Kalács, Cozonac, Kolach (bread), Kołacz, Kolač

One day to go till Christmas and I'm here with another traditional recipe many of you might know. This is a traditional dish for Easter and Christmas in Europe and I think it's safe to say there's no holiday without it. This year I said I'm not going to make kalács and I'm going to make gingerbread instead, but I was out powered by the family, so here's the Christmas Kalács 😂

This recipe is maybe a decade old, maybe older, I have no idea where i got it from, so I'm going to quote it without source as it's not mine. I am always using it as it's a good one and over the years I've learnt how to make the perfect (my opinion of course) kalács for ourselves.

This year baking kalács was a bit of a challenge, due to my new oven. I still need to learn how to set my oven for each dish, to get the result I want.

This year I made a deal with my brother. We agreed on he's baking salty things and I am making sweets, then we swap half. Yes, he's cooking, baking (better than me) and he's not a cook, he just likes it.

There is a great variety of kalács recipes available, you can make it with raisins, Turkish delight, cocoa, walnuts, poppy seeds, you name it. For the past years I mostly made the walnut version as we have it in the garden, but this year I needed a change and decided to go with raisins and Turkish delight. @incublus knows what Turkish delight is and will love this 😂 Voilà!

I made two cakes, so what you see as ingredients on the photo above are for 2 cakes. Below the recipe is for one cake.

Ingredients

• 500g flour,
• 7g dry yeast (or 25g fresh yeast),
• 2 egg yolks,
• 5 tsp sugar,
• 80g melted butter (I'm always using 82% fat, non salty butter),
• 1 pinch salt,
• 350ml warm milk (I'm using 1.5% fat milk).

Ingredients for the filling

• 200g raisins for one cake and some rum for soaking.
• 200g Turkish delight for the other.

Don't use both in one cake as it's going to be too sweet, too heavy.

Method

The method is pretty simple, or I'm just used to it?

The first step is to soak the raisins into alcohol, or if you don't have any alcohol, you can use some hot water. Leave the raisins in the rum for a couple of hours, then drain it as the raisins must not be too wet.

Turkish delight you can buy small pieces specially made for this type of cake, but those are a bit pricey, so I'm usually buying the normal one and cut it into small pieces, which is a messy work, or I have someone cut it for me 😂 If you don't know what Turkish delight is, try to imagine trying to cut rubber with a knife.

Next there's this trick I do to make the dough nicer. I mix the egg yolks with milk. Some prefer to add everything to the mixer and let the machine do the rest. It's not wrong but sometimes the egg yolks don't get worked up properly, so I prefer this method.

Next step is to add the ingredients to the mixing bowl, except for the butter. I usually need 5 minutes of kneading, after which, I slowly add the melted butter and let the mixer knead another 5 minutes.

After the kneading was done, I had to transfer the dough to another bowl as I needed the original one for the other dough. Sprinkled the top of the dough with a little flour, covered the bowl with plastic wrap and left it rest for an hour in a warm place. The dough should double in a hour.

Here they are, both doubled nicely.

On a floured surface, I knead the dough for a minute, then rolled it out.

The first one I fulled it with Turkish delight.

There are so many ways to roll up the dough and I chose the easiest, shame on me. The old, traditional one is to cut the dough into three pieces, fill each of them, roll them up and then make a braid. That looks nice but honestly I had no time for that.

Here's my roll.

I did the same with the second one, filled it with raisins. This looks a bit better as the raisins are not so big as the Turkish delight pieces, but at the end of the day this doesn't matter.

To make it nicer, I always brush the top with an egg yolk. Also the dough needs to be pricked with a fork, to let the air out during baking time.

Baked for about 60 minutes at 150°C and voilà!

Before I bought this mixer, I used to make the dough by hand. It's not a big deal, it's totally doable, but it takes 30 minutes. So don't be afraid, if you don't have a mixer or a bread kneading machine.

Also feel free to use any filling you like. If you're using poppy seeds, walnuts for example, beat two egg whites, add 100g sugar and 200g poppy seeds or walnuts. Spread the mix on he dough and roll.

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