Looking for a recipe that will bring back childhood memories or implant new ones? Let’s try nut rolls to make good ones!

Christmas is upon us pulling behind the sleigh of festive cuisine. Or rather pushing it in front as none would be pleased with a Christmas dinner that arrives later than Christmas itself.

Not to mention that some recipes need a testing phase before we serve them up again after a year of abandonment. Actually, this is the worst part of being a festive food. Just imagine how lonely and abandoned poor King’s Cake aka Roscon de Reyes feels all year around when nobody cares about it.

Yeah, sure enough their collective feeling must be up around Christmas when everybody and their mother (especially their mother) is on a quest of various level and difficulty to get their festive food. But the rest of the year or even around the celebration on individual recipe level, it’s inevitable for them to feel abandoned.

Cakes or dishes, that are made once a year, are highly anticipated and greatly appreciated but what is better burning passionate love then forgotten or steady burning oven that makes the apple pies week after week.

So cruel existential questions that are sometimes better left unanswered or even unquestioned, at least until we haven’t finished with the Christmas dinner and the dessert is not served.

Nibbling on some delightful cake with a bit of hot chocolate or coffee gives us much more comforting answers to any of our troubling thoughts.

Nowadays, when almost all sort of food is available at all the times in one form or another is hard to imagine the origin of traditional dishes and why those are the ones that we are serving at our tables.

Some time ago when our technological advancement meant falling when trying to fly and people were burnt when saying the world is round, there wasn’t much about a choice what is getting on the table. It was food or nothing and kids bent their forks wider to be able to get more food on it if they had forks at all.

The food that was in abundance at the time of the year when the festive season struck the food that was at hand was to be served. Turkeys for thanksgiving, chocolate eggs for Easter and nuts for Christmas.

Well, actually there isn’t anything in abundance around Christmas on the Northern Hemisphere apart from the snow and howling winds, except the nuts and seeds that were collected at the end of the summer.

Keeping food edible for a long period of time without advanced technical equipment like a fridge is as painful as laborious. It required skill and determination that actually wasn’t hard to come by if someone was determined to live through the months had to develop the skills for it.

Similarly, if someone wanted to make nut rolls, the first step was to develop a technique to quickly open the nuts without letting the days go by. Interestingly enough some technological advancements designed to make a task easier paired with the general ignorance that comes when humans aren’t required to think for themselves, makes the very task harder.

Hence comes the nutcracker that could be an incredibly useful little tool but utterly pointless if you ask any half blind granny with a dull knife in her hand shelling walnuts for Christmas.

Probably, half blind nut shelling grannies are out of the reach for the most of us -which saves us many shell-full moments in our desserts- but nuts are luckily not. Even if nuts are not making feel Christmas anymore which is proven by the Gerbeaud cake but Christmas definitely makes us nuts.

Ingredients

(makes 4 rolls)

Dough

1 tablespoon / 10g Fresh yeast
½ cup / 100g Milk
8 cups / 1000g Flour (if there is pastry flour available use half pastry flour half normal)
4 sticks / 400g Butter
3 tablespoon / 50g honey or sweetener of choice
4 medium / 200g Eggs
2 tablespoons / 30g Sour cream or Greek yogurt
1 teaspoon / 5g Salt

Walnut filling

3½ cup / 400g Walnut or any other nut (finely crushed)
7 tablespoons / 100g Honey or sweetener of choice
¾ cup / 100g Raisin
1 medium / 15g Zest of lemon
1 tablespoon / 15g Vanilla extract
1 tablespoon / 15g Rum extract (optional)
⅘ cup / 200g Milk

Poppy seed filling

4 cups / 400g Poppy seed (ground)
7 tablespoons / 100g Honey or sweetener of choice
¾ cup / 100g Raisins
1 medium / 15g Lemon zest
1 tablespoon / 15g Vanilla extract
⅘ cup / 200g Milk

Baking

2 medium / 100g Egg for egg-wash

How to make nut rolls

Dough

Knead flour, butter, honey or sweetener of choice, yeast and milk. Work in the egg yolks, sour cream and salt too and dough until getting an even texture.
Put dough into a big bowl with a lid on top and let it rise in a 68°F – 81°F /20°C – 27°C place.

Walnut filling

Mix ground walnut, honey, raisin, lemon zest, vanilla, rum extract and milk together.
On medium to low heat, bring the milk to boil while stirring continuously. Take it off the heat and wait until it cools down otherwise it will ruin the dough.

Poppy seed filling

Poppy seed doesn’t always come ground. In fact most often than not we have to grind it.
If we don’t have a special poppy seed grinder or something that is able to grind the already small pieces into dust then we have to use our trusty spices grinder. If we have used it for grinding coffee beans, make sure that it is clean before trying our luck with the poppy seeds! Unfortunately, the spices grinder doesn’t really do a great job either, so we probably need to grind the poppy seeds twice to get them fine and black without much whitish specks.
Mix ground poppy seed, honey, raisins, lemon zest, vanilla and milk together in a saucepan.
On medium to low heat bring the milk to boil in low temperature while stirring continuously. Take it off the heat and cool it down otherwise it will ruin the dough.

Assembly

Dust the work surface with flour then divide the dough into 4 parts.
Work with one piece at a time, roll out the dough into a ⅛” / 3mm high rectangular shape, the length of our baking tray.
Choose the first filling and fill half of it along one of the long side of the dough. Mind to leave an empty stripe on one side otherwise the dough can’t be closed properly.
Roll the dough up.
Repeat the process with the remaining dough and filling.
Place them onto a buttered or parchment papered baking tray. Brush the top with egg-wash and punch holes alongside with a fork.
Place them into a 350°F / 180°C preheated oven for about an hour (330°F / 165°C for convection ovens). After about an hour, it should come out with a golden brown top and tantalizing smell. Don’t resist it!

Enjoy!

All desserts are equal but some are more equal then the others. The more equal ones are the ones that we use to dress up our heart with, while waiting for the special times to come.