he could probably take it because he was Korean and had a higher tolerance for spice. (Yes, I’ll find any excuse to insert BTS in a discussion.😂) So, the point is that maybe all Filipinos boast a sweet tooth and Mariqueños are just hardcore.

Anyway, Mariqueña that I am, I welcome the topic of sweets. I haven’t really been scientific in picking what my favorite is, but I’ve answered cinnamon rolls several times when asked that question. Assuming that the choice was made by my gut, I’ve decided that’s probably the case and made it official.

I do love cinnamon rolls with ardor and the violence brought on by a low glucose level, but I felt that I had not sat or slept on the matter enough to pronounce with certainty that it’s my favorite. But since that has been my press release multiple times now, it’s not a problem to just (cinnamon) roll with it. (Here’s an 🙄, heehee)

Not many places here carry a legitimate cinnamon roll. I love Cinnabon, but it’s not always easily accessible. I think the closest store is at least a city or two away (and I just checked Grab; all ten of the nearest branches are out of delivery area😑). That’s why I’ve learned to make my own. It’s not the exact recipe of course. I don’t make mine with yeast, for one. But it gives me the cinnamon sugar hit my blood craves, plus cream cheese frosting and chocolate syrup.

The problem now (because life is just a continuing story, there must always be conflict – along with goal and motivation – for it to have substance 🙄) is that I’m trying to cut out a bunch of fun stuff like sugar, gluten, and processed ingredients from our diet.

I guess cinnamon rolls must really be my favorite because my mind immediately went to them when I tried that diet statement on for size. Full of the excitement of a fresh start, I bravely averred that I would simply make a similar sweet with coconut flour and honey.

At first google, I found a recipe for cinnamon buns with a 4.8 rating that looked promising. I tried it out and… it was decent, but no cinnamon rolls. They tasted like mildly sweet cinnamon macaroons. My sweet tooth howled with dissatisfaction. It doesn’t do mild. The sweetness has to be in its face. My kids ate them though. I guess they’re really okay if you’re not expecting cinnamon rolls.

Was this what gluten-free, sugar-free life was gonna be like? It was pretty depressing so I baked a blackberry cobbler with all-purpose flour and white sugar right after. It helped balance the universe somehow.

With my craving for cinnamon roll frustrated, I endeavored a couple of days later to make another batch with regular ingredients. It just so happened that I saw something on Instagram that made me crave apple pie. I wasn’t about to bake cinnamon rolls and then pie, so I did a hybrid and baked apple cinnamon rolls.

I was still frustrated, however, even if I had dolloped cream cheese frosting and everything. Somehow, the things simply weren’t as scrumptious as before.

That’s when I remembered the other substitute I’d recently been using. Instead of margarine, I was now baking with unsalted real butter. I thought the issue with margarine was trans fat, but that margarine said it had zero trans fat, so I was okay with using it. And then I saw this reel where they were saying that margarine was just a molecule way from plastic, and that studies have suggested that it causes some of this modern world’s many grave ills. I took it as gospel and stopped buying margarine.

Ha! Such a dismal realization.😞

We really need to be healthier. I want to see how my kids will fare without all these controversial ingredients. I think it’s against my code to give up sweets though (I don’t want my hometown to disown me!), so I guess we’ll just have to find safer substitutes and get used to the wholesome taste.

What about you? What’s your favorite dessert or sweet?

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