When I was a kid my mum never made Breskvice. They were time consuming and complicated. And as a working mum with a family, a magnificent garden and a whole bunch of animals to take care of, spending hours baking Breskvice was not on the agenda. Don’t get me wrong, mum made other cakes – Oblatne, Bakin kolač, Šape etc. but as a little girl who loved the colour pink, Breskvice were always at the top of my most-wanted list. Hence at the parties of family and friends, I would head straight to the Breskvice (usually served in a Bohemia Crystal dish) and devour a bunch!
So last week when I was at Teta Olgica’s getting my lesson in Zagreb schnitzels in sauce, I asked for a lesson in the art of making these sugary morsels. Unlike other recipes, she uses an old technique of boiled egg yolks to make the pastry (some Italian recipes do this too) and while it may sound horrid (boiled egg yolks in cakes?!), the pastry is so fluffy to work with (and delicious to eat) that I have to give it a thumbs up and want to explore more recipes that use this technique.
Unlike some other recipes where you take two of the cookies and sandwich the filling in between, with these you slightly scoop out the centre of each cookie to get more filling in and then sandwich two together. And the brandy/rum goes into the filling rather than the pastry. Love it! So without further ado and no more wasting time on talking boiled egg-yolk pastry, let’s get to making.
Ingredients:
For the pastry:
- Six (6) eggs, boiled
- 350 grams flour / half continental and half plain
- 280 grams unsalted butter
- 150 grams icing sugar
- One packet of vanilla sugar
For the filling:
- 30 grams milk chocolate
- 50 grams dark chocolate
- 40 grams unsalted butter
- 50mls peach brandy or rum (or to taste)
- 50 grams walnut meal
For the decoration:
- 20 drops of red food colouring
- 20 drops of yellow food colouring
- 100mls water
- 10 grams caster sugar
- 30 grams normal sugar
Method:
- Shell the boiled eggs. Discard the whites and place the yolks into a mixing bowl.
- Add the flour, butter, icing sugar and vanilla sugar to the yolks and mix well to form a dough. Leave to set for one hour.
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius.
- Cover a baking tray with baking paper and once the dough is set, roll little dough balls, no bigger than 2.5cm and place on the tray. Do this until all the dough is used and place in the oven for 20 minutes. Unless you have a huge oven, you will need to do this in batches.
- In a water bath, melt the two types of chocolate and butter. Once melted add the walnut meal and brandy, and mix well.
- Once the cookies are ready (this is where the recipe may be different from others) using a small, sharp knife slightly scoop out the centres of each cookie. Add the discarded cookie bits to the filling mixture and mix well.
- With a small flat knife gently fill the centres of the cookies with the chocolate filling. Join two cookies together and you have your first peach. Do this for all the cookies until all the cookies are used.
- For the decoration, in two shallow bowls add the 20 drops of red food colouring with 50mls of water (bowl one) and 20 drops of yellow food colouring with 50mls of water (bowl two).
- In another bowl add the two types of sugars.
- Take peach cookie and with a pastry brush, brush on the red dye mix on one side and then the yellow dye mix (with a separate brush) on the other. Let these dry on paper towelling and once dry (about 10 minutes) dip and roll in the sugar mixture and set aside.
- You can leave these for a few hours to dry out completely, or eat immediately. Save in the air-tight container for when needed.
Let me know if you tried these amazing Croatian sweets and what you thought?
Dobar Tek! Zivjeli! (Bon Appetit! Cheers and let’s live!)
The Croatian Kitchen 