Granny's Cinnamon Buns

Granny's cinnamon buns

When I took Nina for lunch at the American Girl Cafe in New York, she especially enjoyed the cinnamon buns they served with the meal. So I promised her that the next time she visited me we would make our own. Which we did, following my mother’s (Nina’s great-grandmother’s) recipe, which my daughter, Dorri Olds (Nina's aunt), wrote up for the delightful book AT GRANDMOTHER'S TABLE: WOMEN WRITE ABOUT FOOD, LIFE, AND THE ENDURING BOND BETWEEN GRANDMOTHERS AND GRANDDAUGHTERS. Edited by Ellen Perry Berkeley, the book is published by Fairview Press and is now out in paperback.

Here's the recipe for Granny's Cinnamon Buns:

GRANNY’S CINNAMON BUNS

3 cups flour
scant ½ cup sugar
¼ tsp salt
1 envelope (1 Tblsp) dry active yeast, dissolved in 2 Tblsps warm (not hot) water with ½ tsp sugar. Yeast should bubble up in 5 mins, showing that it is active.
¼ pound + 4 Tblsp (1 ½ sticks) unsalted butter, softened
½ cup milk, scalded
2 eggs, beaten
½ cup mashed potatoes (fresh or instant)
3 Tblsp brown sugar and/or maple syrup
24 walnut or pecan halves
2 tsp cinnamon
½ cup raisins

1)Combine flour, ½ cup sugar & salt. Mix in yeast water and set aside.
2)Melt ¼ lb. butter in the scalded milk. Add to the flour, then add eggs & mashed potatoes.
3)Mix well, stirring, until mixture comes away from the bowl. Refrigerate overnight (or up to 3 days).
4)Butter muffin pans generously. Pour a little brown sugar or maple syrup (Granny used both) into the bottom of each muffin cup. Then put in an upside-down walnut half.
5)Roll out half the dough on a lightly floured board. Spread 2 Tblsp soft butter over the dough. Then spread 1 Tblsp sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, & ¼ cup raisins over the dough.
6)Roll the dough up tight & slice it into one-inch thick pieces. Repeat this process for the other half of the dough.
7)Place the one-inch thick pieces in the muffin cups, set them on top of the stove (with the oven turned on the lowest temperature you can make it), and cover them with a towel. Let the dough rise until doubled, about 45 minutes.
8)Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
9)Bake buns for 25 to 30 minutes. Take the pans out of the oven & let them stand for 1 to 2 minutes before turning them out onto brown paper.
10)This recipe makes 24 delicious cinnamon buns.
11)Enjoy!

New title, same Oma Sally!

I have just changed the title of my blog, to reflect the title of my book, SUPER GRANNY: COOL PROJECTS, ACTIVITIES, AND OTHER GREAT STUFF TO DO WITH YOUR GRANDKIDS, which will be published by Sterling Publishing Company early in 2009. It will still be a communication from me about grandmothers and grandchildren, and I still eagerly welcome any and all messages from other modern grannies and grandkids.

This reminds me of a sign I saw a few years ago in a grocery store that had just computerized its operations. The sign read: PLEASE BE PATIENT. NEW COMPUTERS, SAME OLD LADIES.

Looking forward to hearing from young, old, and inbetween,

Oma Sally

grandmother names

As I have been interviewing grandmothers for my book, SUPER GRANNY, I have loved hearing all the different names that their grandchildren call them by. There’s Granny, of course, and Grandma, and Nana. And then a host of others.

I am Oma to all my grandchildren. This started because Jennifer, the mother of Stefan, my first grandchild, was married to a German man, and Oma is the German name for Grandma. There’s also Grossmutter – but that’s a bit more formal. When Stefan and his sisters visit us here in the U.S., I am just Oma. But when we visit them in Germany, I am Oma Sally, to distinguish me from Oma Mitzi, their other grandmother. When our two U.S.-based grandchildren came along, it seemed easier for all of them to call me by the same name. I don’t know how my mother remembered who she was to all her grandchildren! My children called her Granny, my brother Buddy’s children (who had lived in Italy) called her Nonna, and my brother Carl’s children called her Bubby, the Yiddish word for grandmother. They called my grandmother, who was their great-grandmother, Bubby-Bubby. She had always been Grandmom to me.

Some grandmother names reflect a child’s first learning to talk – like Bam and Gamma and GamGam. Pally reflects one grandmother’s habitual greeting, “Hey, Pal!” There’s Ammamma (Indian), Savta (Israeli), Meema (I think this means Mom in Hebrew), and Babu (Nepali). Some grandmothers go by their first names, easy for little ones to say and special to the grandchildren, not the grown children, who still say “Mom.”

I’d love to hear more grandmother names!

Say it in email

For those of us who have not studied a foreign language in lo these many years, there's a really easy one to learn: Emoticon! "Emoticons" are little pictures that your email program may come with, allowing you to express an emotion without words. Or, as my 11-year-old granddaughter, Lisa, taught me, you can make some yourself just by striking the right keys on your computer.

Here are some emoticons that Lisa sent to me:

:-) Smile
:-( Frown
;-) Wink
:-P Tongue-out (Lisa’s favorite)
:-D Laughing
:-[ Embarrassed
:-\ Undecided
=-O Surprise
:-* Kiss
>:o Yell
8-) Cool (Lisa’s other favorite)
:-! Foot-in-Mouth
O:-) Innocent
:'( Cry
:-X Lips-are-Sealed


So -- enjoy! :-)

Hot Granny!

My wonderful Hollywood-writer niece, Gina Wendkos, sent me Mel Walsh's great little book, "Hot Granny: Fabulous at 50, 60, and Beyond!" It's full of telling-it-like-it-is and how-to-make-it-better for those of us who have reached a certain age, and it's very funny, as in : "You can look like a horse, walk like a chicken, have wrinkles like the side fissures of the Grand Canyon, and still be a Hot Granny." And speaking of grannies, she says "any older woman who helps the youngest generation turn out right is a very Hot Granny indeed" even if you don't have any grandchildren yourself.

I like her advice when you have a "bone to pick": deliver an "insult sandwich," which is a compliment followed by a layer of criticism and finished off with a top layer of compliment. I once suggested that editors could make their authors fall in love with them forever if they offered their criticism like that. Works with most others also.

And I like her rules for visiting and hosting grandchildren. The list for the first starts out "This is not your house, and these are not your rules." And when they visit you: "Deal with any stale smells. Kids remember how the houses of grandparents smell."

Gina's present to me turned out to be a present for her too, since I pointed out that Hot Granny's movie recommendations to watch with grandkids include both Gina's "Princess Diary" flicks.

Walking the High Beam

When we made plans to visit the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey with our daughter, Nancy, and her two daughters, I never expected to be walking along a steel girder 18 feet in the air as part of the "Skyscraper!" exhibit. Nina, age 7, didn't quite make the height guidelines' minimum of four feet tall. (Maximum height is 6'8" and maximum weight 300 pounds -- not a problem for any of us.) But the rest of us did, and with the encouragement and inspiration of Anna, 15, Opa (i.e., Grandpa) and I lined up along with her, got strapped into our safety harnesses (just like the kind real construction workers wear), and walked the narrow beam. Even though I knew we couldn't fall because of the harness and the rope we were holding, it was a little scary looking down and realizing we were walking along a very narrow walkway, very high up.

When I expressed some hesitation to Anna, she said, "Well, you went bungy jumping!" And so we did, a year ago in Queenstown, New Zealand, the bungy capital of the world. But that moment of terror just lasted a couple of seconds at the jumping-off moment, until I was caught by the bungy cord. This time it lasted for the several minutes it took to walk the beam, get the rope unstuck from the corners, and finally find solid ground again. Anna scooted right along on the beam -- I was glad she went first, so even though I was slower, with a more measured walk, I knew I could do it -- and knew I had to, for my granddaughters' sake!

It was an educational experience, too, since much about the exhibit gave some fascinating facts -- like the fact that Mohawk Indians still are among the largest ethnic group of workers who labor high above New York and other big, skyscraper-rich cities. It was educational for the museum workers too. One of the young men who helped us harness up said, "I like to see older couples like you do this -- gives me hope for my future!"

soap carving for grandchildren

After my husband told me of his long-ago memories of his mother sitting by his bed and helping him to make carvings out of soap when he was sick as a child, I thought, "What a great activity to do with my grandchildren!" And they wouldn't even have to be sick! So I packed a couple of enormous bath-size cakes of Ivory Soap in my suitcase (wondering what airport security guards would make of them), along with directions I found on the Internet, and soon after my arrival at my granddaughters' home, sat down with two of them to proceed to carve.

It certainly seemed much easier on paper than it did on the actual soap! One of us (not me) had done it before, and managed to produce a beautiful little bunny rabbit, but for the other two of us there was much frustration. Somehow the knife would either not cut out enough to make the desired shape, or would cut too much so that we lost first one rabbit's ear and then the other, and finally gave up, ending with a snowy hill of soap shavings, which my frugal daughter plans to reshape into usable soap. The good news, though, was that nobody drew blood -- as a loving grandmother how would I have explained that?

I felt a little better about the less-than-100%-successful activity when I read a hilarious online article by former elementary school art teacher Linda Godfrey called "Whatever Happened to Soap Carving?" in which she writes of this popular school activity in the 1950s: "How many children sacrificed fingers on the altar of Soap Sculpture will never be known, but it's a safe bet the company making Band-aids raked in as many bucks as the soap manufacturers." And I can attest to her observation that "soap is not really that easy to carve... and most finished 'sculptures' end up about one inch in diameter and resembling a lakebed pebble." Too true! You can read the article for yourself at http://www.cnb-scene.com/psoap.html and consider it a challenge to prove her wrong.