Definitely Not Breakfast

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American in search of “breakfast food” will eat some wild stuff. Cake-sized donuts with six Oreos stuffed into them. Biscuits drowned in four gallons of gloopy sausage juice. You get the idea. But among the most enduring forms of Yankee breakfast-that-maybe-shouldn’t-be is the cinnamon roll.

Don’t get me wrong — like many so-called breakfast items, cinnamon rolls are delicious. If you cut them small enough, they’re not even the most unhealthy thing you could shove down your gullet at 6 AM. (That honor goes to the Coco Pops French Toast I once had at a brunch restaurant in Ireland, where our American breakfast habits are, tragically, catching on.) But if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, we should really call these things what they are: dessert.

Cinnamon rolls are a complex bit of pastry that call for two sticks of butter and are finished with a dusting of sugar syrup. I will not begrudge you your desire to start the day with them — I did so for a full week this spring when I made them from scratch for the first time — but we should be clear-eyed about the fact that they are a sweet better suited for finishing a dinner than launching a day.

Also in this category is the latest bake I have to share with you: Cinnamon Roll Blondies.

Like their yeastier namesake, these babies were delicious. They were sugary, cinnamony, and especially delightful hot from the oven or (let’s be honest) microwave. As you may guess, they featured one swirl of cinnamon sugar and another of cream cheese, meaning their only difference from the O.G. was that they used a blondie base instead of bread dough.

So I ask you, friends. Could I serve these at breakfast?

Society would tell me I could not. They’re from a dessert book. They’re brownies, kind of. These are to follow a noon or eventide meal and should not be consumed before 11 AM, right?

WRONG. I say that we should reject the tyrrany of what’s considered AM food and what we call PM. If you look closely at our breakfast pastries and midday refueling omelettes, you’ll see that we really already have — so why not take it further? If we’ve already so cleanly rejected the notion that breakfast should be for light snacks to jump-start our morning, we may as well throw out the rulebook entirely. The idea that cinnamon rolls are breakfast but these are not is intellectually ludicrous. It simply rejects sense!

So, as with most of the bakes in this project, I would recommend that you make Cinnamon Roll Blondies sometime. The odds are that you’ll enjoy. But when you do, you should take them to the place where they belong: a potluck brunch party, of which you will be the MVP.