Cinnamon rolls

I've been doing this since I was ten years old and I still don't know what I'm doing. 

I've tried every kind of dough there is.

This dough has

* half cup water
* half cup scalded milk
* 1 teaspoon yeast
* 1 egg
* 2 tablespoons butter
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 3 + 1/2 cups flour

So a very short brioche that is sweetened. These ingredients should interfere with gluten formation, but not so badly.

Ed: Here's a thing that I discovered about scalded milk. Amateur mistake. My milk was too hot. Killed too much yeast and slowed it down on top of all these interfering ingredients which probably aren't so bad even salt.

Milk is scalded to kill an enzyme. Powdered milk doesn't have that enzyme. That would explain why I thought I perceived dough overly responding to powdered milk, and it would have prevented my error of using hot milk. 

I've become a proper dough-expert in the process.

And I've still never got it right. 

Not once. 

It's the saddest thing, really, if you think about it.

To keep trying like that, even following directions and such. 

So hopelessly.

And pathetically.

Trying and trying and trying and trying over and over repetitively. Dumbly.

And never once getting it

right. 

You had just as well go to the coffee shop and buy one. Theirs are better. Anybody else's cinnamon rolls are better than mine. Apparently I'm hopeless.  

And these will just have to be my punishment again. 

I don't like coffee at all. Hate it, in fact. 

Here's how to make coffee icing that goes really well with these. 

Fix a quarter cup espresso or very strong black coffee.

* 3 tablespoons softened butter
* 2 cups confectioner's sugar
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 3 tablespoons hot espresso or more to adjust to desired thinness.