Dinner roll stamps

Pictured above are some vintage dinner roll stamps given to me by my mom, who said she found them while searching for a particular cookie cutter (and my mom's cookie cutter collection could be a blog all by by itself!).  She said she never used them much and of course there was no instruction sheet, but didn't that seem like the sort of thing you should blogging about?  So next time I mixed up some dinner roll dough, I tried them out.

The idea, at least, seems like a good one.  Instead of having to roll out tiny balls of dough for cloverleaf rolls---and good luck making them come out all the same size---you just roll out a dozen balls, pop them into the muffin tins, apply the stamp dipped in melted butter, and voila!  Perfectly shaped cloverleafs, or hot cross buns, or fantans, or (and I'm so skeptical about this last idea I didn't even try it) spiral cinnamon rolls. 

As you can see from the results, my skepticism proved to be well founded.  Even the best of the finished rolls (pictured here) lack the lovely appearance of "made-by-hand-even-though-it's-a-pain-in-the-neck" fantans and the like.   To be fair, I may try again with a dough that is no quite so soft as the potato roll dough I used for these rolls, so they may hold their shape a little better.  Also, it appears you can use more than about 1.75 oz. of dough---even 2 oz. seemed too much for the stamp to handle.
            In spite of the disappointing performance of the stamps, the monks devoured the rolls so enthusiastically that I suspect they didn't examine their appearance too closely!