Mucenici

Ingredients

• Flour600 g
• Warm milk280 ml
• Dry yeast10 g
• Sugar100 g
• Butter100 g
• Eggs2
• Honey200 g
• Walnuts — ground200 g
• Lemon zest1
• Vanilla1 tsp
• Salt1 tsp

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Dissolve the yeast with a spoon of sugar in the warm milk and leave it to foam.

   15 min

2. 2

   Knead a dough from the flour, sponge, eggs, sugar, zest, vanilla, salt and softened butter.

   20 min

3. 3

   Let it rise somewhere warm for an hour and a quarter, until doubled.

   78 min

4. 4

   Divide the dough into twelve and roll each into a forty-centimetre rope.

   18 min

5. 5

   Twist each rope into a figure of eight, joining the ends, and set it on a tray.

   15 min

6. 6

   Prove them thirty minutes and bake at 180 °C for twenty minutes, until golden.

   55 min

7. 7

   Brush the hot mucenici with honey and cover them thickly with ground walnuts.

   10 min

About the dish

The figure-of-eight shape is not arbitrary: it recalls the Greek letter theta, the first of "theos". They are baked on the ninth of March, the day of the Forty Martyrs.

The honey goes on hot, straight from the oven. On cooled pastries it does not soak in and sets as a sticky film on top.

The Moldovan version is baked and dry, unlike the Muntenian Romanian one, which is boiled in sweet water with walnuts. They are two different dishes under one name.

Worth knowing

• — Let the honey down with a spoon of hot water. Thick, it will not spread and sits in drops.
• — Grind the walnuts just before scattering. Ground ahead they turn oily and taste bitter by evening.
• — Roll the ropes thin. A thick one rises and closes in the middle, and the pattern is lost.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

420 kcal

Protein

9 g

Fat

16 g

Carbs

60 g

More from Moldova

• Plăcintă — A flat pie of stretched dough with cheese, pumpkin or apple, cooked in a dry pan.
• Zeamă — Chicken soup with home-made noodles, soured with bran borș. The Moldovan remedy for everything.
• Moldovan sarmale — Small rolls of soured cabbage stewed with smoked meat under a blanket of leaves.