Roasted Strawberry Cream Cheese Rolls

Within five walking blocks of my childhood home, there was a small and rather quaint German bakery.  Luckily for me, not only was the bakery close to home, but for many of my younger years my mom was an employee at that bakery.  She wasn’t a baker, at least not professionally, although she was plenty talented enough to be one.  My mom worked the counter.  My guess is that on the days she worked, sales were higher at the bakery than on the days she didn’t work.  Besides being a beautiful woman, my mom was smart and personable.  She likely knew many of the customers personally and treated those she didn’t know as if she did.  My mom once gave me a diamond ring that had belonged to one of her customers.  One day, the woman brought it, along with a few other treasures, to the bakery and gave them to my Mom.  The woman wanted her to know how much she had appreciated her kindness over the years.
As children, my siblings and I, still in jammies and planted in front of cartoons, enjoyed many a Saturday breakfast with boxes of baked goods carried home by my dad after dropping my mom off at work.  I had many favorites among the varied selection of goods, and my favorite changed with age and a developing palate.  Several stand out in my mind, one of which was a yeast raised jelly-roll topped with glaze and a sprinkling of chopped peanuts.  In essence, it amounted to a ‘peanut butter and jelly sandwich’ roll.  Fast forward several many decades to this past year’s Spring issue of Sift Magazine, and right on the cover was a pan of jelly rolls reminiscent of those from my childhood.
It took awhile but I finally got around to making the Sift version of that memorable breakfast treat from my mom’s bakery.  Boy, were they worth the wait!  The dough came together in a snap and rolled out like a dream.  And although the recipe required the added step of roasting strawberries,  the oven does all the work and the reward was worth the few extra minutes of time.  My only frustration came when I realized I didn’t have any peanuts in the pantry, which meant I couldn’t make an exact replica of the roll from my childhood.  No worries though because I will definitely be making these rolls again.  I’m just dying to share this recipe with my siblings with the hope that it will also take  them back to those good ole days of our childhood and the delicious treats we enjoyed on those lazy Saturday mornings.

The recipe for these Roasted Strawberry Cream Cheese Rolls is available online at King Arthur Flour.

A few notes:

I used my counter top mixer and a dough hook to do the work of mixing and kneading the dough.

I used 24 oz of frozen strawberries using this conversion chart.   I felt it made a little too much filling. Next time I will cut that amount back to 20 oz.

I like frosting so I made one and a half times what the recipe called for.  True confession – it wasn’t necessary.