Kringel bread

Kringel is a Estonian traditional sweet-bread cake that appears to be originated from Germany. Is knotted and sprinkled with nuts and chocolate and filled with cream cheese or raisins. A standard dessert at Estonian birthday’s parties.The dough is similar with traditional Romanian sweet bread ( cozonac) a cake for all holidays: Easter or Christmas, wedding or christening. Every Romanian has a recipe from her mother or grandmother. My grandma always cooks huge quantities of sweet bread for Easter or Christmas. There is a lot of Romanian sweet bread recipes on the net for that I chose today to make a Estonian version in my own Romanian way. I made extra dough for my daughter to play with and she came out with some beautiful cinnamon rolls bread.

Ingredients
24 g dry yeast,
75 ml warm water,
550 ml milk,
500 g sugar,
1 tsp. salt,
1 tsp. cinnamon powder
3 eggs,
900 g plain flour, sieved
225 g butter, melted
Filling
250 g soft butter
2 tsp. cinnamon powder
250 g raissins
250 g chocolate
150 g butter,
100 g tasted almonds,
Method
Preheat oven to 200°c. Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the warm water.
Stir in the milk, salt, cinnamon, eggs and 200g of the flour, until the mixture forms a batter. Beat until smooth before adding about 300g more flour. Beat well, until the dough is quite smooth and glossy. Stir in the melted butter. Add the remaining flour and mix to stiff dough. Turn the mixture out onto a floured surface and knead for 5 minutes. Return the dough to a lightly greased mixing bowl and leave to rise for an hour or until double in size. Take the dough out of the bowl and rolled out to a thickness of 1cm. Spread the softened butter evenly over the pastry, then sprinkle with raisins, cinnamon and sugar.

You then roll it up Swiss roll style and slice it in half lengthwise. Twist the dough together, lifting each half over the other in turn. Finally, shape the bread into a bretzel shape and transfer to a buttered baking tray and leave to rise for another hour.

Bake in the oven for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 190C  for a further 30-35 minutes until dark golden brown and cooked through. In the meantime, prepare the chocolate topping by melting the chocolate and butter in a bowl over boiling water or in microwave. Once out of the oven, let the bread cool down a bit, place on a serving plate and drizzle with chocolate sauce and toasted almonds.

To make a savory, Kringel, leave out the raisins and sugar, fill them with cream cheese, bacon, spinach, pepper sundried tomato and cheese then sprinkle the Kringel with grated cheddar. Here is the pictures of one I made.

Enjoy.