Your poppy seed roll is a thing of beauty! Combining poppy seeds and walnuts in the filling is new to me. Do you slather on one filling on top of the other before rolling up the dough? Or do the fillings get combined in a mixture?
My grandmother sometimes baked a lekvar (prune butter) roll among the sea of poppy seed and nut rolls she made for Christmas giving. As a kid, I always liked the lekvar even better than the poppy seed. The allure of the limited edition.
I simply roast about 2 cups of walnuts(this is for 2 rolls) chop them and then mix it with the poppy seed mix. The poppy seed mix i use is 900 grm can so i use half for each roll. Ive made rugalch with prune lekvar. So good.
Thanks! I was thinking of ground walnuts but obviously that was not right.
Glenn Mitchell’s Kugelhopf from Maggie Glezer’s Artisan Baking (with thanks to @ShellyBean for the recommendation).
I started the project on Sunday, macerating raisins (recipe calls for dark – I used golden). DH doesn’t care for particularly boozy bakes, so I used 25% dark rum and 75% apple juice for macerating - total amount of liquid as called for in the book.
On Monday, I made the dough in a stand mixer, and kneaded in the raisins by hand before chilling. I gave it about 17 hours chill, but recipe says you can go up to 48 hours.
Tuesday, after bringing the dough back to room temp for several hours, I shaped, and let rise in the Nordic Ware Kugelhopf pan.
Despite good intentions, I haven’t baked much from this classic book. The recipe offered both weight and measure, and gave three different methods for preparing the dough: by hand, by stand mixer, and by food processor. I found the instructions clear on almost all points. The only vaguery I encountered was this business of the long ferment at room temperature on baking day. The recipe calls for 4-5 hours after retrieving from the fridge, but doesn’t give an indication of what signs you might be looking for at the end of that ferment. I went the full 5 hours, by which time the dough was almost back to room temp and just slightly puffy. After the pre-shape, rest, and final shaping, I put the dough into the mold and moved it to an 80-degree proofing oven for 2 hours. While the dough did not reach the rim of the pan during the final proof, it did pass the poke test and then rose quite high during the bake. When the author says “remove the upper racks from the oven before baking”, he means it.
Bread? Cake? Not sure what you’d call it, but we loved it. Not overly sweet, with that airy, shreddy texture you’d expect. I did not decorate it with almonds, but served it with “a shower of powdered sugar”.
Fun project! Good Christmas cake!
It looks amazing and I’m so glad you enjoyed it! It’s funny because I was just thinking about this again as I once again forgot that I no longer have a mold for it.
It really is one of my favorite holiday bakes precisely for the reasons you stated. It’s rich but light and I love the sweetness. I find if you do use the almonds whole ones are better than sliced because my sliced ones got rather dark.
Ftr using the full alcohol I don’t really taste it much, but that can depend on the rum. With 40% I don’t find the booziness lingers.
That’s exactly why I didn’t do the almonds - the ones in the photo in the book looked so dark. I’ll keep that in mind about whole almonds.
The rum ratio worked out just fine. I could smell it; he could not. Win-win. 
I baked 2 fruitcakes today, a hybrid between a rum-soaked fruit cake and a Newfoundland fruitcake. All dried fruit (currants, apples, cherries, figs, apricots, dates, prunes) with butter, pecans and molasses . Cinnamon, Allspice and Cloves.
The one in parchment paper has extra dates and prunes added.
Beautiful
Did you use Screech?
Nope. I used some small airplane bottles of dark rum I bought last year in a gift set.
I will take a photo of the recipe. I bought the cookbook in St John’s. I deviated from the recipe in a big way, since 2 of us don’t like candied peel. No peel or rind in my Fruitcakes.
They look great.
For those of you who age fruitcake, how do you wrap it? I don’t have tins deep enough. I wrapped mine in parchment then foil. I didn’t know if I should use plastic wrap for a more airtight seal. The fruit was soaked in rum, and I haven’t brushed the cake with rum or other alcohol.
I wonder if a vacuum pack would be good.
Thanks for the idea!
I am not sure if it would age inside the vacuum pack? I initially put them in ziplocs in the fridge, then I was reading that the flavours won’t develop unless it’s at room temp.
I didn’t know if paper and foil would be better than plastic wrap because there might be less chance of mold, although that’s somewhat unlikely considering the amount of sugar and dried fruit, although this cake contains 5 eggs and butter, so that makes me more likely to refrigerate.
(I also don’t have a machine to vacuum pack.)
Do you have to “feed” the cake during the aging time? Mine is at room temperature since it gets soused in port every few days.
I don’t have to feed this one. I could.
Is yours wrapped in plastic wrap? That’s how I wrapped the blackcake I made 14 years ago, which I fed regularly. When I made mini-fruitcakes in muffin tins 2 years ago, I didn’t feed them. I drizzled with alcohol and wrapped them in plastic wrap, and gave them away quickly.
pretty sure i did parchment and then foil as well.
no fridge.
Okay, thank you.
Mine is wrapped in parchment and in a tin. One Christmas I made too many treats and the fruitcake, already port soaked, never got opened and was put in the fruit cellar. Four months later I remembered it was there. That was the best, most flavourful cake we’d ever had. You’d think I’d bake one earlier to get that same effect, but Christmas fruitcake in August is probably the last thing on my mind when the weather is hot. Maybe next year. 
