SC - OOP -- Happy Happy! Joy Joy!

[Marian Deborah Rosenberg]

Greetings,

  I'm very proud of myself, twice in less than 24 hours I made something I had
never made before and it was more or less a success.

  My cinammon rolls turned out to be very good bread when fresh out of the
oven.  But they weren't cinammon rolls.  This was the first time I'd ever
worked with yeast so the very fact that my dough rose is enough to make me
happy.

For starters, I didn't have any of the various fruits or things to use for
filling, and I didn't make enough of the filling I ended up using (basswood
honey from that honey seller at Pennsic, peanut butter, two tablespoons
cinammon, one tablespoon ginger, one half tablespoon pepper).  I should have
made about twice as much.

In part because I didn't add enough yeast originally and the dough wasn't
rising, so I prepped two more packets of yeast and it rose too much, giving me
more dough than I knew what to do with.  Because I was on the phone they also
cooked it a bit longer than ought to have so the outsides were very much like
crisp buns rather than soft rolls.

Is yeast dough always really sticky?  Even with floured hands I had trouble
getting it off my hands.

Does anyone have any ideas what I could have done that my sticky buns ended up
being bread?

My last mistake was trying to warm them up, so they'd be nice and toasty when
my guest showed up.  I put them in the oven at about 100 degrees.  End result -
they became hard and crunchy on the outside and stiff and crunchy on the
inside.  Very similar to stale bread.

How does one warm up bread products without toasting them?

The other thing I made was a slab of beef, I've cooked ground beef before but
never a steak or anything like that (don't know what this cut was).  Last time
I was shopping, my dad said this was a great price, so I got it and it has been
sitting in my freezer ever since because I've never made a slab of beef before
and didn't really know what to do.  Guessing, from what I'd been told before
when my family has made roasts, I put it in the oven at 200 degrees at about
5pm, and by the time I was finished moving all the furniture into my new
apartment at 10:30pm, the place smelled great.  I then used a brown gravy mix
to which I added the drippings and some cream of wheat.  Covered it in sliced
mushrooms, smothered it in gravy, garnished with tomato poppers and put it back
in the oven at 300 for 10 minutes.  The apartment still smells wonderful.