Moscow buns are my favorite treat from my childhood, my great-grandmother used to bake incredibly tasty buns, soft and with a sugar crispy crust. To make buns at home you need only a couple of hours and basic ingredients that almost everyone has at home.
Ingredients for the dough:
- flour 500 g;
- milk 150 ml (heat in the microwave);
- water 70 ml (heat in microwave);
- 11 g yeast (1 sachet);
- sugar 110g
- vanilla sugar 1 teaspoon;
- 70 gr. butter
- salt 1 teaspoon with a spoonful;
- 1 egg (egg white for dough, egg yolk for coating).
Ingredients for the filling (layer):
- butter 30;
- sugar 25g.
Activate the yeast in warm milk (pour the yeast from the bag into the milk), add 1 spoonful of sugar and 1 spoonful of flour from the total amount in the recipe.
Start kneading the dough: water, egg whites, salt, sugar and vanilla sugar. Stir until the sugar dissolves and then pour in the milk-juice mixture. Stir everything together. Add flour. Knead the dough until homogeneous. In the center of the dough add soft butter in batches, mixing it inside. Knead the resulting lump of dough with your hands for 5 minutes.
Put the dough into a bowl greased with vegetable oil and cover the bowl with clingfilm. We leave it for 1 hour. Knead. Leave to rise for 1 hour more. Divide ready dough into 8 pieces – these are our future dumplings. We roll out each piece into a big dough ball and leave it to rest for 10 minutes under a towel.
Begin to form buns: take a lump of dough and roll it into a rectangle. Grease the surface of the dough sheet with soft butter and twist it into a flagellum on the long side. Protect the seam, so that the oil does not come out. Roll the ends of the flagellum into narrower flagella. Fold the sausage with a seam inside. With a knife make a notch in the central part not a couple of centimetres to the ends and turn out a bun in a heart shape.
Spread ready buns on a baking tray with siliconized baking paper. There is no need to grease the paper. It is better to put the buns away from each other so they can grow in peace. Cover with clingfilm or a towel and let the buns rise at room temperature for 40 minutes.
Once the buns have risen, brush their surface with a silicone brush with a mixture of egg yolk and water (1 egg yolk and 2 teaspoons water). Let the smeared buns form a crust on the surface for a couple of minutes and then sprinkle the surface with coarse sugar.
Bake in the oven at 180 degrees with the heat on top and bottom for 20 minutes.