Bread Making Day

 Today was my day to bake bread and cinnamon rolls. Bob has a medical procedure in a few days and he has to eat a low fiber diet for next few days. Anyhow, I didn't feel like going to the store for white bread, so I decided to just make him some. Since I had enough time leftover and I found the optimal place to let dough rise, I decided that I would make cinnamon rolls for the first time ever. He can eat those, too. They are basically white bread and he's allowed to have sugar and spices.
Anyhow, I started with the white bread recipe. 

The bread starts out with proofing the yeast. I always do this. If you use instant yeast, I think you can skip this step. I don't use instant yeast, however.

Whenever I work with yeast dough, I let my KitchenAid stand mixer do the work for me. 

I don't even have to knead it! I'm all about work smarter, not harder. 

There was a lot of humidity in the air today, so this took quite a bit more flour than the recipe called for. 

The dough gets covered with a clean towel and I set it up on top of my Keurig coffee maker. It's pretty warm and it did the trick nicely.

I put it into a loaf pan. I wanted a more square shaped loaf, so I flattened it out a bit. 

It may not be a thing of beauty, but it turned out exactly as I wanted it to. This will slice up nicely.

After a quick round of washing dishes, and having Bob dry them, I decided that I had time to make cinnamon rolls, too. 

These were a bit messy to make, but I was able to contain it all on my cutting board for the most part. 

I fit 10 into a 9-inch pie plate. There were another 4 that went into another pan. 

They baked up really nicely. I impressed myself!

Of course, I had to gloop them up with cream cheese icing! That's a given!

So, on a day when the skies looked like this...

and Ravioli was playing with Lily-Pill, like this...

It was a good day to just bake bread.

Click here for the bread recipe.
Click here for the cinnamon roll recipe.

Bread recipe is from Sally's Baking Addiction.
Cinnamon roll recipe is from Ambitious Kitchen.
Both recipes are keepers in my book.