All last week, I desperately wanted cinnamon rolls, but they needed to be homemade. I’m a food snob. I make no apologies for that. I finally got all the ingredients together and decided I would prepare them Saturday night and bake them Sunday morning for breakfast. But by the time we put Eleanor to bed Saturday, and cleaned up our every-counter-is-covered kitchen, and picked up the toys from our tornadic toddler, I knew that the couch was the only place I wanted to spend the evening.

So, no cinnamon rolls. But, I just happen to be married to a good man. And that good man got up before 6 a.m. Sunday. Hours before sunrise, I tell you, and made cinnamon rolls. When I came downstairs, he asked me which pans he should use for baking, and I pulled out two pans because he had made a recipe for 18 rolls. Had I advised him previously that I would only be making a half-recipe? Yes. Did he listen? No. Well, actually he did listen, but how could a person ever have too many cinnamon rolls? We definitely needed 18 rolls.

I was a little nervous about this cinnamon roll production because Greg spends very little time cooking these days. He used to do some baking, but now he usually entertains Eleanor while I cook and bake. And the last time he tried to make cinnamon rolls, the dough never rose. I didn’t want to discourage him though, so I stayed clear of the project. The recipe directions told him to put the cinnamon rolls pretty close together in the pan. The photos, however, showed that the rolls should be put at least an inch apart to give the dough space to rise. Greg didn’t look at the photos.

I’ve done enough baking to know that any dough you put into a hot oven will expand. Greg has done far less baking. But he is a man with an advanced engineering degree. A man who has breezed through advanced chemistry and math courses.

Yet somehow, he missed the part about the expanding dough. He squeezed every single roll into one pan, so tightly packed that the poor things suffocated. I do feel short-changed because I had so longed for that puffy, buttery roll. And I feel even worse for Greg because he spent three hours preparing these emaciated things. They’re still edible, but they’re not the lofty cinnamon dream I wanted. Greg says he likes them because you can eat multiples and it hardly seems like you’ve eaten anything. But isn’t the point to taste every artery-clogging droplet of butter?

Two couples we’re friends with moved to new houses last week, so I knew it was time to get into my own kitchen and whip up something for them. When I saw a photo of a snickerdoodle cupcake, I knew that was the thing. I also planned to take some to the neighbors who recently moved in behind us.

I got the recipe from Martha Stewart, and I will just go right ahead and tell you that I don’t trust her. Not because of that whole jail thing but because the first recipe of hers that I tried — back in college when I was just getting started with baking — failed. I spent nearly six hours making this layer cake with raspberry filling, but the filling never thickened, and so I ended up with a cake massacre. Soggy layers and red running everywhere. Luckily, the boy I baked it for eventually asked me to marry him, so not all was lost.

Anyway, this recipe makes a lot, so it took me much of an afternoon to bake them all in my one cupcake pan. I decided I would frost them Saturday right before we drove around to deliver them. I didn’t use Martha’s frosting recipe because I don’t have a candy thermometer, so I found a recipe on Smitten Kitchen instead. My first batch of frosting came out so-so. But my second batch. Oh my. Some of us took our shirts off.

It was wonderfully glossy and tasted so good. But why did I make two batches of frosting? Well, as we were getting ready to make our second cupcake delivery, we learned that our friend John had gotten a concussion while shopping at IKEA. Yup. So he would not be eating any cupcakes because he would be sitting in the emergency room instead. By Sunday, he felt ready for cake.

I had left a few cupcakes unfrosted in our fridge and decided that I should make more frosting so the cupcakes wouldn’t seem quite so stale. Having spent parts of three days assembling cupcakes (while fighting off a cold, too), I finally tried one. Ho-hum. Yes, I didn’t like it that much. The thing is that I adore snickerdoodle cookies. And this cupcake didn’t seem a good approximation. Whereas snickerdoodles are really just sugar cookies dusted with cinnamon and sugar, this was a cinnamon cupcake. Yesterday, I gave the snickerdoodle cupcake a second chance. My cold was disappearing, the kitchen was clean, and Eleanor was at the baby-sitter. Under these more favorable circumstances, I really liked the cupcake. I still don’t think it resembles a snickerdoodle cookie, but it’s a good cinnamon cupcake. And if nothing else, you must try the frosting. It would be divine on chocolate cake. Or just on your fingers.

One of my annoyances with cooking blogs is that the writers usually talk about how you must have the freshest ingredients and shouldn’t even bother getting into the kitchen to cook unless you do. These are usually people living downtown in large cities who are within walking distance of a farmers market. Phooey on them!

I’m stuck in suburbia and have had to drive many miles to get fresh produce. And often I’d arrive to find only onions and potatoes, which I suppose I could survive on. I mean people have for centuries, right? But those people had very short lifespans.

Two weeks ago, my life changed. A large farmers market set up shop on Saturdays just a few miles from our house, with tons of veggies and eggs and other good stuff. Go ahead and loathe me if you’re stuck with grocery store produce. I understand.

This past week, I got some peaches and decided to make cobbler with this recipe from Gourmet. I have made this previously with grocery store peaches, and it was good, so don’t be deterred if that’s what you have. I would recommend adding cinnamon and nutmeg to the topping. And also upping the fruit because I think the topping is a bit much as is.

If you ever read recipe reviews, there’s always a person or two who insist on changing five things about the recipe. By the time they’re finished, they’ve turned chicken and dumplings into cheese enchiladas. And then they’ll say they loved the recipe. Those people get on my nerves. Alas, I’m going to be one of those people for a minute.

I wanted the crust to have a little more texture, so I used white whole wheat flour instead of all-purpose and I subbed in turbinado sugar for the white sugar. All of this is to say that you can tweak this recipe to suit your tastes.

I made this in the afternoon before going to work, and the next morning Greg wanted to know if we were eating it for breakfast. We didn’t, but I know Greg would have had I not been home.