Who doesn’t love a hot, gooey, sticky cinnamon roll?  Who also doesn’t have 24 hours of forethought and planning to make them happen from scratch?  Sorry, Alton, but prepping dough overnight and waking up before the rooster in order to have breakfast feels a little … well, prehistoric, to me.  As a result, I’ve been relatively obsessed with the idea of cinnamon roll muffins for awhile now.  The thought of cramming all that gooey cinnamon goodness into a neat little muffin cup (and cutting out the hours of preparation … and painful waiting!!) was almost too much to handle.

I finally narrowed my search down to two different recipes.  One recipe was invented by Nicole over at Baking Bites and adapted into muffin form by the always delightful Joy the Baker.  This version uses a yeasted dough that only calls for minimal rising time (if I can wait 15 minutes, you can wait 15 minutes).  You just scoop the dough into muffin pans and press the cinnamon sugar filling in with your fingers.  The other recipe doesn’t use a yeasted dough and instead uses a fairly basic muffin dough that can be rolled out, filled with the good stuff, cut into two inch pieces and baked in a muffin pan.

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When it comes to strawberry cake, there are a shocking lack of recipes that are truly made from scratch. Most recipes call for white cake mix, strawberry gelatin packages or mounds of strawberry preserves. Delicious as they may be, I was not willing to give in to the Sandra Lee mentality (though I know there are times when it is an absolute necessity), and I decided to experiment with some truly, from-scratch recipes to see if I could make a strawberry cake that was homemade (and delicious) without resorting to any strange gelatin packages or overly processed preserves.

I saw a suggestion on some web discussion board (probably Chowhound) to use another dense fruit cake recipe and substitute strawberries for the original fruit. With that in mind, I dove head first into a classic Paula Deen recipe for Hummingbird Cake, which is traditionally made with mashed bananas and pineapple. I switched the bananas and the pineapple for pureed strawberries, left out the chopped nuts completely, and substituted lemon zest for the cinnamon. I’m convinced that it would have been an outstanding success on the first try if I hadn’t first suffered through the Great Flour Debacle.

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