Gingerbread buns with poppy seed filling

This is a fusion of two major Christmas flavours in Poland: gingerbread (which smells and tastes just like pumpkin spice) and poppy seed with honey, dried fruits, and candied orange peel. If you ever come to Poland for Christmas, you will see a bunch of baked goods filled with poppy seed. Poppy seed is derived from a gorgeous red flower that cannot be grown without a permission (because it is used to make drugs). Raw poppy seed is ground 3 times, then seasoned with honey. Finally, finely chopped candied orange peel, chopped almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, raisins and dried cranberries are added. It's just mouth watering...


Gingerbread is traditionally baked in the city of Toruń. We make gingerbread cookies for Christmas and adorn Christmas tree with these beauties. However, we also bake a special version of gingerbread, called "the old Polish maturing gingerbread". We make a cake batter and leave it to mature in a cold place for... at least 4 weeks. And yes, it contains raw eggs. The longer you keep it before baking, the better. The funny thing is that you can keep this cake (baked, of course) in a dark dry place forever. Once, we forgot about the Christmas leftovers and found them some time around Easter and it was still delicious.
Today, I suggest that you make something simpler that still embodies the flavors of Polish Christmas. Merry Christmas from Warsaw! Wesołych Świąt!



Active time: 20 minutes
Waiting time: 75 minutes

Ingredients:
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup white sugar
20 g fresh yeast
1 egg
2 cups all purpose flour
2 Tbs pumpkin spice
5 Tbs melted butter
3 Tbs canola oil (to oil the pan)

Poppy seed filling
3/4 cup poppy seed
1 1/2 cup hot milk
3 Tbs honey
1 Tbs candied orange zest
1 Tbs raisins

Mix luke warm milk with sugar and yeast. Cover with a clean cloth and allow to foam (5 minutes). Add egg, flour, pumpkin spice and melted butter. With a hook attachment of your standing mixer, mix the dough for 5 minutes. Form into a ball, oil the surface, cover with a clean cloth. Leave it in a warm place for 1 hour allow to raise.
In the meantime, make the filling. Bring the milk to boil and pour over poppy seed. Wait 5 minutes for the seeds to absorb milk and grind them in a meat grinder 3 times. Then, add honey, orange zest and raising. Season with honey to taste.
Let's return to the dough. Take it of the bowl, put on a floured surface and roll to form a rectangle - 25 cm x 35 cm. Spread the filling evenly. Roll the dough along the longer side as you do with cinnamon rolls and cut them into 3 cm wide slices. Oil the tin with the remaining oil. Place the rolls in the pan. Heat oven to 180 degress C or 350 degress F. Place the tin in the oven and bake for 20 minutes, until golden brown. Remove from oven, allow to chill and remove from the pan. 


What do Poles have for breakfast?

What do eat in the morning? Nothing? Or maybe you grab a croissant and a large cup of coffee? Maybe you're cereal-with-cold-milk type of person? Anyways, if you don't eat a sandwich in the morning, you're not Polish...


Sandwich is a thing that we eat all the time - for breakfast, for lunch at school or work, for dinner. There's even this figure of Mr. Sandwich who comes to offices to sell sandwiches for lunch and that's no joke - reception calls everyone and says "Mr. Sandwich is here". 
The prototypical sandwich consists of: a wheat bread roll or wheat bread, butter, yellow cheese (Gouda or Emmentaler), and ham. Some people who are health-oriented add a slice of tomatoe, a slice of cucumber or a leaf of lettuce, but this is not compulsory. But... we don't close our sandwiches. What I mean is that when we eat at home or at desk we eat an open-faced sandwiches. Apart from ham, we like twaróg (quark), egg spread, hard-boiled eggs with mayo, smoked makerel, nutella (who doesn't like nutella), all types of jam. Some people eat yellow cheese with jam... PB&J is not a Polish thing at all. Yes, you can find peanut butter in the Polish stories, but it's not that popular. However, hummus is gaining on popularity among "Warsaw foodies". 
OK, so what do we do with the second slice of bread and how to we transport our sandwiches?
We "close" our sandwiches with another slice of bread only if we want to wrap them in a plastic foil. Zip-lock bags are gaining on popularity, but if we use any bags at all, these are paper lunch bags - and they are white, most often. Only hipsters can afford these brown paper bags - the rest has to deal with the white ones. Sorry... 
So, if you are somewhere in a hotel or a hostel having continental breakfast and with a corner of your eye you see people putting ham and cheese on their bread (and not eating it with a fork), you can listen closely - do they speak Polish? 



Pierogi

If you want to write about Polish cuisine, you just have to start with pierogi. This is the thing that most visitors to Poland crave for, so Polish pierogi chains are blooming. However, if you are not in Poland and you have no idea what pierogi are, I will try to exaplain it. 



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