Week 14 - Geometry and Shapes

I'm not great at making things in defined shapes. For a long time, my pizzas were just whatever random shape I could form with the dough (before I realized I had to leave it out to warm up for much longer than the package indicated). But even now, they're not the best circles or rectangles. Also, I couldn't even make dinosaurs with a mold! When trying to figure out what to make for this challenge, a few things came to mind. Pizza, except for the aforementioned issues with circles and rectangles. Dumplings for semi-circles, but I think I'm even worse at those, plus they take me forever to make. Then I had a lightbulb moment for the shape I ended up going with - spirals!

I settled on spinach and artichoke pinwheels from Damn Delicious, making a few modifications like substituting frozen spinach, and some others mentioned in the comments, like reducing the amount of sour cream and making them individually in muffin pans instead of a pie pan. A and I have always been big fans of spinach artichoke dip, and although B hasn't had much exposure to artichokes and is not a fan of dips or sauces at the moment, I thought he might go for this considering it would be a small amount of dip wrapped up in bread.

To make the pinwheels, the first step is putting together a bowl of spinach artichoke dip. Then you roll out the crescent rolls, spread on the dip, roll them up, and cut them into rounds. Some of the commenters had mentioned that this part of the instructions to the recipe were kind of confusing, and I would agree with that, as I had to get A's help to figure out how they would have been laid out if they were 13x18 so I could figure out which way to roll (I was doing them one can at a time). The first few rounds that I sliced got a bit squished, as I was holding them tightly so they wouldn't fall apart, but once I realized that a gentler, lighter slice worked better, the process was much smoother.

The pinwheels came out of the oven, and you could definitely see the spiral shape, so challenge met! The weird thing was that the muffin pan on the cooler side of the oven came out slightly overdone on the bottom, and the one on the warmer side was just right, except stuck to the pan. Can the "warm side" of an oven switch?! Flavor-wise, they were fine, but not a ton of spinach-artichoke dip flavor once rolled up in the bread. A and I heated up some of the leftover dip (since I didn't use all of it to make the pinwheels, trying to break my bad habit of overstuffing things), and added them to the pinwheels and that was perfect. I don't know that I would need to make the pinwheels themselves again (although B did eat a whole one himself), but I would 100% make the dip again.