We had something different for breakfast this morning. I  usually alternate between pancakes and French toast on Sunday mornings, but this time we had cinnamon buns. I had prepared a sweet bread dough on Friday to be refrigerated for later use through the week. It's a bread dough with a milk base in which I included a half-cup cottage cheese, a few tablespoons of honey, and two eggs; not the usual bread dough, but the kind used in egg-braid bread, for example (though it can also be made without dairy products, eggs in place. 

Yesterday evening after dinner I took out a small portion of the dough, reserving the rest in the refrigerator. I rolling-pinned the dough to a rectangle, brushed it with butter, sprinkled over brown sugar, cinnamon and raisins, then folded it over into a long roll shape enclosing the filling. The log shape was  reduced to six short pieces, fitted into a baking dish, then re-refrigerated to await the morning.

Bottom up

This morning as I set the table for breakfast, I placed the prepared baking dish with the cinnamon buns into our countertop convection oven, then we went upstairs to shower. When we came back down the requisite time had almost elapsed -- 28 minutes -- and the buns were withdrawn and set aside to cool. Since Jackie and Jillie can't eat sweet buns, they had a little dish of scrambled egg for a Sunday treat following their breakfast, deprived of their usual pancake or French toast.

The rest of the refrigerated dough is destined for miniature challahs to be baked in the late afternoon meant to accompany steaming bowls of mixed bean and vegetable soup. Because it's a cold winter day. A heavily overcast, cold winter day, at that. We wouldn't see the sun until twilight was prepared to descend and then it shone on the horizon as it prepared to set.

Before that, we had gone out for our afternoon ravine hike. Knowing that under the new coronavirus conditions with shutdown in effect (and moreover Ontario appearing to be on the cusp of following Quebec's lead into a period of curfew imposed on a public chafing to get out of their houses), we would likely encounter an unaccustomed horde of people coursing through the trails.

And sure enough, they were everywhere in great caravans of extended family members, young children, family pets, neighbours, what-have-you. Scrambling up and down the hillsides, crowding the bridges. Not doing much social distancing in their wider bubbles, and cramming the trails in places. We've taken to standing aside and waiting when we run into these crowds. Sometimes they move along, sometimes they don't. 

 

There were times when we felt obliged to caution people not to proceed in certain directions. A bit of a lost cause, we've found people not to be very receptive to unsolicited advice. We were, however, a trifle taken aback when one woman petulantly asked us 'where's the parking lot'? We're increasingly aware that people are driving considerable distances to come along to our treasured ravine. Previously a largely unknown community 'recreational source', it has lately been included in the municipality's online directory of choices of natural surroundings accessed for people hungry to escape the feeling of isolation thanks to the novel coronavirus.