Here. I’ll say it right away to avoid misunderstandings: the brioche rolls filled with jam I’m talking about today were supposed to be another dessert!
They were meant to be a cake called Torta Elisabetta. A cake that maybe some of you already know. Because it’s a somewhat dated recipe, just like the cookbook where it’s found: the famous Manuale di Nonna Papera 🤩 that my daughter had received as a gift, and in which she put about twenty bookmarks, one for every recipe she decided to replicate. Or that she asked her mom, that is me, the ‘queen of perfect replicas’ (ha ha ha!), to replicate.

Torta Elisabetta is one of those recipes.
I mean. It was. 😄

You who already know me well know how it works in my kitchen: my intentions are always good, in fact excellent, I would dare say at the start… and then…

So, the day comes when I decide to try it, and I set about it with all my goodwill, the book open beside me, and I start well by giving my best — that is, by taking the first ingredient, the flour. I have it, 400 grams, et voilà into the bowl. Go.

I move on to the second ingredient, the butter. I have it! Go, 130 gram… oops, what? how many grams? Help.

When, immediately, I realize that I ran out of butter, that is, I realize that the little piece of butter I have weighs 60 grams and not 130 as Nonna Papera wants… well… what do I do now, leave it? But yes, come on, it can be done!

Then… ok, while I’m at it… I could also change things…

It always happens like this: it is precisely in this way that the worm of personal interpretation creeps in, and this time too goodbye to the recipe copied exactly the same.

😃

Yes, I joked about it a bit! But, oh, it’s the truth!

I like to mess around in the kitchen so much that customizing recipes comes naturally to me, I can’t help it!
If you own the Manual of Grandma Duck you can check: after all my recipe is indeed different from Torta Elisabetta, but in essence it isn’t — I only lightened it a bit and changed the method using a longer rising time. No big deal, right? 😀

With this recipe you’ll get about 20 brioche rolls filled with jam. I called them that because that’s what they are: rolls. Made from a very lightly sweet brioche dough, one of the many versions in the world of what’s called brioche dough.

They are soft and slightly crumbly rolls; we liked them a lot, and even if I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter I’m sure the final taste isn’t so different from Nonna Papera’s Torta Elisabetta. A cake that who knows… maybe one day my daughter will make it for real and without variations! 😀

〰〰〰

I have other stuffed rolls on my blog; I’ll link them here! (2 sweet and 2 savory) 👇

Difficulty: Medium
Cost: Economical
Rest time: 4 Hours
Preparation time: 20 Minutes
Portions: 20 Pieces
Cooking methods: Oven
Cuisine: Italian
Seasonality: All seasons

Ingredients

3 1/3 cups type 0 flour (or all-purpose flour)
4 tbsp butter (about 2 oz (melted in the procedure))
1/3 cup milk
1 egg
2 tbsp sugar
1 lemon (grated zest)
Half cube fresh brewer's yeast
20 tsp jam (to taste; I used blueberry)

Tools

Bowl proofing
Work Surface
Baking sheet
Mold silicone

Steps

Dissolve the fresh yeast in the milk.
Melt the butter.
Pour the flour into a bowl.
👉 I worked the dough by hand, just like Nonna Papera wants 😀 but I’m sure you can safely use a stand mixer or a food processor with dough blades.
Add to the flour the melted butter, the sugar, the grated lemon zest, the whole egg and the milk in which the yeast was dissolved.
Work everything in the bowl then transfer the dough to the work surface and knead for a few minutes.
Let the dough rise for a couple of hours, after which take small portions of dough and shape them into balls by hand (I got 20 in total).
Flatten each dough ball with your hands to obtain a disk of dough not too thin, put a teaspoon of jam in the center of each disk and close it well taking care not to let the jam escape.
👉 Make sure there are no holes or openings in the dough otherwise during baking the jam will leak out (but know that some leakage will happen anyway, or at least it happened to me 😄).
Place the filled balls on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and let rise for another 2 hours.
👉 Nonna Papera’s recipe calls for placing them in a cake pan, letting them rest for an hour and then baking them. During baking you’ll get, I quote, a “supertorta” (basically like a danubio). I’m sure that following that method you’ll get an excellent result. 😊
I, however, proceeded like this:
After the 2 hours of rising — due to the late hour at which I reached this point in the recipe — instead of baking them I covered them with plastic wrap and put them in the fridge overnight. The next morning I took them out of the fridge, waited half an hour for them to warm up a bit, then baked them (oven at 392°F, baking time a little over 20 minutes).
At baking time I also did a small test, I’ll report it so you can decide how to bake your rolls: most of the rolls I baked on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, 6 rolls I instead transferred to a silicone muffin mold. I wanted to see if there were differences in the final result. No, I didn’t notice big differences, except 4–5 extra minutes of baking time for the rolls placed in the mold. Here they are, these:
They turned out practically identical to the rolls baked on the sheet, with the only difference that the jam that leaked out (in two rolls out of six) remained confined in the mold and stuck to the roll rather than to the parchment paper. A detail that can be useful to know. 😉
Some of the rolls I baked on the sheet stuck together (they had already joined during rising because they weren’t spaced far enough) but once baked they separated without problems.
Regardless of how you decide to bake your brioche rolls filled with jam, the only warning I feel I should give is to measure the amount of jam well in relation to the size of the rolls.
In fact a couple of mine (you can see them in the background in the photo below) were overfilled, so much so that some jam had leaked out already during rising, forcing me to pinch the dough to close it (with so-so aesthetic results).
But I must say that those very rolls that “lost” jam, those, to my children’s eyes were the most delicious, and they wanted to eat those first! And I, who sometimes worry about the exterior appearance of what I cook! 😃
Enjoy!