Rose cake with sourdough starter: the recipe for a puffy and soft cake

The rose cake with sourdough starter is a naturally leavened, soft and delicious cake, very similar to a brioche bread stuffed with a cream of butter and sugar. The long-leavening dough is made with sourdough  starter (always to be refreshed before use) and must rest at least a whole night.

Then prepare the dough the day before, to allow time for the sourdough starter to grow. For the rest, the recipe is very simple: just mix the ingredients all together, preferably with the help of a planetary mixer. Make roses by rolling the dough, cut it into rounds and you're done.

How to prepare rose cake with sourdough starter

Melt the sourdough starter with the milk in a bowl. Stir slowly until you will obtain a liquid mixture. Pour the 00 type flour and the Manitoba flour a little at a time and continue to knead.

Lightly beat the eggs and pour them into the planetary mixer. Add the softened butter, little by little, together with the granulated sugar.

Finally add the honey, the vanilla extract, then some grated lemon peel and a pinch of salt. Mix the ingredients well, stringing the dough.

Make a loaf on a work surface, keep it in a bowl well covered with plastic wrap and let it rise in a warm place until it doubles its volume.

For the filling, soften the butter and mix it with the same amount of sugar until creamy.

Once the dough has risen, spread it on a work surface to obtain about 1cm of thickness. Spread the butter and sugar cream over the entire surface and roll the dough for the long side. Cut 7 roses of the same weight and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, spacing them apart. Let it rise again, up to double the volume.

Lightly brush the roses with a mixture of eggs white and milk, then bake at 180 degrees C for about 25 minutes.

Tips

Plan ahead: the recipe requires long breaks to give the sourdough starter time to grow. Take the sourdough starter out of the refrigerator the night before, refresh it and leave the quantity you will need for the recipe at room temperature all night. The next day, dissolve the sourdough starter in milk at room temperature and continue with the normal preparation.

Pay attention to the flour. Choose a type of medium strength flour that resists the rising of the dough well. The best ones are the 00 flour and the manitoba flour. In this case we have considered half a dose of one type and half of another, but it's up to you to choose the proportion.

You can fill the inside of the roses with a sugar cream, as in this case, or with a spreadable hazelnut cream or jam. Decorate on the surface with sprinkles of sugar or dusting icing sugar.

Preservation

You can preserve the rose cake with the sourdough starter for about 3 days, under a glass bell jar. Like all leavened products, the rose cake tends to dry out in the following days.

If you have more then, the advice is to heat it in the oven for a few minutes, to melt the butter cream inside and make it soft again.