Cardamom-pistachio buns
With chocolate chips and a zest of orange!
Chocolate chip cardamom-pistachio buns
Time: 2 days | Difficulty: 5/5 | Recommendation: Weekend baking project
These buns! They’re delicious!! They’re one of the most complicated things I’ve made (but I don’t bake a lot), but they’re so worth it. The main flavor comes from ground up cardamom—not using cardamom powder, but freshly grinding the tiny seeds you get from the pods. Then there’s some crunchy pistachios, flakes of chocolate chips, and orange zest, and the buns are all topped with a sticky, tangy orange glaze. This is a mish-mash of a couple recipes I originally found from Verena Lochmuller, but it has been repurposed to include these specific ingredients and use normal flour! Also, it’s all done with your hands, no stand mixer required. I recommend doing the first half in the evening, then leaving the buns to proof overnight so that they’re ready to be baked when you wake up in the morning. This recipe makes 12 buns!
Ingredients/tools:
For the dough:
2.5 cups flour
1 packet instant yeast
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup ground pistachios (blitz them in a food processor, or put them in a plastic bag and mash them up with a wooden spoon)
100g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
9 cardamom pods
Zest of 1/2 an orange
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
1 stick of cold butter
For the glaze:
1 cup of icing sugar
Zest of 1/2 an orange (the other half)
3 cardamom pods
Juice of 1 orange (the zested one)
A baking dish
A big bowl
A food processor if you want to use it for the pistachios and chocolate
Method:
Crush your cardamom pods and remove the tiny little seeds inside. Put those aside.
Make the dough. Incorporate all the dry ingredients, including the pistachios, chocolate, cardamom, and orange zest. Then add in the wet ingredients (milk and eggs). Stir it all together very well.
Chop up the butter into small bits, then crumble it in and incorporate it with your hands and a hefty spatula.
As you incorporate the butter, knead the dough well, until it is soft and elastic, building up the gluten.
Let that dough proof in the bowl until it has doubled in size, about 1.5 hours.
When the dough has doubled, tip it out onto a clean surface and form it into 12 equal-sized buns.
Place the buns in a baking dish. Cover, and put them in the fridge to proof overnight (or, at room temperature for 2-3 hours if you want to make them all the same day).
When the buns have proofed, heat your oven to 375° and bake for a half hour.
While the buns are baking, make the glaze: Combine all the ingredients and stir well with a whisk or fork until smooth. Add more icing sugar if you have a particularly juicy orange!
Once the buns have cooled slightly, drizzle over the icing. You can try and make it in a sort of cross-shape across all the buns, like a hot-cross buns situation, or you can just douse them all in the icing. Both are great options!!
