Yeast Cake with Ginger Pudding and Plums

Dough

• 70 ml milk 3,2% + 1 spoon
• 15 g fresh yeast
• 500 g flour
• 30 g sugar
• 6 eggs + 1 yolk
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 320 g soft butter cut in dice

Crumble

• 180 g flour
• 100 g cold butter
• 40 g powdered sugar

Pudding

• 250 ml milk 3,2%

• ¼ spoon wheat flour
• ½ spoon potato flour
• 1 spoon honey
• 20 g fresh ginger

• a couple of purple plums

1. Grind yeast with sugar. Heat milk to 45 degrees and combine it with yeast and sugar. Whisk six eggs with eggbeater. Add sieved flour, salt and leaven. Knead the dough well for 15-20 minutes until evenly mixed. The dough should be elastic and smooth.
2. At this point, add pieces of butter, one by one, to the already rising dough. Knead for another five minutes. Cover with foil and set aside for 2 hours in room temperature. Then, knead again 2-3 times to release the air, cover with foil again and put in a fridge for 7 hours. Prepare crumble: mix cold butter, flour and powdered sugar. It should have granular consistency. Put it in the fridge.
3. Peel ginger and grate it finely. Add it to milk, both flours, and honey, and heat over medium fire. Mix constantly with a beater. The mixture will be gradually getting thicker, stir it until it achieves a thick pudding consistency. Cut plums in halves and remove the pits.
4. Take the dough out of the fridge. Form little flat cakes, put 1-2 halves of plum inside and a teaspoon of pudding. Fold it and form buns, place in cake pan one next to another. Set aside in a warm place, cover with kitchen cloth and let rise for 30 minutes. Smear the top of the cake with yolk mixed with one spoon of milk and sprinkle with crumble.
5. Bake in 200 degrees on the bottom rack of the oven for the first 15 minutes. Lower the temperature to 170 degrees and bake for another 15 minutes or so until fully baked through inside (insert a wooden skewer into the cake to check if it comes out clean).

Recipe: Magdalena Święciaszek, photos: USTA Magazine