Giorgio Locatelli’s rosebud cake

Giorgio Locatelli’s cookbook, Made at home, contains delicious recipes that remind him of home. For example, try this recipe for this beautiful rosebud cake.

Locatelli: ”The name does not refer to the flavour of this pastry, but to its appearance. The yeast dough is rolled out, spread with vanilla cream, rolled up and cut into thick slices that are placed close together in a circular pattern in a cake tin. They puff up during baking and stick together, so the result looks like a beautiful bouquet of roses.”

Method

1 Lightly grease a 26-centimetre springform tin with butter and line it with baking paper.

2 In a bowl, mix the milk with the yeast until the yeast has dissolved. Then add the flour, sugar, oil, egg yolks, salt and lemon zest and knead everything by hand into a dough. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave to rest for 30 minutes.

3 Place a sheet of baking paper on the work surface, put the dough on it and roll it out into a rectangle measuring approximately 70×40 centimetres. Cover with the tea towel and leave to rest for another 15 minutes.

4 For the filling, beat the butter with the sugar and vanilla seeds until pale and fluffy. Spread over the sheet of dough.

5 Using the baking paper, roll the dough up into a Swiss roll and cut it into eleven pieces. Place eight of the pieces, cut side up, around the edge of the tin and place the remaining three in the centre. Cover the dough with cling film and leave to rest for 1.5 hours, until the ‘roses’ have risen and are stuck together.

6 Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180°C. Place the tin in the oven and bake the cake for 30 minutes until golden brown.

7 Remove the cake from the tin and leave to cool on a wire rack; dust the cake with icing sugar. You can pull the ‘rosebuds’ apart before serving.

Title: Made at home
Author: Giorgio Locatelli
Publisher: Fontaine Uitgevers
Price: €29,99