When I was growing up my mom made so many great things to eat. Maybe this is why my sense of smell and my memories are so much entwined. A whiff of something can take me back to being an eight year old in a moment. All these memories are now driving me to the kitchen, trying to recreate those warm feelings.
One of the goodies I remember is kolaches. A traditional pastry with Czech origins, my mom always made apricot and prune kolaches and I couldn’t eat them fast enough. Just enough sweet with that little fruity surprise inside. Mmmm 🙂 So today I endeavored (along with bread, scones and granola, which is another blog) to make kolaches.
Mom’s kolache recipe was eluding her today, but she directed me to this kolache recipe. With some modifications and several phone calls home, I recreated the dish of my childhood.
The recipe calls for adding beaten egg yolks and hot milk to the sugar/butter mixture. It didn’t say anything about tempering, but I’m thinking raw egg yolks + hot milk = funky scrambled eggs. So I tempered anyway and I think I made the right decision. Once the dough was made the modifications came in. The recipe calls for letting the dough rise an hour, then making little balls with an indentation for the fruit preserves. But what I remember from years gone by are more like little packages of pastry surrounding the fruit. So (again, after a call to Mom) I put the dough in the fridge for an hour, then pulled it out and rolled it out flat. I cut the dough into squares, dalloped on the fruit preserves (apricot, raspberry and blueberry – no plum preserves, unfortunately) and closed them up with a little pinch.
- Apricot and Raspberry Kolaches
The little things baked a lot faster than I thought they would. I almost burnt the first batch, but that’s ok, we ate them anyway. They were so tender and just the right sweetness. Even Test Subject “I Don’t Eat Cooked Fruit” Bill couldn’t keep his hands off of them.
kitchenkungfu.net 
Can’t tell you how proud I am to have you following in my floured foot prints. \o/\o/