Cooking the "KAF Guaranteed" recipes: dinner rolls

Ever since I got my KitchenAid stand mixer, I've been trying to find easy & successful recipes for yeast breads. Well, I think I might have stumbled upon a damn good source: the King Arthur Flour Guaranteed Recipes. To quote their website, these recipes don't call for any hard-to-find ingredients, and they've been tested over and over again -- so they're practically guaranteed to come out tasty.

Today, we're baking soft white dinner rolls. The ingredients are pretty simple -- the only 2 things that didn't have in my pantry were dry milk and instant mashed potatoes. But, they were cheap and I didn't mind spending a little money to see how this came out.
You start like you do with any yeast bread, with the yeast. You need to add the yeast to warm water and wait 15 minutes for it to activate. Do yourself a favor, and set the timer. Otherwise, you're sure to rush it. Another hint, if you're making this in a KitchenAid mixer, warm the metal bowl with hot water before you start.

While the yeast is doing its thing, get your dry ingredients measured and ready to go. My favorite method for measuring is with a scale. I bought one of these after my last cooking class, and I really love it. Before, measuring flour was a headache: is the flour too dense, too loose, is it really a proper measurement? No need to worry with a scale: 12 3/4 oz. is 12 3/4 oz. And, the King Arthur Flour recipes have a radio button, where you can choose whether you would like your recipe given in cups or ounces -- brilliant!

Then, add you ingredients all together in the mixing bowl, make sure everything is incorporated well, and then let the dough hook work its magic. (Again, set the timer and walk away -- way less stress that way.)

Then you put the dough in a bowl for its 1st rise -- about an hour or so until it's doubled. If I'm pressed for time, I'll set my oven for 100 degrees and put the bowl in the oven to help it along -- but if it's a sunny day I'll just put the bowl in a sunny spot.

Once the dough is ready, you'll divide it up into 16 pieces. I like to use my handy-dandy dough scraper for this job.

Then you put the pieces into buttered pans for their second rising -- again, about an hour or until doubled in size. Then, you bake them in the oven for about a half hour.

Viola! Hot, freshly baked rolls, ready for butter. I have to say this recipe was really, really good. We ate about half of them the 1st night, and the other half were gone in a day or two. But then again I have a roll-loving husband, who said to me with a mouth full of warm roll: "yeah, you can make these again."