Soft, buttery einkorn sweet dough, filled with spices and baked into a caramel pecan glaze. Perfect for lazy Saturday mornings and weekend brunches.

“Your recipes are too fancy.”— I get that A LOT. So I’ve been pondering this idea of fancy recipes over the past few weeks, vacillating between the idea that I should try to make my recipes a bit more mainstream in order to grab the attention of others while also really just wanting to make recipes that I absolutely love. Why not just make pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and get all the Instagram likes and Pinterest saves? Not that simple recipes are bad, but they just don’t excite me like tossing hawaij into snickerdoodles or stirring red wine into chocolate cake. I know I’ve written about this before, over and over again actually, but I feel very passionately that when it comes to the kitchen, we should be fancy! I think in our culture that is so easily overwhelmed by the kitchen, we look for rules and familiarity. We look for specific recipes and weekly meal plans that follow certain diets and we’ve lost that creative spark that comes with cooking. We want cookbooks that list out our entire week’s grocery lists and tell us exactly what to make each evening (and how much salt to add) and we’ve lost the ability to cook for pleasure and enjoyment. This is important because what if Thursday comes around and I am really not feeling the ‘one pan, quick and easy, fajitas’ that I painstakingly planned on Sunday afternoon?

So often in our minds, fancy = time = difficult and that is simply not true! How are we living in a time where we are so into self-care, refusing ourselves the opportunities to care for our food in the same way that we do our skin and our homes and our routines? For me, being fancy means exploring flavors, being creative and unique in my approach to baking, and investing in the food that I’m putting in my body. It means swirling salted honey into whipped creams and playing with funky flours. It means trying new things, helping people think a bit outside of the box, and occasionally, it means challenging myself a little bit. I want my recipes to make you feel fancy, because I think being fancy is a good thing.

In that same spirit, here is a fancy version of my momma’s sticky buns. We used to make these with canisters of Pillsbury crescent rolls and we were lucky if a batch lasted an entire day in our house. This rendition uses an enriched sweet dough, spiked with einkorn flour and is swimming in toasted pecans bound together by a very gooey brown sugar caramel and I hope you make them and let yourself be a little bit fancy this weekend.