Fiadoe. Surinamese rum-and-raisin rolls.

This is a recipe that the boy had been begging me to make for ages, except I was not able to really find a recipe I understood or trusted. However, knowing how I love to bake, the other day my mother in law brought me  a cookbook (De surinaamse keuken by Ilse Marie Dorff) that used to belong to the boy's grandma and showed me the recipe. It was a good exercise, trying to understand it (it was all written in "creols" style, that is: -'add a little bit of that, and do this until it resembles such and such'- What? I need precision). But I decided to experiment and the rolls did not come out bad at all. So I am sharing here the recipe with the slight modifications I made. There was an ingredient, succade, that I was not able to get hold off, so I just used orange zest instead. And I did not have rum, so I used cognac.

 Ingredients
7 gr (1 envelope) dry yeast
3 tbsp. sugar
250 ml. lukewarm milk
4 eggs
vanilla essence
250 gr. butter, softened (I left it out the whole day).
500 gr. flour

For the filling
150 gr. sugar
cinammmon, powdered ginger and nutmeg
250 gr. raisins, soaked in rum
The zest of 2 oranges
100 gr. finely chopped almonds

What to do
Mix the flour with the dry yeast. Beat the eggs with a drizzle of vanilla essence and the sugar (3 tbsp)  until obtaining a thick mixture. Add 2 tablespoons of butter. While mixing (I used the kitchenaid with the hook attachment at this point, but this is totally doable by hand) start adding the flour, little by little, alternating with the lukewarm milk as moisture requires, to form a dough. You know it's ready when the dough starts separating from the bowl (or from your hands), but it is quite a sticky dough. I did not need all the 250 ml of milk, it was more like... 200 ml?

Let the dough rise for about 1 hour in a warm place (until it doubles its size). I usually cover it with plastic foil or a damp cloth. In the meantime, for the filling mix the sugar, cinammon, powdered ginger, orange zest and almonds. Flour and grease a springform pan (I used a 10 inch / 27 cm pan). When the dough is ready preheat the oven to 220º C. Flour your hands and working surface and roll the dough (it might need a little bit of kneading, but it should be easy to handle if there is just enough flour around). Cut a circle of dough  the size of the bottom of your pan and cover it. Roll out the rest of the dough to a large square, spread butter all over it, then sprinkle some filling and raisins over it. Roll the square in spiral and cut little slices of it. Arrange the rolls in the spring form (if you have some extra rolls you could just bake them individually in a muffin pan).

 Let the rolls rise for another 20-30 min. Add a little bit of butter on top of each roll, and bake for 40-50 min. And that's it, you are ready to enjoy. If you'd like, at this point you can glaze your rolls (I would use a mix of powder sugar and orange juice) or soak them in syrup (rum infused syrup if you are being naughty).