What's the time? It's FOODZEIT: Vanilla pudding cinnamon rolls

Sideways view on a serving of the vanilla roll from with the vanilla pods

Vanilla - Since I got my hands on fresh vanilla, I am mesmerized by this topic. I got myself some pods of fresh A grade vanilla beans, the best quality you can get out there. They are black and moist, glistening with an oily layer on the skin that has the hypnotizing smell of fresh vanilla with a little bit of an earthy smell. Once you cut it open, the inside nearly spills out with me having to scrape it out. The seeds and the mark from the inside of the beans is what I will be using but even the outside of the pod, the skin, is so full and rich of vanilla flavors that I will cook it alongside with the mark from the inside and after I cooked everything, I will save the outside skin, dry it and use it again, but this is a topic that I will write about another time. Coming back to the vanilla topic, I had to try to make something with my new found passion. So I decided to bake a vanilla pudding roll (“Vanille Pudding Schnecke” in German), something that I loved to get from my mom every time we went shopping in the bakery (or at least I was longing to get one from her). This roll is a savory yeast dough recipe that is not too dry, grace to the moistness of the vanilla pudding that is succulently stuffed within the layers of the roll.

The Pudding:

Anyhow, let’s get started making the Pudding first for this recipe. All I had to do is make my pudding (recipe can be found over here) and add some of my fresh vanilla to it, just simply follow this recipe over here.

Ingredients:

300 g whole wheat flour
6 g dried yeast
1 vanilla pod (or the equivalent of vanilla sugar / aroma or whatever you are having at home)
50 g butter
1 egg
5 table spoons of sugar
100 ml milk (lukewarm)
5 Table spoons of powder sugar
Handful of rum raisins
Cinnamon
A cube of molten butter
Half of the above mentioned pudding recipe

Put the milk in a pot on the stove, cut open the vanilla pod. Scrape the mark out of the pod and put it together with the skin of the vanilla pod in the milk which you will cook later. After cooking, take out the skin and put it aside and put the milk aside until it cooled down to be lukewarm. Put the dry yeast, 2 Table spoons and the lukewarm Vanilla milk in a bowl, mix it and put it aside for five minutes. In the meantime put the flour and the rest of the sugar in a bowl. Then add the yeast milk to that bowl and mix it well. Now add the egg and the butter and knead the dough well over 2 – 3 minutes till you got a consistant dough.

Now cover the bowl with a kitchen towel, put it aside in a warm place (25 degrees) and let it rest there until the dough doubled in size (30 – 60 minutes). Now you roll out the dough on the table with a rolling pin to an equal square, don’t roll it out too thin, should be at least 2 – 3 mm thick still. Now you spread out the pudding on top of the pastry. Don’t overdo it, take a nice evenly layer of pudding and spread it out evenly.

Spreading the pudding on the rolled out dough, raisins are added

Then add the rum raisins on top and sprinkle some of the cinnamon on the pudding layer.After that roll up the dough from one side.

Rolling up the Pudding roll with the cinnamon added

You have this kind of a roll in front of you now.

Rolled up dough with the pudding inside

Now cut out 2 – 2.5 cm think slices of pudding rolls. Put them like in the picture with the cut side downwards on a buttered baking tray

Pudding rolls cut off and placed on the buttered baking tray

cover this with a kitchen towel and let it rest for another 30 – 50 minutes (the rolls should increase another 50% in size now).

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius. Take the oven tray, pop everything in and let it bake for about 20 minutes until golden brown on top.

Rolls fresh from the oven nice and brown baked

Take a brush and brush the molten butter on top of the rolls. Let the rolls cool down 5 minutes.

In the meantime mix the powder sugar and the milk. The consistence should be rich, moist, glistening and firm, not too water. Take the brush and brush this powder sugar mix on top of the rolls.