I knew I was going to make nut horns for the wedding (nephew’s request) and planned on using my grandmother’s sweet yeast dough (paska). But a test run used Platinum yeast resulted in a dough that seemed very yeasty. Like, overly yeasty. Which was odd because I’d use it before and they were fine.
Most nut horns on the Internet will use a cream cheese-based dough and I was already using that for the rugelach. But my nut horn would use the same components as a nutroll—an ethnic dessert common amount Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Croatian, etc. It’s a sweet yeast dough rolled flat, smeared with a ground nut filling, rolled up and baked as a log. It’s very traditional for Christmas. I started checking nutroll recipes online to compare with my dough. A Ukrainian version was almost identical to my grandmother’s, but this Hungarian was completely different. I mean COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. It had more dairy, more eggs, more butter—and most important, I didn’t have to knead it.
Score one for the Hungarians.
While I loved the dough recipe, I wasn’t crazy about their filling…which was simply ground nuts, sugar and egg whites— 3 lbs of ground nuts for one roll! I knew CathyZ’s potica (term for Polish nutroll) filling would work because I’d used it often. It’s much more favorable and not as one-note as the Hungarian version.
You can watch the video to see just how easy it is. I’ll write out the recipe next. I prepared 6 dozen nut horns from one batch of dough. I could have frozen these unbaked because I “chatted” with King Arthur help line and asked for advice considering all the other stuff I was baking for the wedding. They said prepping and freezing for 1 week would not affect the yeast.