Finnish Laskiaispulla - heaven in the mouth

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Laskiaispulla is one of my favourite Finnish sweet pastries.  It´s a light fluffy yeast dough, in Finnish pulla, cut and filled with almond paste or strawberry marmalade and decent amount of whipped cream. Extremely delicious! Now it´s a very good time to enjoy it, because it´s connected to the fasting before Easter when the meat is avoided. It pops up in cafes and shops, but the best is homemade anyway. Baking feels cosy and it´s nice to fill home with cardamon smell.




For me, yeast dough was always challenging. Czech sweet pastry is also based a lot on yeast dough, and I like it very much, so I tried it several times. But the result wasn´t often as it should be. Sometimes my trials ended up hard and dry or had strong yeast smell. I think that I was making mistake in the method. Perhaps when the dough was supposed to be rising for couple hours and I couldn´t catch the right moment when it was ready.  Also, my dough was often too liquid, so I was adding later more and more flour. Or it was hard from the beginning and didn't want to rise. I just couldn´t reach the right consistency of it. I admitt that the fault was mine, not the recipes.

However, then I tried to bake Finnish pulla and finally, I took out of the oven soft fluffy pastry with a lot of air bubbles inside. And a very good taste! No yeast smell at all.

The main differences before my previous trials were:

  • Good elasticity of the dough
  • Dough is rising only about 30 min + 10 min more on the metal sheet before baking
  • It´s baked shortly in very high temperature.

The process is surprisingly more simple than in the recipes I tried before, but the result is great. So, if you also belong among those who has been struggling with the yeast dough, try this recipe. You can then make Laskiaispullat or just enjoy good pulla itself. I was inspired with this recipe: https://www.valio.fi/reseptit/laskiaispullat---resepti/

Ingredients for Laskiaispullat:

Dough:

  • 12 g of fresh yeast
  • 1,25 dcl milk
  • 40 g sugar
  • ½ egg
  • 250 g white flour
  • 0,5 tablespoon of cardamon
  • 40 g butter

For brushing:

  • ½ egg
  • can be sprinkled with coarse sugar or pieces of almonds

For filling:

  • almond paste or strawberry marmalade
  • 2 dcl whipping cream

Procedure:

  1. Mix warm milk (only body temperature, hot milk would kill the yeast) with spoon of sugar and crumbled yeast, sprinkle with flour and leave it until it starts to make bubbles.
  2. Move yeast mixture into a big bowl, add rest of sugar, cardamon, half of egg and mix it.
  3. Add slowly flour while mixing the dough.
  4. Add melted butter.
  5. Make elastic dough. If you don´t have a kitchen robot, manage the dough in hands.
  6. Leave the dough in warm place for about 30 minutes to rise.
  7. Work the dough briefly with your hands and form around 8 buns. If you want larger size Laskiaispullat, make 5 – 6 buns.
  8. Put buns on the baking paper on the metal sheet and leave them to rise another 10 min.
  9. Meanwhile heat the oven for 225 °C. Brush Laskiaispulla buns with the other half of the egg and if you want to, sprinkle them with coarse sugar or almond pieces. Put them into the oven and bake them for about 12 min.
  10. Leave the buns to cool down. Then whipp the cream, cut the buns in half and fill them with almond paste or marmalade and whipped cream.

Enjoy delicious Laskiaispulla with a cup of coffee or tea😊

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