A young lady rings the bell to her neighbor’s apartment. “Excuse me, may I offer you some apples in a bathrobe?”
“Of course”, the voice from inside says, “but feel free to offer them even if you are not wearing anything at all.”

That was an old joke I still remember from my childhood. It’s a little play on words: apples in a bathrobe (jablká v župane) is a sweet Czech and Slovak treat. It’s apples stuffed with a nut filling, wrapped in a puff pastry “bathrobe”, and baked in the oven until soft. I’ve actually never had this snack prior to today, but I’ve been wanting to try it for a long time. So I baked a batch. I made it following an excellent video instructions posted on akosatorobi.sk (“how it’s made”.sk). Here is the recipe:

Ingredients: 9 small apples, 1 sheet of puff pastry dough, about half a cup of ground nuts, 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar, tablespoon of lemon zest, 2 vanilla sugars, 2 tablespoons cinnamon, 1 egg, quarter cup of water
Prep Time: at least 30 minutes to get everything ready, plus another 30 minutes for baking.

First, make sure you have a defrosted sheet of pastry dough ready to go. If not, take it out of the freezer now and let it thaw out. Take the apples (jablká) and peel them. Next remove the stem and the core. The lady in the video had a neat core-removing contraption, but I just used a knife. I started by cutting off a wedge from both ends. I then cut through and then “drilled” the core out by twisting the knife back and forth.

Next we make the filling. Grind up two handfuls of walnuts (orechy) in a food processor. Combine in a pot with quarter cup of water (voda, you could also use milk), two tablespoons of powdered sugar (práškový cukor), and a teaspoon of lemon zest (citrónová kôra). The original recipe also called for a bit of rum. I didn’t do this since I didn’t have any. Cook the paste together until it’s like honey.

Also mix two packets of vanilla sugar (vanilkový cukor) with two tablespoons of cinnamon (škorica). At least that’s what the recipe called for. I ran out and had to make more (using regular sugar). I think that for 9 apples you need at least twice this amount.

Roll out the defrosted sheet of puff pastry dough (lístkové cesto). Flip it over few times, dusting the surface with flour to keep the dough from sticking. I rolled it until it was thin enough for the markings on the mat to show through. Cut it into 9 squares. Place each apple, coated in the cinnamon sugar mixture, at the center of each square. Fill each apple with the nut filling. I didn’t have enough for all the apples, so the last three apples got filled with currant, plum, and apricot jams.

Alright, almost done! You just have to wrap the apples in their “bathrobe”. Do this by folding two diagonal ends together, and then cover with the two remaining ends. When folding the second time, try to tuck in some of the dough that will stick out along the crease. Place a toothpick in the middle to keep the robe together.

Move the apples onto a baking sheet lined with a wax paper. Sprinkle any remaining cinnamon mix over the apples, and brush each apple with a beaten egg (vajce). Bake on 330F for 30 minutes. Enjoy! It’s so easy to get your apple a day, especially when baked and coated in cinnamon and sugar…

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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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Well, this past Thursday and Friday was round #2 for me. See, I started SlovakCooking.com about year and a half ago for a simple reason: to let people know about the delicious Slovak cuisine. And there is no better way than letting folks try our specialties (which are so hard to find here in the US).

So, I decided to run sweepstakes for Slovak Christmas cookies. Five winners were selected at random out of the 600 entries, with each receiving a dozen of assorted Slovak Christmas cookies. Congrats to them all – and off to the kitchen with me.

I ended up making quite an assortment, as you can see in the photos below. In all, I made the three cookies from before, along with my grandma’s bear paws, and two new kinds, walnuts (oriešky) and chocolate šuhajdy. Here is the recipe for the walnuts.

Variety of Christmas cookies I baked for the sweepstakes winners.

These nut cookies are very popular in Slovakia. They consist of two shells joined together by a sweet cream. The shells should be in the form of walnuts (oriešky), but since I couldn’t find such a form anywhere, I used the Madeleine mold. I bought mine in Williams & Sonoma, but you can buy a similar – albeit shorter – mold at Amazon (you’ll also support the site by making the purchase through that link).

This recipe comes from mimibazar.sk, my favorite Slovak cooking site. Making these cookies consists of three steps: baking the shells, making the cream, and joining them together. Ingredients below are as given in the orignal recipe, I used roughly half of everything.

Dough: 150g ground walnuts, 600g flour, 300g butter, 1-2 eggs, 200g granulated sugar, 2 tablespoons cocoa
Cream: 4 eggs, 200g powdered sugar, 1 packet vanilla sugar, 250g butter
Prep Time: 2.5 hours

Baking the walnut (or Madeleine) shells

Place all the dough ingredients in a bowl and mix together until you get smooth dough having consistency of play-doh (plastelína). Wrap the dough in parchment paper and place in the fridge for few minutes, while you go about greasing the molds.

It’s important to grease the molds with oil so that the finished cookies don’t get stuck. Just take a pastry brush and apply a thin coat of oil to all the molds. Make sure to get the edges too. Then sprinkle bit of flour into each mold and rub it around with your fingers. To fill the molds, take a small ball of dough, place in the middle, and squeeze out to the sides. You want to make a dip in the center to leave room for the cream.

Here is a close up of how I was filling the molds. Check out the bowl shape to hold the cream.

Bake the cookies for about 8 minutes at 375F. They are done when they stop looking gooey. Let them cool a bit, and then carefully flip the mold over. If you get lucky, the cookies will fall out. More likely, they won’t. So, next grab a knife or a spoon, and start banging on the underside of the sheet. Do this while holding the mold as closely to your counter top as possible. Most of cookies will fall out, but there will be few stranglers. For these, use a sharp knife and carefully cut around the edges. Just a tiny poke is all that is often needed; often these cookies get stuck along the edge of the mold. Then carefully push them out by pressing the knife alone one edge, the bottom flat section worked the best. The cookies will slide out.

Making the sweet cream filling

Hard part done, next comes the cream. I improvised here, and added ground walnuts to the mix. I figured, heck, these are nut cookies, may as well make the filling nut flavored too. Grinding nuts in a food processor is a good way to get started, but to get the really creamy texture, you will need either a more powerful chopper than what I have, or one of these old fashioned disc seed and nut grinders (I bought this one from Amazon, it gets the job done, but the tin coating started peeling off after just two uses).

Combine eggs, nuts, vanilla sugar (or vanilla extract), and half of powdered sugar together in a double boiler. This is just a fancy word for smaller pot sitting in a larger one filled with boiling water. This assures that the mixture heats up at the boiling temperature of water (100C or 212F) instead of the temperature of the metal pot heated by natural gas flame, which can reach temperatures as high as 1500C or 3000F. As you keep whisking, you will notice the mixture will start thickening. Keep whisking until it reaches consistency of honey.

Let the mixture cool, and in the mean time, combine butter and the second half of powdered sugar in a pot or a bowl. Using a fork (the whisk didn’t work too well, the butter is too sticky), blend everything together. Whisk to get creamy consistency. Don’t heat the butter when doing this.

Finally, work the butter into the cream. I placed the cream pot back in the warm water bath to soften-up the cream. That’s it. It may look complicated, but making cream is actually quite easy!

Putting it all together

The last part is fun. Find two shells of approximately equal size (they will vary in size somewhat based on how much dough you put in), and top one side with cream. Press the second half on it to make the walnut.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar and you are done! You can also get creative with the dough. I had these mushroom molds, so I made some chocolate summer ceps (dubák).

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Both of those are really delicious. But nowhere as delicious as these little sugar rings or wreaths (venčeky). These are my favorites!

We ended up using half the amount listed below. The recipe comes from the same Czech collection we used in making the zebra cookies.

Ingredients: 250g flour, 250g margarine, 100g ground hazelnuts or almonds, bit of salt, half a spoon of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of orange zest and juice, 1 egg, 5 spoons of white wine
Prep Time: about 2 hours plus 15 minutes for baking.

Start by adding the flour. Then add the margarine and the ground nuts. I used almonds instead of hazelnuts. I don’t know if there is a mistake in the original recipe, or if the margarine was too melted, but the recommended amount of margarine resulted in the dough being too sticky to work with. We had to add more flour. So when you are making these cookies, use less margarine to begin with and add more as needed.

Then add a hint of salt and the grated orange zest.

And a little wine (víno) for good taste. Form into a ball, wrap in foil, and let cool in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Then roll the dough out, and use grooved cookie cutters to cut out the rings. My mom picked up this set of 5 cutters in Williams & Sonoma for 16 dollars. Cut out the big circle, lift off the the dough from the mat (use a knife if stuck), and then cut out the middle section. Bake on baking paper for about 15 minutes at 350F, until they brown and the margarine stops sizzling.

Coating in sugar

While the cookies are baking, mix the powdered sugar with vanilla sugar and ground cinnamon. Coat the cookies in this mixture while they are still hot. I also had some left over chocolate from the making the marble cookies, so I dipped few in chocolate as well.

And that’s it, super easy! Enjoy.

Recipe #100!

By the way, this is recipe #100. This site started about year and a half ago with me knowing how to make only a handful of Slovak dishes. It’s been a great journey since!

And just few more photos of the cookies we baked to tease you. They were delicious! Veselé Vianoce (Merry Christmas).

Don’t forget to check out Parts 1 and 2, jam-filled hearts and two-color cookie “combs”.

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We ended up using 1/2 of the ingredients listed below.

Ingredients: 300g flour, 180g butter or margarine, 90g powdered sugar, tiny bit of salt, half a spoon of lemon zest, 3 yolks, half a bag of vanilla sugar, 1 spoon cocoa, jam for filling
Prep Time: About 2 hours, plus 15 minutes for baking

Start by sifting the flour and add the butter.

Then add the powdered sugar and the lemon zest. This came from quarter of a lemon, grated using a box grater.

Then add the yolks and half bag of Dr. Oetker (or similar) vanilla sugar. You can find these in German or Russian gourmet stores. Or just use a dash of vanilla extract.

Knead everything together until you get smooth dough. Then form it into a loaf and cut off one fifth. Mix one spoonful of cocoa into this smaller section to turn it brown.

Roll into balls, and let refrigerate for 30 minutes to solidify the butter. Then carefully roll the dough out on a mat dusted with flour. Roll out the yellow dough only slightly, you will roll it out again later. Make the brown dough about 2 mm thick.

Making the striped dough

Here is where the fun begins. Cut stripes out of the brown dough and assemble them on top of the yellow dough. Try to leave about the same spacing between the stripes as the brown stripes are thick. Push these down, and then use the rolling pin to fuse them into the yellow dough. This part is bit tricky. The stripes kept getting stuck to the pin. Mom helped out by pulling off the pieces that stuck. Try to get someone to help out, it really helps having that second person around for this step.

Mix the remaining dough into a ball and roll out again. These guys will turn into marble cookies, since the two colors will mix together. Again, cut them out using the cookie cutter. If you don’t have this comb (as in rooster) shape, use whatever you can find handy. Bake the cookies on a baking paper for some 15 minutes at 350F.

Filling the cookies

After they cool off, fill the zebra cookies with apricot jam.

The marble cookies go well with Nutella. You can also dip their ends in chocolate. To make the chocolate spread, melt one cube of baking chocolate with 1/3 the chocolate amount in butter in the microwave.

And that’s it. Enjoy!

Don’t forget to check out Parts 1 and 3, jam-filled hearts and sugar rings.

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