Gattina's Bread Nugat

I wasn't going to post about this until I made it a 2nd time as I slightly overbaked the first time.. but what the hell, I'm all for showing my screw ups! Keeps me grounded. har! I saw this on Gattina's site. She's extremely talented and such a very loverly gal - am so happy to have found her site months ago, I've enjoyed each entry she posts! All of her posts are awe-inspiring, but these lil sweet rolls had me at hello. I wanted to follow her recipe to the Tee but I had to omit the walnuts for health reasons and I used sweetened condensed milk instead of the called-for evaporated milk. Why, do you ask? Well let me tell ya'll why. Mmm hmm. I have two pantries.. both of them are seriously over stocked and it's harder than hell, sometimes, to find anything. Case in point. I keep all baking supplies on the 2nd shelf of both pantries - when perusing for the evaporated milk that I knew I had, I couldn't find it to save my life. I moved cans and jars and bags every which way, to no avail. I already had my biscuits cut and coated in the cinnamon sugar and smooshed into my baking pan so I was kinda screwed. I, of course, made a very panicky phone call to my mommie - "What the hell do I do, Ma? Can I sub sweetened condensed milk?" "Ohhhh noooo", she says.. "it will make whatever you are making way too sweet." "Okay well this is a dessert, kinda, so do you think that will matter much?", says panicky me. "Well you could try it, just cut the other sugars down." "'kay thanks, Mommie, buh-bye now!". So she was really no help.. but at that point I was committed in baking these lil wads of yummy dough, so I hadda try the sweetened condensed milk. I cut the sugars in the recipe in half in hopes that my teeth would not start disintegrating the instant I took a bite. The sauce came together beautifully. They looked almost good enough to eat raw after I drizzled it over. But I decided baking would be best and popped them into the oven. Unfortunately, my oven runs hot and I overbaked them. BUT! They were still extremely tasty and the carmelized coating was only "crunchy" around the edges.. the rest of it was heavenly. I've got biscuits on my grocery list for this week and will try this again, keeping in mind my hot oven. Ohh yeah.. just as I cut the lid off the sweetened condensed milk? Hubbs pulls the can of evaporated milk out of the 2nd pantry. I almost beat him over the head with it. I know he was trying to be helpful and probably thought if he could find it, he'd beat me to the opening of the other milk, but he was a split second too late. tee! I still went with the sweetened condensed and by cutting the other sugars, I don't feel it made too much of a difference in taste - I'm assuming these sweet rolls were to have a caramel flavor and that's exactly how they ended up tasting. So all in all, fabulous recipe, Gattina! Thank you so much for sharing! The next time I try one of your recipes I'll make sure to have all my ingredients pulled from their various temporary homes in my kitchen BEFORE I start prepping. heheee! Below are my pictures.. for some reason I couldn't get a photo of the slice to come out bright. WTF? I'll post more pictures once I try this recipe again, later next week. ;) Please, go check out Gattina's recipe to learn how to make these and to see gorgeous pictures of how they should turn out! heee! It really wasn't baked to a charred, wedge shaped brick, just bad lighting ;)