the fridge,” she said. “I’ll measure the brown sugar.”
He found a stick of butter and cut it at the five tablespoon mark. Then he put it in a bowl, covered it with a paper towel, and popped it in the microwave, as though he’d been doing this his whole life.
Babette stared at him. “You cook?”
“I can melt butter.”
She grinned, watched him grab a dish towel and use it to remove the heated bowl from the microwave.
“Where’s the pan?”
Babette pulled the pan that Rose and Hannah had told her worked best for cinnamon rolls out of the cabinet and placed it in front of him, then he poured the butter in. She followed suit, sprinkling brown sugar on top of the butter.
“What’s next?” she asked, because he was hogging the cookbook. He really seemed to be enjoying this.
“With a rolling pin, roll dough into an eight by fourteen inch rectangle.” He looked at her skeptically. “Do you even have a rolling pin?”
Babette opened a drawer near her hip and withdrew the wooden rolling pin that Rose had found earlier in the week. “I learned how to make them already, remember? I just don’t know the recipe by heart.”
“Right,” he said, and gave her the crooked little grin that told her what he was thinking—that she was cute, and that he wanted to have “more” with her.
Worked for Babette.
She poured a little flour on the counter, spread it out with her palm, then ran her floured palm up and down the rolling pin the way Hannah had shown her. “Okay, put the dough there.” She nodded toward the floured counter.
“In the middle of it?” he asked, lifting the cookie sheet with the dough on it.
“Yeah.”
He tilted the sheet and the big mound of dough plopped in the middle of the flour. Babette surveyed it; it seemed bigger than it had the other day when she made the cinnamon rolls with Rose and Hannah, but maybe she hadn’t been paying attention that closely. Or maybe they had halved the recipe so they wouldn’t make too many. Hannah had measured everything, so Babette wasn’t sure whether they’d used the same measurements that she’d used on this batch. That could have happened. In any case, there was more dough here than Babette expected, so she sprinkled more flour on the counter and then picked up the rolling pin and began trying to convert a big, bubbly glob of bread dough into a neat rectangle.
After several minutes filled with a lot of grunting and huffing and puffing—it was harder than it looked when Hannah did it—she had a rectangle. It wasn’t a neat rectangle, but it was a rectangle nonetheless. One side looked a little thicker than the other, but she couldn’t seem to tame it, so she let it be. She’d always liked fat cinnamon rolls anyway; these would just be a little fatter on one side.
Jeff had stayed with her through the rolling, and had even sprinkled additional flour on the pin whenever the dough started to stick.
“Got the rectangle,” she said. “Now we have to mix up the filling. I can’t remember what all goes in it.”
He looked back to the book. “A tablespoon of melted butter, a tablespoon of sugar, one and a half teaspoons of ground cinnamon and a tablespoon of brown sugar.” He paused. “You mix it in a bowl, then put it on top of the dough. Want me to do that part, since your hands are floured?”
“Sure,” she said, then watched admiringly as he melted more butter, then found the remaining ingredients, measured them precisely, and mixed it all up. Next thing she knew, Jeff was spooning the mixture over the top of the dough.
When the dough was covered and his bowl was empty, he looked at her and winked. “Every kind of cinnamon roll I’ve ever had was a round swirly thing. This looks kind of flat.”
“Smartass.” She nudged him out of the way and took control of the sugar-coated dough. “Watch this.” Then she gently tugged one of the longer sides of the rectangle and started rolling it toward the other side, folding in the sugary filling as she went.
Jeff nodded approvingly as she completed the roll, then wet her fingers and pinched the seam to seal it. “So do you need a knife to cut it into individual cinnamon rolls now?” he asked, opening the drawers in the kitchen, then withdrawing a sharp knife.
Babette was extremely pleased that she was about to teach him something