Did you know that if you mix tahini and molasses, you get a fluid and deadly sweet & gorgeous dessert? You can just dip your bread in it and bamm! You would probably get less sweet if you actually inject sugar in your veins… And my mother used to just spoon this whole thing, without making the sweet taste even a bit milder with the help of bread.. I’m hoping she stopped doing that (since she is 72 years old with a weight problem…).

Ok but that was not the thing I was going to talk about!

Today’s recipe is a rather less sweet (but still, sweet) pastry, again from Turkish cuisine – tahini roll. It is quite crunch on the outside but soft and sweet on the inside and especially before you put it in the oven, it has a rather psychedelic look in the baking mould…

Usually the ones that are sold in bakeries in Turkey are too sweet for me, but this one is not so deadly sweet so you can actually enjoy it (I do not have the sweet tooth, unlike my mother). It is a delicious companion to black tea – you can have great afternoon tea sessions with those!

Well I can continue talking about how great it tastes for pages, since tahini is one of my favourite tastes. So I will just stop here and move onto the recipe.

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Ingredients:

6 gr. (about half a package) dry yeast
40 gr. butter (in room temperature)
3/4 cups lukewarm milk (I used full-fat, täysmaito)
25 ml vegetable oil
1/2 tbsp granulated white sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 (+1) cups white flour (I’ll explain what +1 means below)
1.5 cups tahini
1.5 cups powdered sugar
1 egg yolk
3 tbsp sesame seeds
1 tbsp walnut (crushed in very small pieces, preferably by a blender)

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1. In a large mixing bowl, put 2 cups of flour. Add salt, granulated white sugar, and dry yeast to that and whisk a little (keep 1 extra cup of flour, you might need it later).

2. Make a well in the middle of the flour mixture. Onto this hole, add vegetable oil and milk and mix it a little just simply using your hand.

3. Take the butter and by crushing it in your hand, add it to the now rather fluid flour mixture. Start kneading. And now comes that extra 1 cup of flour: in the end, you should have non-sticky, soft dough which is suitable for rolling. If 2 cups of flour was not enough to have that consistency, slowly add 1 more cup of flour until you reach the desired dough. When you have a good dough, put it in a big bowl and cover it for the dough to rise for at least half an hour – or until it doubles in size.

4. When the dough is doubled, take it out of the bowl and put it on a little floured counter / table. Roll the whole dough to have a thick tube shape. Cut the dough in 4 pieces (I used double portion so do not let the photo below deceive you – you should get 4 decent pieces out of your dough). While you are dealing with each piece, let the other pieces covered with a kitchen towel so that they do not get dry.

5. In a small bowl, prepare the filling by mixing tahini and powdered sugar.

6. Take one piece of dough and start rolling, until you get a 2 mm thick piece. If you cannot make it a nice whole circle (like me as you can see in the picture), it really does not matter, don’t worry.

7. Put about 2 tablespoons of tahini mixture on the rolled piece of dough. I did not cover the whole piece, which made the final pastry quite mildly sweet. If you want extremely sweet then you can put more tahini – powdered sugar mixture in each piece (but you would need bigger tahini and powdered sugar measurements than above). When you spread enough tahini mixture, start rolling the dough from one side. Put each rolled piece of dough aside and cover with another kitchen towel, leaving them like that for 15 minutes to give them a final proof.

8. Preheat the oven to 180C.

9. After 15 minutes, take each roll and by rolling towards and away from you, make them thinner and longer rolls. In the end, the diameter of each roll should be maximum 1 cm.

10. Butter your baking mould. Starting from the edges, put the thin rolls in the mould as seen in the picture below.

11. Beat the egg yolk a little. Take a brush and spread it on the surface of the roll. Use the whole yolk, all the surface, including touching lines of each roll should be well covered with egg.

12. Spread sesame seeds and crushed walnuts on top of the roll.

13. Put the roll in the oven and bake for 30 minutes. When the surface is brownish you can check if it is actually baked enough by sticking a toothpick inside – if it comes out clean, then it means that the roll is ready.

14. When it is baked, take the roll out of the oven and then out of the mould, but leave it to cool on a cooling rack or just on a wooden surface (like I did) before you start slicing pieces.

Mmmmm… you will see that the combination of tahini and dough is priceless!