Danish Cream-filled Carnival Buns
This recipe makes approximately 12-14 servings
Irresistible old fashioned Danish Carnial buns with blueberries, remonce, cream of course, and a top of rich chocolate ganache.
I created this recipe when the longing for a delicious Shrovetide bun in Aarhus became unbearable!
I quickly figured out the filling: the combination of tart blueberries, rich remonce and pleasant vanilla cream combined with a top of velvety chocolate ganache is a winner 😋
After a few tries, the dough got the right consistency - soft and elastic, with the perfect balance of butter and cardamom and a crispy outer edge.
It can easily seem very confusing because the recipe consists of so many parts. But in reality, each part for the filling is incredibly easy, and I recommend that you start by preparing the filling element by element and then get to work on the dough, OR make some of the filling while the dough is rising.
〰️ If you want to make an element even easier, you can buy a baking jam instead of the blueberry compote 〰️
Read more tips for each element at the bottom of the page.
Danish Cream-filled Carnival Buns
Preparation: 30 minutes Raise and baking time: 1 h. 30 minutes Total: 2 h.
Ingredients
This recipe makes approximately 12-14 servings
Chocolate ganache:
150 g milk chocolate
1.2 dL heavy cream
Remonce:
75 g soft butter
75 g brown sugar
75 g marzipan
Blueberry compote:
100 g frozen blueberries
50 g sugar
1/2 lemon, juice and zest to taste.
3 sheets of gelatine
Pastry Cream:
7.5 dL milk (sweet or light)
1 whole vanilla pod
2 tsp vanilla sugar
8 egg yolks
100 g sugar
60 g cornstarch
Dough:
4 dL milk room temperature
25 g active yeast
40 g sugar
40 g HUSK
1 tsp flake salt
2 tsp cardamom
2 M/L eggs
10 g Xanthan gum
230 g sorghum flour
75 g tapioca starch
150 g red Finax or Fin Mix from Semper (+50 grams for rolling out)
100 g butter in cubes, room temperature.
1 egg for egg wash
Method:
Ganache
I often use Marabou because if you buy a bar of 175g or 200g, guess what you have to do with the last gram you don't need? Haps haps. But Callebaut No. 832 is also really delicious.
Finely chop the chocolate and put it in a bowl. Heat the cream in a saucepan until it steams. Pour the hot cream over the chopped chocolate in the bowl. Let the mixture stand for 1-2 minutes. Then stir with a spatula from the center of the bowl in small circles that get bigger and bigger. The ganache is finished when it has come together and is shiny and smooth.
If there are some small pieces of chocolate that won't melt, put the bowl in the microwave on medium wattage for 5 seconds at a time until all the lumps can be stirred out.
Cover the ganache with cling film, lying at the bottom and stirring the ganache so that no skins form. Leave the ganache to chill overnight in the fridge. The next day, remove the film and gently whip the ganache with a hand mixer. Can also be put in the freezer for a few hours.
Place the ganache in a piping bag with your favorite piping tip. I usually use a star nozzle with 6 teeth, size 8-10.
Set aside.
Remonce
Grate the marzipan.
Knead it all together.
Set it aside.
Blueberry compote
Soak the gelatine in cold water. Boil the blueberries, sugar and lemon juice together. Grate in the lemon zest. Remove the water from the gelatine and stir it into the boiling berries.
Taste the compote. You may need to add more sugar or lemon to your taste J
Let the compote cool down. Then put it in a piping bag and put a clamp on it so that there is no air in the bag. The air will cause condensation to form, and in that condensation bacteria are not fat. Now put your airtight bag of compote in the fridge, preferably overnight or 3-4 hours in the freezer.
If you think the compote seems very stiff, that's absolutely correct and the intention. This is because, in my experience, it's easier for it to stay inside the bun if it's on the stiff side, and it's not something you can taste at all once the bun is baked.
Set aside.
Pastry Cream:
Pour the milk into a saucepan. The pan should not be too small, as it must be able to contain all the cake cream later.
In a bowl, whisk the remaining ingredients with a hand mixer until smooth. Add the now empty vanilla pod to the pot with the milk so that the last precious vanilla seeds are not wasted.
Heat the milk until it steams.
Pour the hot milk into the bowl with the whisked ingredients and whisk everything together. Then pour the mixture back into the pan. Over medium heat and whisking constantly, bring your soon-to-be cream to the boiling point.
When the cream is boiling, keep whisking-whisking-whisking. Cook and whip the cream for about 4-5 minutes until thick. If you have never cooked a cake cream before, I have two things you can do and look for. 1) taste the cream, it needs to boil to activate the cornstarch and cook away the taste of the cornstarch. Then taste the cream after 4-5 minutes and taste and it tastes good. 2) Is the consistency thick? When you take a tablespoon and dip it into the cream, there should be cream hanging from the spoon in a thick layer so you can't see through the cream and see the spoon.
Take out the vanilla beans of the cream and pour the cream into a clean bowl. Cover with cling film, placing film at the bottom of the cream to prevent the cream from forming a skin.
Chill the cream for a couple of hours in the fridge.
Once the cream has cooled, whip it up to get a fluffier cream. Whip for 2 minutes with a hand mixer.
Divide the whipped cream in half. One half goes into the buns before baking, the other half is piped into the buns after baking. The half that goes into the buns before baking can be left in the bowl. Put the other half in a piping bag, preferably with a piping tip that looks like a needle - but otherwise the most pointed tip you have.
Set aside.
Dough
In the bowl of your mixer, stir the yeast into the milk. Add the sugar. Add the HUSK and whip until jelly. This takes 4-5 minutes at medium-high speed. Meanwhile, mix all flours and Xanthan Gum.
Add salt, cardamom and egg and whisk together with the jelly. Switch from whisk to dough hook.
Add the flour mixture a little at a time. Push down the sides between stirring. You may need to remove the bowl and turn the dough with your hands before continuing to stir. Once all the flour is added, knead for 5 minutes at high speed. Then add the butter cubes. Knead the dough for another 10 minutes at medium speed. The dough should be moist but not hanging at the edges. It should also not be so dry that it feels like a hard lump. If the dough is so moist that it sticks to the sides of the mixing bowl, carefully add a little more red Finax and continue kneading.
Sprinkle a little red Finax on a clean table and turn the kneaded dough out so you can knead it with your hands. Form the dough into a ball and place it in a clean dish. The dough should now rise in a warm, covered place for an hour.
Assembly
Take out the now risen dough. Sprinkle a clean board with flour. Divide the dough in half. First roll out one half into a rectangle about 0.5 cm thick. Maybe a little thicker, but not thinner. With a knife or pizza wheel, divide the dough into 6-8 squares measuring about 12x12cm. Slightly tear the corners of each square.
With a tablespoon, place a dollop of cream on each square, on top of the cream, pipe some blueberry compote, and on top of the blueberry compote place a dollop of remonce. The most tricky part is the assembly. Take all four corners and join them at the top, the four edges between the corners joined by pressing. The four new corners are gathered again in the middle and pressed together. If there is a large amount of excess dough, pinch it off and discard. Look carefully to see if the bun seems to be closed tightly. Gently roll the bun in your hands to make it round and then place it on a baking sheet with baking paper, folded side down. There should be no holes in the dough and you need to be a little careful when assembling as the dough is a little porous. The more thorough you are with the folding, the more likely it is that all the delicious filling will stay inside the buns during baking.
Once all the buns are folded, let them rise covered for another 45 minutes.
Baking
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees hot air. Place a roasting pan in the bottom rack and pour water into it to create steam. It should heat up together with the oven.
Boil a pot of water.
Brush the buns thoroughly with a beaten egg.
Place the two baking sheets in the oven. Now you need to be a little quick on your hands, but at the same time very careful. Take your pot of boiling water and pour about 1 liter quickly into the bottom baking pan and close the oven quickly so that as much steam as possible stays in the oven. If your oven has a steam function, you can of course also just use it, I'm just not that fancy.
Bake the buns for about 12-14 minutes. They should be golden brown and feel light.
If some of them crack or some of the filling comes out at the bottom, don't worry. This is one of the reasons why the recipe is designed to add extra cream after baking.
Once the buns are baked and have cooled on a wire rack, add extra cream. Either with a syringe or by cutting a small hole in the top and inserting the piping bag. It doesn't matter if there's an ugly hole, you're going to put ganache on top anyway!
Finish with a ganache top and gold dust, freeze-dried berries, sprinkles or whatever you like - this is where your imagination can really run wild.
Tips and storage:
〰️ Like many other yeast based doughs, these buns are best on the day. If you're making a larger batch, it's better to freeze the buns before they're baked and then bake them fresh on the day you want to serve them. Take the frozen buns from the freezer, let them thaw in the fridge and bake them as originally instructed. You can probably bake the frozen buns as well, but they will probably need a little longer.
〰️ Store Shrovetide buns without ganache at room temperature. And Shrovetide buns with ganache in the fridge. The buns are best kept in a tightly sealed container at room temperature, so I recommend decorating them only when you're ready to serve them.
Tips for the ganache:
If you're in a hurry and haven't made your ganache the day before, don't worry! I have two suggestions.
〰️ Whip 1 dl. cream to a froth. Melt 150 g. chocolate in the microwave or over a water bath, do not temper, just melt. Fold the melted chocolate into the whipped cream and top your Shrovetide buns with the chocolate foam. If necessary, whisk again briefly. It's not quite the same, but it tastes great and you still get the decorative look.
〰️ Make the chocolate ganache as described in the recipe, but instead of refrigerating it, dip your Shrovetide buns in the warm ganache or spoon the ganache over the buns.
〰️ Instead of ganache, you can just use regular icing.
Tips for the remonce:
〰️ Add a little lemon zest, vanilla, freeze-dried berries, chocolate chips, or whatever else you think would make your Shrove Tuesday bun extra luxurious.
〰️ If you don't like the taste of marzipan, you can halve the amount of marzipan or omit it completely and replace it with 75 grams of regular white sugar.
〰️ For a deeper flavor, you can replace brown sugar with muscovado sugar.
Tips for the blueberry compote:
〰️ I use wild frozen blueberries from Rema1000 because I think they have the most flavor.
〰️ Buy a baking jam if you don't have the energy to make a fruit compote yourself.
〰️ Replace blueberries with your favorite berries: raspberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, blackberries, cloudberries or whatever you fancy. However, I recommend a berry that has some acidity present.
Tips for the pastry cream:
〰️ If the cream is too thick:
When whipping the cream, gently add a little milk at a time.
〰️ If the cream is too thin:
Place 2 gelatine leaves in cold water. Take 1-2 tablespoons of cream and warm it in a saucepan over low heat. Remove the water from the gelatine and add it to the pot for the cream. Stir with a spatula until the gelatine is dissolved.
Take another 1-2 tablespoons of the cream and fold it into the gelatine cream. Repeat twice so that you get more and more cream in the pan and the contents of the pan are hand-hot. Finally, fold the contents of the pan with the remaining cream. Cover and chill the cream as instructed earlier.
