Ode To A Cinnamon Roll

     Yesterday, again, my home internet  was down.  All day.  It’s still down. 
    About six months ago we switched from our dependable old provider, Time Warner,  to WOW when a friendly, sincere-looking young WOW salesman came to our door pedaling a plan for half the monthly cost.  Since then our internet has worked half the time. 
    So late in the morning I schlepped my annoyed self over to Coffee Time (see post from 10/28/2014), my favorite hang-out as well as my current internet provider of choice when Wow plotzes on me – which is all the time.   Little did I know that I was about to meet the cinnamon roll of my dreams.
    Now, depending on the day and the time,  Coffee Time often offers an array of goodies baked up in their kitchen, and late yesterday morning there was a goodly  variety of goodies on the shelves and counters:

    But my eyes about bugged out of my head when I saw this:

      These were some unbelievable cinnamon rolls! They were huge, and all that icing, who would dare to make such a roll?!
    A young lady who appeared to be in her mid-twenties came up beside me. “I just baked those this morning,” she said, “I just baked everything, the muffins, the bread, the brownies…you should try one of those cinnamon rolls, they’re sooooo good!”
    Aha, thought I, Coffee Time has a new young baker on board who gets it!
    Who gets, that is, my own bold philosophy of icing, which is the 2-to-1 rule:  two parts icing to one part cake. 
      All right, perhaps that ratio is a bit hyperbolic, but what I mean is that  when it comes to icing, I don't mess around.

       And these cinnamon rolls, while perhaps not adhering strictly to my rule for reasons of practicality – I mean these were some big honking rolls – were pretty darned close!
    “Those rolls have been walking out of here,”  the  enthusiastic young baker  proudly proclaimed.  “The brownies have been walking out of here, too,”  she said, “they’re  so good!”
      I  should have known right then that I was fated to walk one of those rolls out of here, either in a bag or in me.
       But alas, I knew that the roll I had my eye on, the high-iced one topped with nuts, had 1,000 calories if it had one.  The others probably ran close-enough seconds.

•     So I resisted.  I ordered a sensible grilled cheese sandwich and went on about my business.
  

    And while I sat in Coffee Time righteously munching on my grilled cheese and sipping my diet soda I couldn’t stop thinking about that sweet little roll with all the icing and nuts. 
    And after I left the shop and for the rest of the afternoon while I rehearsed my piano students for their recital next week that cinnamon roll was humming along somewhere in the far back of my mind.
    And then, at 5:15 pm I had a 45-minute break before my next lesson, whose location, by chance or fate, would take me right past Coffee Time.   And, taking unfair advantage of my  45-minutes of brain disengagement, the image of that cinnamon roll rolled itself from the back of my mind right up to the front where it plopped down, front and center.
    I made a decision.  Since I had a little time to kill, I’d stop back into Coffee Time, grab a cup of tea and maybe a little snack  to fortify me for the rest of the evening’s piano lessons. 
    But not that cinnamon roll, of course.  I doubted that cinnamon roll was even still there.  After all, it was the end of the day, and the roll had probably already walked on out of the shop with or in somebody else. 
    Of course, it might still be there.  And if it was just baked that morning it would still be fresh and delicious enough. 
    I made a deal with myself.  If the roll was gone, that was that.  But if, by chance it was still there….
    When I walked into Coffee Time I was once again greeted by the friendly young baker,  who was just leaving for the day.
    “You came back!”  she chirped.
    “You remember me,”  I replied, heading directly for the cinnamon roll display.
    “I sure do,"  she said in that jollying-the-old-folks tone of voice I'm starting to become accustomed to hearing, "Go on and get one of those rolls this time,”  she said.  “I put some more out fresh.”
    Indeed she had.  And there amongst them, calling to me as if it had been waiting all day just for my return, was the roll of my dreams.
​    My nut-topped mile-high cinnamon roll.  The icing turned out to be cream cheese frosting.

    Was it a sublime gustatory epiphany?
    More than words can say.

    Epilogue:
    Earlier this afternoon I met my dear old college chum Linda for lunch at a little country diner right off the Mt. Gilead, Ohio exit. 

       I didn't even catch the name of the restaurant.  It was right off the exit, next to the Marathon gas station.
    Anyway, after lunch, on the way out the door I noticed this display:

     I've heard of drug users getting drug-high flash-backs.  At that moment I got a cinnamon-roll-high flashback.
    I called to the restaurant cook, who was hanging around the dining room talking to some of the patrons.  "Say", I called, "did you bake these cinnamon rolls?"
    "No,"  she replied, "Little Amish lady lives a mile down the road made 'em this morning."
    Which caused a compound flashback of another cinnamon roll from my past:

(See post from 2/24/2015, "Return To Amish Country, Part 2")

     And so my story ends here as I head into an Amish-cinnamon-roll weekend.
    Whatever your indulgence, have a good one ;)