Pizza Roses

      With Valentine's Day coming up my husband and I started to plan what we were going to do. We eventually decided to save some money and we are not only having a stay-at-home date but we also agreed to not do any big gifts. However I did tell them that no matter what, he has to buy me flowers! Call me psycho, but I even ended up typing him up a full guide on the kinds of flowers I like! Thats when it occurred to me, what in the world am I going to give him? I can't just not get him anything. So I decided to get him flowers too! For those of you who know my husband, you know that he would not enjoy a bouquet of fresh cut flowers. Don't worry, this kind of roses are the kind he would actually like. instead of petals and stems they consist of pepperoni and cheese! Not to mention they're a little tastier.

  I started my pizza roses by rolling out my dough. I made my own dough but you can also use store-bought. To shape my dough into a rectangle, I first used a rolling pin to flatten it a bit. Then, I went around the dough lifting and gently stretching the sides of my flattened dough. I was very careful to make sure I didn't stretch any part too far to avoid holes in my rectangle.    

    Once my dough is just about as stretched out as I could get it while keeping it in one piece, I cut my first strip to be about 1/2 inch thick. My homemade dough rises a ton in the oven so I didn't cut my strips super thick to avoid the dough swallowing the other ingredients. 

    Next, I took my homemade pizza sauce and thinly spread it along the entire strip. Then I cut a block of mozzarella super thinly. I like to use block cheese instead of pre shredded or pre sliced because oftentimes those have some kind of coating so that it doesn't stick together. I wanted the insides of these roses to be as cheesy ooey-gooey as possible and block cheese melts better. The only thing is, you have to make sure you slice your cheese super thin so that it bends when you roll everything up. 

    I topped all of my sauce with my thin sliced mozzarella and my mouth was already watering! Then, I took a package of freshly sliced pepperoni from Walmart (if anyone knows how to get them to sponsor me please shoot me an email! I spend way too much money on Great Value products!) and cut each pepperoni in half. I layered them to create a scalloped edge on one side of my dough strip. I carefully started at one end of my pizza strip and rolled it as tightly as I could without the filling falling out and placed it into a greased jumbo muffin tin. It is ok if your ingredients start to fall out of your dough spiral, it is pretty easy to adjust the main problem pieces once you get it into the muffin tin. 

    If you want, before you bake them, you can top your roses with a little but of shredded cheese for a little extra cheesiness. I like to do this every time I make these because it creates a bit of a "cheese crust" on top that cannot be beat! I baked my pizza roses according to my dough recipe, just subtracting a few minutes so I did not burn it. Mine called to be baked at 500 degrees F for 12-15 minutes so I baked it at the same temp but took them out at 12 even. 

    When I first had the idea for these pizza roses I was a little nervous that they were going to be really complicated, time consuming, and messy, but I was pleasantly surprised! This recipe only took me about 10 minutes to assemble and easily wiped up before they were even done baking. They turned out absolutely gorgeous and even more delicious! These were so good that I'm actually considering trying to figure out how to sell these for my home bakery this year for Father's Day!

    

   How did this recipe work for you? Leave a comment if you think I should write a post on my pizza dough recipe!