These old traditional circular baked goodies are popular at fairs (jarmoky). My hometown of Banská Bystrica is famous for a huge fair, Radvanský jarmok. This ancient fair is said to be the king of fairs. And for a good reason. It has been held in September for now over 340 years! It all started back in 1655 when then a village of Radvaň held its first market. Much has changed since then, the village has merged into the city to become one of its “suburbs”: Radvaň is now one of the two main residential parts (called sídlisko, the other is Sásová in the north end). The fair has also migrated to the center of town and is now held in conjunction with “Banská Bystrica Days“. But it is still a great place to find unique crafts and sample various culinary delicacies. In that article, in the second picture from the top, you can see another popular offering at Slovak fairs: gingerbread hearts. These are always lavishly decorated and sometimes even contain a mirror baked into the dough. Such hearts were given by boys to their loved ones, and in the past, mirrors were not as common as they are now so they were highly prized. That is at least the explanation I was given…

Ingredients: sweet leavened dough, your favorite toppings (plum jam, poppy seeds, walnuts, and farmer’s cheese are traditional)
Poppy seed / walnut filling: ground poppy seeds/walnuts, powdered sugar, milk
Tvaroh filling: farmer’s cheese, powdered sugar, raisins, egg
Prep time: 1 hour, plus few hours to the dough rise

Start by preparing the sweet leavened dough (click on the link for the recipe). While the dough is rising, prepare your favorite filling. Check out the poppy seed roll recipe for the poppy and walnut filling, and the tvaroh cake recipe for the farmer’s cheese filling. I also used plum jam (slivkový lekvár), which I found in a Russian grocery store under “plum butter”. You will also find steps for preparing these same fillings in the Christmas Eve cake recipe.

Once the dough is ready, transfer it onto a dusted board and roll out to about 4mm thick.

Then take a tall drinking glass and dust the rim with flour. Turn the glass upside down and use a twisting motion to cut out a circle. Then turn it the right side up and use the flat base to press out the edges. Or use a tablespoon, your fingers, or even a fancy kolache press. Spoon your favorite topping into the dimple.

Transfer the filled kolache onto a greased baking sheet. Brush the edges with egg yolk. Let rise while you preheat your oven the 400F. Bake for about 15 minutes until the edges turn light brown color. The poppy seed koláč went into the oven solo: my baking pan was filled with a nut roll, buchty and tvarožník. There was simply no room for it!

And that’s it, homemade koláče. Enjoy!

And for a slightly different version, checkout Alena’s recipe.

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And it’s also super delicious. Bad combination, indeed!

I decided to surprise my mom this Christmas by baking a štedrovečerný koláč (Christmas Eve cake), or štedrák for short. This cake (koláč) is baked for Christmas or New Years, but never in my family. This was the first time for both my mom and me to try this treat. We’ve been missing out!

Štedrák is a layered cake. The layers are made of leavened dough, and are filled with the traditional Slovak village home-cooking fillings: plum jam, poppy seeds, ground walnuts, and farmer cheese. Think of it as buchty, poppy seed rolls, and tvarožník all fused into one delicious calorie bomb.

I found the recipe for the cake in Slovenská Kuchárka (available online here). I also found several recipes online on mimibazar, toprecepty.cz, and mojerecepty). The last one, from mojerecepty, is interesting, because instead of being layered, the fillings are organized as concentric circles.

This cake originated as traditional ceremonial holiday bread, similar to the Eastern Slovak kračún, which was believed to hold magical powers. This bread was prepared for the Christmas Eve dinner, and the many layers symbolized abundance, fertility, and good harvest. This is because the belief of first-day magic was prevalent in the olden days. Back when Christmas coincided with New Years, and as one did on Christmas, one was bound to repeat during the whole next year. There are also different versions of this cake, some containing ingredients such as hazelnuts, prunes, or apples. These days, it is prepared only rarely. Instead, it’s place at the Christmas table has been taken over by the poppy seed (makovník) or nut rolls (orechovník), or various assorted Christmas cookies (this info comes from Úľuv, Slovak Centre for Folk Art Production).

Anyway, enough blabbering, let’s start baking! The recipe below is how I made it. It’s a variation on the recipes above. Feel free to experiment, especially when it comes to the fillings.

Dough: 500g flour, 70g sugar, 2 yolks, 3dl milk, 1 stick of butter, packet of yeast, lemon zest, yolk for covering
Poppy filling: 150g ground poppies, 2dl milk, 120g sugar, 1 tbsp butter
Nut filling: 180g ground nuts, 1.5dl milk, 100g cukru, 3 tsp bread crumbs, 4 tbsp sugar, one packet of vanilla sugar
Farmer cheese filling: 300g farmers cheese, 4 tbsp sugar, 4 tbsp butter, 3 tbsp raisins, 2 yolks, snow from two whites, vanilla sugar, lemon zest.
Plum filling: 200g plum butter
Prep time: 5 hours

Here are the ingredients you’ll need. If you are having hard time finding poppy seeds, try asking the bakery department in your local grocery store. I was able to buy a pound of poppy seeds for a mere dollar at my local Giant! The plum jam came from Russian gourmet store.

Prepare the dough

Combine the ingredients, minus the yeast and milk, in a bowl. I decided to scald the milk. Scalding milk used to be required back in the days before all milk got pasteurized. Nowadays, it’s no longer needed for safety reasons – and there is an interesting debate on About.com on this topic. The recipes did not call to scald the milk, but I figured it will improve the taste. The warm milk will also heat up the dough, aiding the fermentation.

Mix everything together, and only then add the primed yeast. Yeast likes it warm, but not hot. By adding the yeast to the hot milk directly your run the risk of cooking the yeast, which would be bad. To prime the yeast, simply pour little bit of milk into a bowl, microwave for 10 seconds, add a spoon of sugar and the yeast, and then whisk for 20 seconds with a fork to give the yeast air. Let sit for few minutes until it bubbles up. Knead together until you get smooth dough that doesn’t stick. Form into a ball, cover with a cloth, and let rise for 3 hours. You can also do what I do, and that is after two hours deflate the risen yeast, knead for about 5 minutes, and let rise again.

Alright, that’s done. Now let’s start preparing the fillings!

Make the poppy seed filling

You will need a poppy seed grinder to make the poppy seed filling. Coffee grinders don’t work too well. The blades simply slice the seeds, but you actually want to break them by squishing them. This releases the oil stored in the seeds resulting in a smooth paste. Poppy seeds ground in a coffee grinder end up looking like dust.

Combine the seeds, butter, and sugar in a pot and heat on low heat. Bring to boil, stirring continuously. This will take about 15 minutes.

And also make the walnut filling

The walnut filling is made similarly, but you use ground walnuts. I ground the nuts by first chopping them in a food processor to get small chunks. I then ran them through the same grinder used to grind the poppy seeds.

And the farmer cheese (tvaroh) filling

To make the farmer cheese (tvaroh) filling, combine farmer cheese, two yolks, sugar, raisins, lemon zest, and vanilla sugar. Save the egg whites and beat them for about 10 minutes until you get foam, called snow (sneh) in Slovak. It shouldn’t be as stiff as when making meringue, whisk it until it resembles whipped cream. You don’t cook this filling. Just mix it together until everything is blended.

The cookbook said to mix the plum jam with lemon zest. It actually said to add lemon zest to all the fillings. I only added it to the farmer cheese, and used plum jam straight out of the jar.

The layers are now done. Let’s assemble it all together.

Roll out the dough and layer the cake

After the dough has risen, form it into a brick, and divide into five equal chunks. The recipe book said to roll out each section to the thickness of a finger (about 1cm). I had WAAY too little dough and WAAY too much filling for this – the cake would be as big as an index card, and tall as a small child if I did it like that. This cake is usually made in a rectangular shape, but I happened to have this convenient aluminum pie pan lying around. So I rolled the dough out to the size of the pan. It ended up being about 3 mm thick.

Place one layer on your baking sheet or in the pan (make sure to grease it first). Then spread plum jam on it. Top with another layer of dough. I rolled the first layer bit too small so I made the second one slightly larger bigger than the pan and pushed the extra dough down to seal the jam in.

Gently flatten the dough with your palm, and spread the walnut filling on it. Then top with another layer of dough.

Cover this layer with the poppy seed paste, and top again with another layer of dough.

And then cover this one with the farmer cheese filling. Now, take the last piece of dough, and roll it out into a long rectangle (instead of a circle). Cut into stripes and arrange these in a grid on the top.

Bake

This was my first time making such a grid – I definitely need more practice! Try to arrange the strips so they alternate up-and-down to get a nice cross-stitch pattern. Then beat one yolk and coat the top of the cake with this egg wash. Bake in an oven preheated to 350F for 40 minutes until the top gets nicely brown.

And enjoy

Let cool, slice into small squares (the cake is really rich and filling), and enjoy. A lot of work, but definitely worth it!

Check out my little write up to find out more about Christmas in Slovakia. And also check out the other Christmas recipes.

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Ala from Žiar nad Hronom sent me another recipe, this time for poppy rolls (makové rožky). Her mom made these and they look delicious!

Start by preparing your standard leavened dough from all the ingredients, except for one yolk and the poppy seeds. Once the dough puffs up, roll it out into a circle, and cut into triangular wedges.

Then roll these into rolls (just like when making the regular bread rolls), brush on one yolk, and top with ground poppy seeds.

Bake for about 30 minutes at 350F. Enjoy!.

And don’t forget to check out another of Ala’s recipes, spanish rolls.

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Few weeks ago I showed you how my grandma Pavka makes fancy fluffy apple pancakes. In this recipe I show you how my other grandma, Terka, makes pancakes. Her pancakes (or crepes, palacinky) are simple, easy and cheap to make. They require just a few ingredients and take just few minutes to prepare. And best of all, they are just as tasty.

Start by combining 2 cups of water (voda) and 1.5 cups of flour (múka). Add one tablespoon of sugar (cukor) and a pinch of salt (soľ). Whisk well. The batter should be thin – just a tad thicker than milk.

Preheat a frying pan with a flat bottom. Take it off the stove, and brush on bit of grease with a pastry brush. Pour on a small ladle’s worth of batter onto the pan and let spread out evenly before placing back on the stove. Fry for about a minute and flip over with a knife. Take off just as the pancake starts turning brown.

And that’s it. Wait for the pancake to cool off before spreading on jam or sweetened cottage cheese. Roll into cylinder, or fold into a triangle. Top with chocolate (čokoláda), poppy seeds (mak), nuts (orechy) or whip cream (šlahačka). Enjoy!

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Pečené buchty are tasty baked buns filled with a sweet surprise. It may be plum jam (slivkovký lekvár), farmer’s cheese (tvaroh), poppy seeds (mak) or even walnuts (orechy). Either way, they are delicious! They are somewhat analogous to the American cookies, in that they are something you can always count on when visiting grandparents.

I have tried baking buchty before. Although they ended up tasting great, the filling leaked out during baking. This happened for two reasons. First, I did not fill them correctly. I placed the filling in the middle and pinched the ends shut. In this recipe, I show you the proper way, as my grandma taught me. Secondly, the jam I used was too thin. It’s best to use thicker jams, such as those made out of plums.

You can make buchty out of dough mixed with a lemon zest, as was done in the previous recipe. However, this is not necessary. They’ll taste just fine if you use the same kysnuté cesto that is used in making of other sweet Slovak treats, such as a poppy seed roll, bobalky and buchty na pare. But, to get your buchty to come out soft, it’s important to brush on oil on the dough and fold over few times before rolling out.

Start by rolling out the dough. Add raisins (hrozienka) if you like. Cut the dough into rectangles slightly smaller than your palm. Place the filling (we used plum jam) towards one end. Fold over the side containing the filing.

Fold over once again to complete the bun. That’s it. This is much simpler than the pinching I tried previously. Place on a greased baking pan. Brush on more oil on top and let rest for 20 minutes.

Bake in a preheated oven for about 20 minutes. This is a much shorter time than what I had last time, which makes me think my grandma’s oven was burning quite hot. Basically, you want to bake them until the tops start turning brown. You can brush on little bit of oil or water on top after baking to soften the crust. Sprinkle with powdered sugar once they cool off. Enjoy with a cup of tea (čaj) or coffee (káva). But don’t eat too many, or you may turn into buchta yourself. See, buchta (the singular form of buchty) is a Slovak slang word for a larger-than-average girl.

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