Making or BreakingTraditions and Conference Rolls

Do you have traditions?  Of course, we all have some special activities we do for holidays like Christmas or Thanksgiving, but do you have unique little twists to every day living?

My mom used to do a funny little thing when we had a guest spend the night.  We'd put our shoes outside of the bedroom door and in the morning we found little gifts in our shoes put there by 'little elves'.  Or, my girls and I sometimes do April Fools pranks, small or big, that still surprise everyone, because we tend to forget that day is actually coming up.

One other tradition we have in our house is watching General Conference twice a year.  Our local church is cancelled, however we watch church on tv broadcast from Salt Lake City (wait for it) for 8 hours over the weekend!  It's a church marathon.  There's an optional 2 more hours to watch for the men.  It's something we look forward to and anticipate every six months.  My kids anticipate Conference Rolls also.  These rolls are basically a trumped up monkey bread recipe.  I've probably made these rolls for around 20 years. Thus a hard fast tradition!  

But, today, oh Today, I broke with tradition.  Sometimes you know when to quit a tradition, or change it a bit.  With only 2 kids at home we don't need a huge batch of Conference Rolls anymore, plus they take some fore-thought.  Not that Conference Rolls are hard to make- it's basically a dump recipe, but you do it the night before (on occasion this tired mom would forget and have to wake up in the wee hours to try and pull something together so as not to hear groaning in the morning). So- angels singing- I found this recipe.  It's basically cinnamon rolls in a cake pan that takes 5 min. to swirl together and 30 min. in the oven.  

 Cinnamon Roll Cake
adapted from  Life as a Lofthouse 


Cake:
3 c. flour
1/4 tsp.salt
1 c. sugar
4 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 c. sour cream or plain yogurt or milk
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 c. butter flavored shortening, melted or real butter

Topping:
1 c. real no salt butter, softened
1 c. brown sugar
2 Tbsp. flour
1 Tbsp. cinnamon

Mix everything together except for the butter. Slowly stir in the melted butter and pour into a greased 9x13 pan. For the topping, mix all the ingredients together until well combined. Drop evenly over the batter and swirl with a knife. Bake at 350 for 28-32 minutes.

Glaze:
2 c. powdered sugar
5 Tbsp. milk
1 tsp. vanilla

While warm drizzle the glaze over the cake

A new tradition is born!