Pesto Flower

For a change, no pictures of trees or sunlit clouds today, but a recipe.

O.K. and I celebrated New Year's Eve with my parents and my sister. We had a buffet meal with hot soup and most of the other items made or prepared by our Mum, but us guests also brought something along.

Our contribution was a "pesto flower", a kind of bread that was supposed to look pretty on the buffet and go well with most of the other things on offer. I found the recipe in a free booklet from Aldi's.

You need:

• 600 g flour
• 40 g yeast
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 50 ml olive oil
• 300 ml warm (not hot!) water
• pesto
• 1 egg

Mix the flour, yeast, sugar, salt, oil and water and let the dough rest in a warm place for about an hour.

Separate the dough into 3 pieces and let them rest for about another 1/4 hour.
Roll out each piece to a circle about 2 mm thick.
Preheat the oven to 160 C (with air circulation) or 180 C (if your oven does not have circulation).

Spread your baking tray with baking paper and put the first circle on it.

Spread 2 to 3 tablespoons of pesto on it. Don't worry, a thin spreading will do well - I went a bit over the top there!

Repeat with the second circle and cover with the third circle (no pesto on the top one).

Put a small round glass or cup as a place holder right in the middle of the three circles.
Cut from there in four equal parts, then each part into four narrower segments, so that it looks like a sun or flower.

Then take two segments or strips next to each other and twist against each other, pressing the ends firmly together. Repeat until all 16 strips are turned into 8 "petals" of your "flower".

Whisk one egg and spread on the flower.

Bake for about 25 minutes.

This was our first attempt, and next time, we'll know better how to twist the segments so that the flower will look more like the one in the original picture. 

Also, my dough did not rise as expected; I don't know whether it was the yeast (not fresh but powdered) or the resting place was not warm enough (O.K.'s theory).
Anyway, I probably would not have managed to get a reasonably good result without O.K.'s help.  

It was nice enough, and we can imagine this working well with other types of savoury spread, too. The recipe suggests to make a sweet variation of the dough and use a filling of nuts, sugar and cinnamon; I guess that would work well, too.