Ukrainain Makivnyk, or poppy seed roll, or poppy seed roulade (roulette) – I’ve found a lot of names for this delicious pastry. It may be considered to be classical pastry for Easter. Roulettes are traditionally baked of yeast dough with various and sundry stuffings in Ukraine. In most cases they are filled with poppy, nuts, cottage cheese, apples, and cherries.

But today we will dwell upon poppy seed :). In order to knead yeast dough for the roulette we use the recipe of paska without raisins. If you bake paska for Easter on your own, you can bake a rolled cake at the same time but don’t forget to knead more dough. Poppy stuffing is recommended for 0.5 kg flour.

Makivnyk stuffing recipe.

Ingredients

2 glasses poppy
2-3 tbsp butter
sugar or honey as you like
raisins and nuts
0.5 glass powdered sugar
1 lemon juice and peel
1 shotglass cognac

Preparation

Soak poppy in boiling-hot water for 20 minutes, and then strain it off and rub in makitra (or other dish) until so called poppy seed milk comes out. Instead of rubbing in makitra you may grind poppy for several times or blend it. But I have never seen any devices to rub poppy better than our Ukrainian makitra. If you know any other ways of rubbing poppy – I am all ears (or eyes :)).

Warm up butter on the frying pan, add poppy, sugar or honey as you like and fry for several minutes on small fire. Whisk the whites with powdered sugar, take out poppy, cool a little, add the whites’ froth and mix with the stuffing. Add raisins, ground nuts, lemon juice, and cognac.

Roll out very thin ready dough, then put the stuffing, and roll it up.When I kneaded paska, I forgot about rolled cake so the roll dough here I have with raisins – not a big deal, it’s even better ;).What is more, I added too much of ground nuts, so the roll appeared to be poppy-nutty, but mind you own likes and tastes.

Put the rolled cake into the form and bake at approximately 200⁰ for about 40 minutes. I made two rolls out of 500 flour dough.

Bon appetit!