Parker House Rolls

You know how when you take Pillsbury biscuits or crescent rolls right out of the oven they're all warm and flaky and buttered with deliciousness? Well as much fun as busting those tubes open is (seriously, am I the only one who finds it fascinating that you have to like slam the tube on the counter to break the pressure?), I thought the only thing better would be home made baked flaky buttery deliciousness. My dad would make bread in a bread maker and I love playing with dough so thought making rolls would be awesome.

Squishy dough

 To justify making bread, I thought "oh, I'll freeze half of them and they're rolls so I can make pulled pork sandwiches next time I make pulled pork" etc. etc. I followed the directions, including the part where it says to let the yeast foam and to throw it out if it doesn't foam. Well, you know what they say "watched yeast never foams" (or they do now!). So while waiting for the yeast to prove it's aliiiiive, I mixed the other ingredients. Note to self: next time, make sure the yeast is alive before mixing other stuff. Yeast packet 1: doesn't seem to be alive so I throw it away and we go with yeast packet number 2: to prevent myself from watching it, I did the dishes, I cleaned the kitchen and voila! Foam! Which was good because I only had one more packet to test.

That looks foamy, right?

After mixing things together, I got to play with dough, hurray! It really is quite fun. And so I let the ball of dough 'rise' or at least I left it alone so it could rise. It did not appear to double in size as it was meant to. Nevertheless, the show must go on so I soldiered on and divided the dough into lovely roll shapes and left it alone to double yet again. Alas, it again did not appear to double in size. Obviously the foaming yeast was a false promise.

Kneading-- not just for kitties

And still, the show goes on! Maybe the bamf oven will work some magic and make the rolls rise into buttery deliciousness. This was sadly not the case, they did not rise. But they did taste buttery and delicious so kind of like biscuits but not even close to Pillsbury biscuits. With a little butter, some microwave action or nutella, they still taste satisfactory.

Mmmm that doesn't look larger

But these biscuity-like creatures will not suffice for pulled pork sandwiches. Plus, I now have a giant bag of bread flour because after careful googling I discovered you can't really circumvent the need for bread flour like you can for self-rising flour because it's about gluten content. I guess that means I'll have to try to make more bread or bread-like things to use that bag (baked good ingredients should not go to waste).

They hath not risen. But I did test a couple...

I live to bake bread another day.