Retro Recipe: Cinnamon-Nut Rolls

Last year for Valentine's Day I baked five or six dozen #16-scoop size cookies. They were all ginormous, and there were an awful lot of them. This was no easy feat considering at the time I only had one baking sheet. And I guess I kind of went overboard, because we ended up eating cookies for at least two months. Oops.
This year, I took heed from Good Housekeeping:
. . . everyone (particularly men) likes something good and simple.
I forewent the oodles of cookies in favor of another good bakery item, and a simpler one to make with the retro recipe: cinnamon-nut rolls. Cinnamon is highly appropriate as a food of love: it may be an aphrodisiac, depending on who you ask; it may be even more of one when paired with the scent of baked goods, and finally, in sentimental value, I know cinnamon rolls already go over well.
These were not exactly what I had in mind.

They smell really, really good. But I was not quite pleased when I pulled them out of the oven: at best, I think they look like misshapen and burned miniature hot dog rolls, and at worst they look like turds. Not particularly romantic either way.
For the sake of blogging I ate one, part warm. They are actually quite tasty if you eat them all but straight out of the oven, and if you're not superficial about your food. These don't taste like cinnamon rolls - they taste like biscuits rolled in cinnamon. But that's really not such a bad thing, if you like biscuits and you like cinnamon. They are not worth a second glance fifteen minutes out of the oven once they've cooled. Probably the tastiest part is the bits of buttered pecans and hardened cinnamon sugar left on the baking pan - so maybe you should just skip the biscuits. Leave the nuts whole, toss them with butter and then the cinnamon-sugar mix and then bake on a sheet for about 10 minutes: you'll get all the tantalizing smells and the best part of the recipe. I'd hoped these rolls could do for a tantalizing breakfast-in-bed, but probably you should stick with Pillsbury in a can. After all, what's more swoon-worthy than no extra dishes to wash?

CINNAMON-NUT ROLLS
from The Illustrated Good Housekeeping Encyclopedic Cookbook, 1965, Vol.1

Start heating oven to 425 F. With hands, roll each refrigerated pan-ready biscuit into stick 4" long. Roll in melted butter, then in this mixture: 1/4 cup brown sugar, packed; 2 Tbsp granulated sugar; 1/2 tsp cinnamon/ 1/4 c chopped nuts. Bake 10 min.

tags: RRC #6