Category: Desserts

Hazelnut Buns

Ingredients:

Pour boiling water over fifty grams of nice raisins and quickly rinse and drain them. Set them to soak in just enough cold water to cover.
Soak your favourite vanilla bean in half a cup of water for an hour. Remove and save the vanilla pod.
Mix a teaspoonful of hard unbleached flour with a teaspoonful of raw sugar and the vanilla water. Add half a teaspoon of active dry yeast. Leave the leaven to become foamy. Add just enough unbleached hard wheat flour (it will have been somewhere under two cups) to make a stiff paste. Turn out onto a floured board. Knead until silky. Put into an oiled bowl, turn to coat, and cover. Allow to rise until doubled in volume, in a warm place.
Lightly roast half a kilo of hazelnut meats and rub off their skins in a kitchen towel. Crush them with your rolling pin. Mix with the raisins and their soaking liquid, and add the zest of half a lemon. Add a teaspoonful of Curaçao or triple sec. Chop four dried apricot halves into fine dice and add them. Bind all together with a tablespoon of prune or apricot preserves.
Punch down your dough, knead again, briefly, and divide it up into eight pieces. Roll each one out into a disc, slightly thinner at the edges. Put an eighth of your filling across the center of each roundel, with a little more in the middle. Bring the two opposing edges together over the stuffing, and working outwards in both directions, pinch and fold a seam across the middle of each turnover. Brush with water, and sprinkle with crystalline raw sugar before placing on an oiled baking sheet. Leave to proof while the oven heats to a moderate temperature, and bake on the top rack until the turnovers are golden brown.

Notes:

In traditional buns I have eaten of this sort, no provision was made for the escape of steam. This was, of course, to make the bun puff up and look more filled than it in fact was. Cool on a rack!

Recipe Index

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