Entry 2: Cinnamon/Choco Rolls

A couple photos of the finished product!

Cinnamon Rolls / Choco-Rolls
Homemade Paula Deen Recipe:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/cinnamon-rolls-recipe/index.html

AO:
Cinnamon Rolls: 9
Choco-Rolls: 6
I love this recipe. Everyone loves this recipe. Except my cinnamon hating boyfriend. The finished product rates a 9 on my scale of excellence. The effort it takes to produce finished product rates a 3. The choco version was a learning experience and from that I learned adding cocoa to powdered sugar icing is absolutely amazing. I highly recommend this recipe for anyone who has time and loves cinnamon buns. Don't use as much melted butter as it says you need to for assembly purposes, and add a pinch of cocoa powder to the icing mixture. The actual choco-rolls had too much chocolate for me.

JD:
Choco-Rolls: 7.5
Cinnamon Rolls - NR

I don't do cinnamon. Whether it be in gum form, roll form, or cookie form, I just don't care for the 'spiced' flavor. Subtle notes are fine in a french toast or in a larger recipe. That being said, I took the rolls in a slightly different direction, making the inside out of cocoa powder and regular sugar, then modifying the icing the same way.

7.5 is a pretty good rating for me. The problem with homemade rolls is that if you cook them a second too long, they're hard the next day. It's all to do with the dough recipe, so you can certainly browse for different ones to get the texture you like the best. In this case, when they came out of the oven, the flavor and softness of the dough combined to create a tasty chocolaty treat-- not to sweet, with just a hint of bitterness from the chocolate. I'd probably have been willing to go for an 8 if they would have maintained that spongy-doughy goodness, but this morning, despite being covered up, they're definitely harder. What can you do.

Let's sum this up. Great with chocolate, terrible with cinnamon, best-- as with all homemade goodies-- 10 seconds out of the oven.

Entry 1: Donut

Tim Hortons

Blueberry Bloom Doughnut

$ 0.79

AO:

7.5 because I never eat donuts.

The actual donut parts were really good. The Jelly in the middle was really jelly - not jam. The sprinkles on the outside were more like pop rocks with no fizzle than cupcake sprinkles. As a card holding member of the Frosting Fan Club, I think this had too much stuff on top. Maybe because JD gave me the jelly from the middle of his donut and I spread the excess all over the top. User Error. The shape is fun and just as easy to dunk in a cup of coffee as any other donut even if you are afraid the bits on top are going to fall off and infiltrate your joe. (Actually, the liquid softens them and the bitterness of the coffee cuts the extreme sweetness of the sugary bits.)

JD:

3.7 -and I've eaten quite a few donuts.

The Tim Horton's blueberry bloom had me pretty excited when we noticed it on a large-format advertisement as we were travelling on the expressway. The aesthetics of the donut were arguably the most notable selling point, unique 6 pointed shape, center filled with jelly, curious sprinkles on top-- AO and I decided this was a 'must-taste' morsel. We picked up a half-dozen of these on the high hopes that they would be pretty tastey. Unfortunately, I've got a few major qualms with these that prevent me from ranking them anywhere near the best donut that I've had the opportunity to taste. My first thought as I bit into the donut was that the sprinkles on top were not your standard-faire cupcake or donut sprinkles-- they were a hard crystalline sugar substance that crunched while you chewed. This texture issue was a major detractor. Second, and perhaps equally distracting was the very synthetic flavor of the blueberry. This thing tasted nothing like a blooming blueberry plant... It tasted like someone had just mixed it up in the food-lab.

In retrospect, it's difficult to ascertain many positives from the Blueberry Bloom experience. The actual cake donut portion was soft and the white frosting beneath the gross 'pop-rock' sprinkles were about the only two attributes that made this particular item edible.