I’m a Brooklyn gal now, but I grew up in southwestern Michigan where vegan folks are few and far between. While my family has always been steadfastly supportive of my dietary choices, they don’t always know what to feed me when I come home for a visit. To avoid stress, I usually arrive with recipes in hand, ready to take over the kitchen. Whipping up my favorite dishes gives me both the opportunity to show off my mad cooking skills and the chance to show my loved ones how delicious (and normal) vegan food can be. This year, I took on a new challenge: Christmas morning baked goods.

Cinnamon rolls are one of my mom’s favorite foods. I had never made them before, but Christmas morning seemed like the perfect excuse to experiment. I’d heard good things about Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s recipe from Vegan Brunch, so I decided to give it a try. The resulting cinnamon rolls were exactly what I had hoped for: gooey, messy, moist, and totally delicious. We ate them fresh from the oven at my mom’s house on Christmas morning, and they were still tasty the next morning at my dad’s house—even after being refrigerated and re-heated. I’ve made them several times since, and they’ve been consistently awesome.

For those of you who aren’t interested in getting up a few hours early just to make breakfast, I can definitely confirm that you can cover the baking pan full of cut rolls with plastic wrap after the final rise, and refrigerate for up 3 days. I also had good luck cutting the rolled dough into 16 slices instead of 12, and always used a 9.5 x 13″ baking pan. (I tried both a regular metal pan and a glass Pyrex baking dish with equally positive results.)

The results:

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