It was an experiment that went horribly wrong. Down deep in the bowels of my high school, somewhere in the area of the air raid bunkers and the furnace room, three women in white coats, their hair in nets worked around the clock surviving only on black coffee and chain smoking. Their orders were to create a recipe.
Dough was made from various flours experimenting with varying amounts of butter, salt, sugar, and yeast. Oven temperatures and baking times were tested. The breads were pulled from the oven, tasted by the three and kept as a candidate or thrown in a garbage can. Cinnamon and raisins were added in varying amounts and lastly and the most time consuming was the perfecting of the frosting. It was unique and one of a kind. It was… delicious! Each day the principal would stare from his office window at the chimney stack on the roof which came from the bowels of the basement until one morning a puff of white smoke appeared in the air; the recipe was born. The three bakers in their long white coats had created the perfect cinnamon roll.
You see, the problem was tardiness. Kids and teachers were getting to school late. Threats were made and ignored. Contests and challenges were held but participation was low. The State mandated, “Do better or pay the price!” and taking the lead from other school districts in the nation, the superintendent ordered, “Create the perfect breakfast roll!”
It was a Monday morning, 7:00 a.m., totally unannounced; a wonderful foreign smell filled the back hall to the cafeteria. Slowly, teachers and students alike, noses high in the air were drawn taking deep breaths. They homed in on the cafeteria like pigs drawn to truffles. The cinnamon rolls were an immediate success. So successful in fact that the daily supply would sell out before everyone who wanted one could buy one. This meant you had to arrive early to stand in the long line for the chance to purchase a cinnamon roll. Was this the diabolical plan all along? Oompa Loompas were hired as bakers to supplement the demand and yet students and teachers alike nervously waited in line each morning worried that the supply may run out before they were served. They were addicted.
Then things got out of hand. A proposal was made to keep the school mascot’s initials the same but change the name from Red Raiders to Raisin Rolls. Freshman got locked in hall lockers to prevent them from dwindling the supply. A straight “A” student purchased two cinnamon rolls, thereby shorting the teacher behind him. His next essay was given only a “C”. Fist fights broke out, people camped overnight in the halls ignoring the custodian’s pleas to leave and back alley hustlers would sell them for four times their value. It was clear that the experiment had gone wrong.
And so the Superintendent said, “Enough. No more cinnamon rolls!” The baking ended, the Oompa Loompas were laid off and the long process began to wean the school from the addiction. I personally had to go to CRA, Cinnamon Rolls Anonymous. “Hello, my name is Marty. I am addicted to cinnamon rolls. I tried Ho-Hos and Ding Dongs but they don’t help.”
It was an unfortunate time in life, to find something you love only to have it torn from your life and it was not just me; everyone who went to my school during that time had their own cinnamon roll story and how life changed for them. Though I have searched from town to town, bakery to bakery and tried hundreds of samples, no one has been able to produce a cinnamon roll like ones created by the three bakers from the bowels of Bellingham High School.
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One reply on “The Experiment that Went Horribly Wrong”
Still addicted, more than forty years later. Like you, I have maintained my quest to find the perfect cinnamon roll with those from Bellingham High being the standard all rolls must meet to get a perfect “10.” So far, all other rolls have failed to reach the standard. I have found the occasional “8” but that is as high as I’ve found. I am both fortunate and bedeviled on this matter. You see, I was possibly the only student at BHS fortunate enough (and nice enough) to sweet talk the cook into sharing her recipe with me. She made me promise several times that I would share the recipe only with my mother and no other! After I said enough times that I would strictly adhere to such top-secret protocol, she wrote down the recipe and made me promise once again, before she handed it over to me, never to share it with anyone but my mom and to make sure she never shared it with anyone.
I gave the recipe to my mother will the mandated instructions, but mom never made the recipe quite the way it was written. She insisted it didn’t need to use “baker’s flour” and that it didn’t make any difference if you sift the flour. The result was the rolls from her oven did not come out like glazed, cinnamon-sprinkled clouds that had descended form heaven. They were, in other words, not quite the manna that we got from BHS, and so the recipe faded out of use for lack of grand praise (well, and maybe a little expression of disappointment because I really wasn’t ALWAYS that nice).
After my mother passed, I went through her hand-written recipe box to find the famous cinnamon role recipe. It could not be found. Somehow, for reasons inexplicable to me this day, my mother had let the secret recipe drift away to God-only-know where — back to heaven for baking the manna I presume. Now, cinnamon rolls have been forever wrecked for me because everyone that I try reminds me of the lost top-secret recipe that I am sure was originally inspired from heaven, so everyone fails to meet the mark.