Rooster with poppy seed filling
Description
Home baking for tea. A rooster with poppy seed filling is, at heart, a rich yeast pastry pie. In taste, frankly, it’s a nice but perfectly ordinary pie—no better nor worse than others like it. But purely in appearance, a rooster with poppy filling looks absolutely fantastic :) Among both children and adults, such a pie sparks real delight—especially if you take the trouble to make the rooster as beautiful as possible. Well then—I’ll share how to prepare this marvel. Good luck. Serve chilled or lightly warm.
Instructions
- 1
Step 1
Sift 1 kg of flour into a large bowl.
- 2
Step 2
Make the sponge: gently warm 50 ml milk, add yeast and 2 tbsp sugar. Add the mixture to the flour, mix, and leave in a warm place for about 10 minutes.
- 3
Step 3
You can now add the remaining milk, salt, sugar, and egg to the dough.
- 4
Step 4
Then add melted and cooled butter to the flour mixture.
- 5
Step 5
Now knead the dough by hand for about 5 minutes. As soon as the dough stops sticking to your hands, cover it with a towel and leave it in a warm place for 1 hour.
- 6
Step 6
While the dough rises, let’s prepare the filling. Pour the poppy seeds with a small amount of water (about 1½ cups), bring to a boil, and cook for about 5 minutes more. Then strain the poppy seeds through the finest sieve you have.
- 7
Step 7
Grind the swollen poppy seeds with a blender or a mortar.
- 8
Step 8
Mix ground poppy seeds, washed raisins, coconut flakes, egg whites, and honey.
- 9
Step 9
And now comes the most interesting part — we’ll shape the roosters. For this, take an ordinary white A4 sheet, draw rooster outlines on it, and cut them out with scissors. When the dough has risen, take about one sixth of it, roll it into a flat round, and cut out roosters from the dough using our template. Then roll out another similar flat piece, cut out a rooster along the contour again, but step back from the edge by about 0.5 cm — we need a slightly larger rooster. Next, place the filling on the smaller rooster and cover it with the larger one. Pinch the edges closed.
- 10
Step 10
Now the real art begins. Brush each little rooster with beaten egg. Using pistachios, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds, decorate our rooster to give it a more rooster-like look :)
- 11
Step 11
Bake for 15–20 minutes at 200 degrees until the dough is golden brown. While one rooster is in the oven, shape the next, and repeat until you run out of dough and filling. Done! :)