Buns Filled With Your Heart's Desires

This is one recipe for many buns, rolls, or whatever you use yeasted dough for. In this instructable, the buns were filled with a cottage cheese filling, but you can fill them with literally anything. Fill them with meat, apples, Nutella or with your heart's desires.

Ingredients for the dough:

yeast

sugar

milk

margarine or butter

salt

vegetable oil

1 egg

flour

Equipment:

1 small heat-safe metal bowl

1 large heat-safe metal bowl

1 medium bowl

whisk

spoon

tablespoon

teaspoon

In a small metal bowl, combine one cup of milk and 2 tbsp of sugar. Heat this over your stovetop until the sugar has dissolved and the milk is lukewarm. Take it off the heat and add in 8 grams of yeast. Set it aside in a warm place.

Also preheat your oven to its lowest setting, turn it off once it finishes preheating. This is for a warm place for the dough to rise later.

In your large metal bowl add in your margarine. Break it up into smaller pieces and place it on your stovetop, add in about a 1/4 cup of your vegetable oil. Melt it over medium heat then add in three tbsp of sugar, half a tsp of salt, and four cups of milk. Keep heating this mixture until it is lukewarm. Now taste your mixture, it should taste overly sweet and overly salty, adjust the salt and sugar if needed. Then move your bowl off the heat and mix in an egg.

Now start adding your flour. First, add in about 4 cups of flour, and mix to combine. The goal of mixing in this flour before adding in your yeast is to combine the fat and salt with the flour.

By now your yeast mixture should look frothy, add it into the big bowl. Mix it to combine and add in another two cups of flour. Make sure you scrape down the sides as you mix. Once the last two cups of flour have been mixed in, switch out your spoon for your hands. At this point, you need to start watching out for the dough's texture. The finished dough should be soft and slightly sticky, but you should be able to pick it off your hands with little trouble. Add in the last 1 1/2 cups of flour little by little until you reach that consistency, your dough may take a little more flour or a little less.

Sprinkle the dough with a dusting of flour and cover it with a cheesecloth. Then place it into the now warm oven and set a timer for 1 1/2 hours or let it rise till doubled in size.

As mentioned previously, you can fill this with anything. Here are some filling suggestions and recipes.

Cottage cheese filling:

• About 2.5 kg of cottage cheese
• Sugar to taste
• 2 tbsp of vanilla extract
• Salt
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup of flour

Apple filling:

• About 16 peeled and diced apples
• Cinnamon
• Sugar
• Lil bit of salt

You could also add:

• Poppyseed filling
• Nutella
• Meat
• Jam

What do you usually add? Let me know in the comments!

Once the dough has doubled in size, punch it down and cover the bowl with cheesecloth again. Place it back into the oven and let it rise for 1 1/2 hours again.

Once the dough has risen again, punch it down and turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface. Cut off a smaller more manageable chunk to work with and place the rest back into the big bowl and cover with a cloth so it doesn't dry out. Cut chunks a bit smaller than a tennis ball and roll them into spheres.

To fill a bun, take a rolling pin and roll out one of the spheres to a 3/4 centimetre thickness. Lay the dough over your palm and spoon a heaped tablespoon of your filling into the middle. Press it down with your spoon and fold your dough in half. Starting from one end, pinch the seams closed, leaving a small gap in the middle for steam to escape. Now if you like, you can also crimp the seams to create a stronger side. fold the edges under the bun and place it on your tray.

Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 15-20 minutes. After ten minutes, rotate the pan so that they brown more evenly.

We had a lot of dough leftover, so we used it to make a poppy seed roll. Roll out your dough into a large rectangle with a 1/2cm thickness. Spread out the filling 1/4 cm think and roll it up like a cinnamon roll. Pinch all the seams closed and roll the roll onto a large baking sheet. Make sure it is seam side down. Cut some slits on the top to let steam escape and bake for about 20 minutes.

• The first picture has the cottage cheese buns
• The second picture has the poppy seed roll
• The last picture has an apple-filled bun and two mini cinnamon rolls