Baking Like a Great Grandma (Part II, Mohn)

For my second attempt at using kuchen (coffee cake) dough, I read all the options in the Jewish Cook Book to my five-year-old, and let him choose. Of course, he liked the sound of "Mohn (Poppy Seed) Roly Poly" and I liked the sound of "Swedish Tea Ring" (it sounded to me like some kind of criminal gang having a pinkies out tea party).

First step, read the recipe. With this book, not a chore, but an exercise of the mind. I cracked my mental knuckles and began:

 Notice, on page 195, at the top, it says "black poppy seed."




Now, before a few weeks ago, I would have asked myself, "Why would it specify black poppy seeds? Aren't all poppy seeds black?" But several weeks ago I found myself gleefully buying a bag of white poppy seeds at less than half the price of the black poppy seeds I normally buy for bagels and muffins and things like that.

  

 I found this bag of poppy seeds in the Indian market near my house, and was overjoyed (channeling my inner Grandma Ida) at the size of the bag (7 ounces!) and the price (3 dollars!) compared with the Spice Islands brand (2.5 ounces) (6 dollars). But they were white!

White poppy seeds, it turns out, are used in Indian cooking: to thicken the korma sauce, as a garnish, or simply cooked in milk and served as a dish on their own. Who knew!

Well, my Polish ancestors never knew from white poppy seeds. But, they did know black. I was familiar with poppy seed filling ("mohn" as my dad told me the Yiddish-speaking grandmas would have called them) in hamentashen, but until starting to explore this cookbook, I didn't know of other pastries made with poppy seeds. Ah well, I would use the rest of the black poppy seeds and mix them with the large amount of white poppy seeds I had on hand.

The other recipe I found alluring was made with the same kuchen dough, rolled out and filled "like a jelly roll" and baked at about the same temperature. So the two recipes seemed like a smart choice to make together. This kuchen dough recipe makes a lot of dough.

So, following the recipe for mohn roly poly and for swedish tea ring, I rolled the dough to about 1/4 inch or 1/3 inch thick...who's measuring!? I'm pretending to be a grandma, right? I don't whip out a ruler, I just eyeball it.

 

Then, following the instructions in the recipe, I ground the poppy seeds (I used a coffee bean grinder for this), boiled them with milk, butter, chopped walnuts, raisins, and sweetener. Simple. 

Actually, that last ingredient merits a bit of comment: The recipe said "corn syrup" and I was like, "What?! My great-grandma Zelda didn't have any corn syrup in the Ukraine in the 1890s." So I used honey instead, and felt very good about it. (Also, I didn't have citron, so the obvious choice there was to use lemon instead. I have no idea if citron has some properties — maybe more pectin or something? — that lemon lacks.)

 

To be honest, I was a little unimpressed by the pile of mush I beheld steaming in my bowl. I thought to myself, if I had used black poppy seeds, this would be a shiny, black, beautiful filling, a nice contrast to the golden color of the egg dough. Regardless, after it cooled, I added the vanilla and spread the filling over the dough.

 

 

I also chopped up some pecans and measured a half cup of raisins for the Swedish tea ring (the thugs were getting antsy in the miniscule child-size chairs I had given them) and prepared to roll.

For some time, I contemplated the recipe for the Swedish tea ring. Only raisins and nuts as a filling? Hmm, I thought, that does not seem like enough flavor for all that dough. I thought back to my family's recipe for rugelach, which has a cinnamon-sugar coating on the dough before the raisins are rolled up in it. Very similar flavor profile. So I did that.

 

Then I rolled them up, and placed them each on their own baking sheet. 

The tea ring needed a little more finessing than the mohn roly poly. I had to flip the dough over because I'd put the seam side up — whoops! Next step was to use a scissors to make cuts from the base almost to the center of the ring, and to fold the dough upwards. And I wasn't sure what that meant, but I tried to show the filling a bit through the cuts. I saw that I could have added some more filling at the tapered ends of the roll. Nothing to do about it now.

 

 

After a couple of hours of rising time, they were ready to bake. Interestingly, the recipe for the tea ring said to brush with egg yolk mixed with milk, while the roly poly recipe said to brush with melted butter.

  

When baked, the roly poly was plump and satisfied.

The Swedish tea ring was shiny and kind of fancy looking.

Cutting into both was very satisfying, though I still had another moment where I wished I'd had black mohn for this recipe. As with the kuchen, the cake tasted slightly sweet, nicely chewy, and this time the filling really was a showstopper in terms of flavor, especially the mohn roly poly. Don't test me for opium; you already know I'll be positive.