[Sca-cooks] Baking Khushknanaj was: RE: [SCA Cooks] period sweets

[Volker Bach]

With thanks to the most gracious Anahita, I hope
this humble report may be useful to someone
onlist. Fired by enthusiasm I proceeded to
immediately bake Khushknanaj and can report from
recent experience the following:

I used His Grace Cariadoc's dough mixture, but
instead of sour dough, which I do not have handy,
employed yeast, which worked very well. THe sesame
oil is tasted clearly, but is quite agreeable (I
used North African). I probably overbaked it
slightly, but it is still firm but crumbly and not
hard at all, as I had feared. I also coated two of
the rolls with saffron milk, which looks very
attractive.

I made both loaves and the 'almost baklava'
rolled-up version and found the latter to hold the
stuffing better. My loaves ballooned up, one even
burst, and the sugar mixture inside candied more
strongly than in the rolled-up version.

The filling is very good with unblanched almonds
(no time :-)) and can well stand cutting back on
the sugar a little. I chopped the almonds rather
coarsely, which gave a granular consistency that
goes well with brown sugar, cinnamon or (very
little) cloves (it is a bit bland by itself). I
suspect, however, that the original idea was a
fine, marzipan-like paste, which I will try next.

As an aside, the recipe for the fillings in both
redactions are very close to traditional Lubeck
marzipan.

Hail and Farewell

Giano