Spending time with your parents as a fifteen year old can really bore the shit out of you. While family vacations are always well intentioned, a long weekend in a touristy as all hell beach town can be less than ideal by teenage standards.. I suppose if cowboy boots and hat boutiques, overpriced kite shops, and chowder houses all claiming to be the world’s best are your jive then well, read no further, because I’m only more likely to insult your tribe as I continue on. Even with a most trusty companion, the boredom had me nearly succumb to sporking myself in the eyes – sporks seemed to be the silverware of choice at these exclamatory chowder houses – while my friend kept things interesting by accidentally smudging his eye with remnants from a bottle of “Dave’s Insanity Sauce” hot sauce, killing a couple hours wandering around red faced, tearing, pondering the silver linings of blindness. But just when hope had receded with the tides into the great Pacific, Pismo Beach unveiled it’s one savior, worthy of worldly claims: Old West Cinnamon Rolls.
Now for those that don’t have any indulgent inner fat kid DNA controlling your circuit boards, you may give two shits about the merit of a cinnamon roll. To that I may not be able to alter your opinion, as I fully understand that most people in the world have been subjugated to the likes of cinnamon rolls available in malls and other corporate bakeries shameless in their aims to give consistent shite. If you can suspend your disbelief that this is the fate for all cinnamon rolls, then take the leap and believe me when I say that Old West Cinnamon Rolls are the heavy weight champions you’ve never heard of, and if you have, a golf clap for you.
Recently, I had the opportunity to revisit this buttery childhood haunt, to which I will firmly attest to their excellence. I’m certain that if you were to subject their baker’s to a polygraph test that you’d find the secret ingredients are : flour, sugar, love, grandma’s blood, and laughable amounts of sweet butter. Indulgent as these essentials are, these cinnamon rolls fall into the cliché’d category of food of the clouds. Ethereally fluffy in texture, they possess a sturdiness to stand up to their appropriately sweetened vanilla laced cream cheese frosting, resting sinfully in a 2-gallon Cambro, lacquering those puppies to order. Remember to close your now gaping jaw before approaching the counter.
While each roll will only cost you $4, it makes little to no sense to buy only one. Buy a plain, frosted, duh!, and then up the ante with something more elaborate like their toasted almond cinnamon roll, (obviously frosted, because we all know we’re eating these for a socially acceptable reason to consume inappropriate amounts of cream cheese frosting). If a boring beach town is not in your top five of soon to be travel destinations, fret not, because they ship these babies. Or, if you’re the type to go Sandra-Lee semi-homemade, pick up one of their dry ingredient kits to bake these suckers at home and make flagrant lies to your friends that you made these scratch-scratch, which is exactly what I did since my sister had mailed me a bag as a gift. Hey! Don’t judge. I at least added some excess sourdough leaven and proofing an extra bit in the fridge. Anyways, treat yo’ self. You probably don’t need them, per sé, but you kinda do if you ever want to know true happiness… It’s been a year and then some, so go west, real west, buy a cinnamon roll, and then I dare you to tell me I’m wrong.
Cheesy Fantastico 