Gooey Caramel Goodness

For my day job as a graphic designer,  I work with a fantastic team of people. Most of us are local, but we also have a few members on the East Coast. While we are in contact with our long-distance friends regularly through email and conference calls, we also make a point to get together once a year for a team meeting here in the midwest. This gives us the opportunity to brainstorm together in person, strategize, and - most importantly - get to know one another better.

Since our team meetings usually last a few days and start first thing in the morning, I thought it would be fun to bring in a breakfast treat to share - a meeting of my worlds I suppose, as my day job of designing meets my "evening" job of recipe experimentation and blogging! Since I love caramel rolls and I don't love getting up early, the Easy Caramel Rolls recipe piqued my interest. I decided to give it a little test run prior to presenting it to my co-workers (better safe than sorry, right?). I was delighted to find that the recipe lived up to it's name as a simple fare (no prep for the dough - hallelujah!) and the rolls are deliciously packed with gooey caramel goodness!

First, set your oven to 375 degrees. Since I wanted some rolls with nuts and some without, I combined my melted butter, white sugar, brown sugar and corn syrup, but left the pecans out for now.

If your pecans aren't already chopped, just grab a cutting board and carefully cut them up with a knife.

Pour the caramel mix evenly into the bottoms of your ungreased jumbo-sized muffin cups. If you don't have a pan like this, you can use an ungreased 9" round baking pan. I just sprinkled in the pecans on top of  half of the cups of caramel.

Now, open up the can of refrigerated breadstick dough. Carefully unroll the sticks and separate them along the perforations into 6 sections of two strips each. Gently pinch the edges of the dough together to seal it into one fat "breadstick".

Now, butter each breadstick with a little LAND O LAKES(R)  Butter.

Mix up the filling ingredients of sugar and cinnamon. I found that I had some extra left over even with my breadsticks this coated, so if you're trying to go lighter on sugars, just make sure you cut your measurements evenly... or you can wing it, I'm not a stickler.

Now roll up each stick into a pinwheel like this. At the end, do your best to pinch the end of the roll to seal it up (although, I found my breadsticks only moderately cooperative).

Press each pinwheel into the caramel-filled muffin cups (or evenly spaced in your round baking pan) and place in the oven.

Bake the caramel rolls for 15-20 minutes until they are golden brown. Remove them from the oven and let them cool for 5 minutes.

After the rolls have had a little chance to cool, flip the pan over onto another pan or cutting board. The gooey topping will coat the top of your rolls (and they will smell so good that you may be willing to risk tongue-singeing to taste them immediately!).

Simply use a spatula to carefully transfer the rolls from your "flipping location" to your serving platter, and you have a tempting tray of morning treats!

The trial run for these tantilizing caramel rolls was a huge success and I definitely plan to present them at the team meeting... although I might not mention just how easy they were! Try these Easy Caramel Rolls for yourself, savor the gooey goodness, then rate and review the recipe on landolakes.com.

It's "Girl's Night Out" on Monday with Julie making an amazing artichoke dip for her friends.

Amanda is paid to write for the Land O'Lakes Recipe Buzz™ Blog.