undertaking

Right before we left on our trip, a bunch of pins about camping and outdoors popped up on Pinterest. Call it coincidence, call it early June, call it whatever, but one in particular caught my eye: cinnamon rolls while camping. I actually had seen and pinned this earlier, but hadn't had the opportunity to try it out. With a relatively lazy Saturday coming up, Gianna and I decided it was time to give it a go.

We combined the recipes by halving the oranges, but wrapping them up completely in foil.

First came the prep. This was juicy and a little bit tedious. I would recommend bringing a metal spoon (or two) with you to effectively get all the innards out.

Because there were 12 of us, we had to make more than one can of cinnamon rolls. That's a lot of oranges! 

Then came the fun part: plopping the rolls into their shells to get ready for baking. At this point, B joined us (she wanted to earlier, but we weren't prepped to have her help with cutting and scooping) to fill and wrap. 

Oh, and I don't know if it truly matters what size orange you use, either. We had both.

Once every half was full, we wrapped in foil and placed them on the grate above the fire.

This proved to take FOREVER (seriously--30 minutes), so we ended up switching to putting them directly in the fire. Much better solution! In the meantime, we polished off all the orange innards.

Then it was a matter of getting some frosting on them and enjoying!

Would I do this again? Perhaps. As you can see in the last photo, they don't really brown up, so it's a little hard to tell when they're done. It also is a lot of work and you aren't really doing this to get orange flavor into the rolls (read: it doesn't transfer). 

The advantages are easy eating (once cool enough, just grab a fork!), they don't burn (the rind protects the rolls from getting too close to the heat) and it is really fun (plus you can get the kids involved). I also now have experience, so that would make the whole process go a little more quickly... 

Sounds like I've convinced myself!