Trefoil buns

My sister has many different herbs growing in her garden. Her caraway plant has flowered and produced lots of seeds which she wanted to try in some recipes.

This is a picture of the dried caraway seeds in her garden.

About caraway

Caraway is native to South Europe, Asia and India. It is cultivated on a large scale in Germany and Holland. The name comes from the Arabic karawya which means seed. The Ancient Egyptians used it in medicine and as a flavouring. It is supposed to have magical properties and was reputed to ward off witches and prevent lovers from straying!

This information comes from Jekka McVicar and her book 'Jekka's complete Herb book'. It is a wonderful book detailing many common and uncommon herbs and their uses as food, flavour and medicines.

As I'm staying with her this weekend I looked through my cook book collection and found a recipe for Trefoil buns that had the option of being cherry or caraway seed. Having ingredients available for both we decided to split the recipe and make half of each flavour.

This is the recipe from Good Housekeeping:

The dough was made and left to prove in a covered bowl outside, as it was very warm. It was left for a bit longer than 1 hour but it didn't affect the dough.

We divided the dough in half and put in chopped cherries into one and caraway seeds into the other.

They were then rolled into small balls and three placed into a muffin tin. The dough was soft and a bit sticky but a little extra flour helped to make it easier to roll.

This is the cherry ones. After proving again they had a whole cherry placed into the center and brushed with milk.

The caraway seed ones has the same milk wash and a sprinkling of seeds on top.

The recipe calls for them to be baked at 200oC for 20 minutes but this was too hot and too long. Ours were done much quicker so if making them again I would check after 10 minutes.

The recipe doesn't tell you how many to make as I guess it depends on how big you make the balls. We made 15 in total, but could have got more if we made them slightly smaller.

The finished buns:

Inside they were soft and fluffy and very nice! I also think they look a lot like the original picture, so we did well!

The cherry buns were a bit like a Belgian bun, so we thought a drizzle of glacé icing would make a nice addition.

The caraway buns were subtle with the flavour, until you bit into a seed and then you had an explosion of flavour. I don't think they need anything else, they were good just as they are.

I might look through the other recipes I sorted out and see what else I could try with caraway. It wasn't a flavour I was particularly concerned with, but now it's something I would be willing to use more off!