Orange Twists

These are fantastic made with salted Kerrygold Irish butter! It works to make up the full recipe of sweet dough but use only half at a time, refrigerating the other portion for a few days. If using half the dough, roll out to an 9x12-inch rectangle (or 9x9 square is fine, because the dough tends to pull a bit when folding it over the filling) and cut into 9 rolls. Also works well with a nut filling: grind 4 ounces of nuts and add to ¼ cup sugar. Half of the dough also works perfectly with the King Arthur Flour bun pan. Roll into a 16x8-inch rectangle, add filling, roll, and cut into 6 slices. Let rise 45-60 minutes, and brush with egg wash. Bake at 375°F for about 16 minutes (I raise the rack up one from where I usually have it so the bottoms don’t burn), tenting with foil if browning too quickly. This also works well with apricot lekvar as a filling; in that case I twist the buns as I do the cardamom buns.

Ingredients

  • 1 recipe Basic Sweet Dough
  • 2 tablespoons butter melted
  • ½ cup sugar
  • 2 tablespoons grated orange peel/zest
  • 1 egg beaten

Instructions

  1. Roll out dough to 18x12-inch rectangle. Brush with butter.
  2. Combine sugar and peel; sprinkle over dough.
  3. Fold ⅓ of dough along 18-inch side over center. Fold other side to overlap. Press down lightly, and cut into 1-inch strips.
  4. Twist each strip twice; place on greased cookie sheets.
  5. Cover; let rise in warm place until light and doubled in size, 45 to 60 minutes. Brush with beaten egg.
  6. Bake at 375°F for 15-18 minutes, or until golden brown.
Prune-filled version Walnut-filled version Orange version Walnut-filled version Walnut-filled roll Walnut-filled rolls

Notes

20 May 2025: Made these today for the first time in quite a while. I didn’t have any oranges, so I used the chopped walnut/sugar filling for 5 of the rolls and strawberry cream cheese filling for the remaining 4. The filling ingredients are:

  • 85 g cream cheese softened
  • 31 g powdered sugar
  • 11 g freeze dried strawberry powder
  • 1¼ teaspoons all-purpose flour
  • pinch table salt
  • ⅜ teaspoon lemon juice powder

The first rise was 50 minutes in the oven with the light on (it was a very cool day). The second rise was 30 minutes in the oven with the light on, and then 20 minutes on the counter while the oven preheated, for a total of 50 minutes. They baked as usual for 15 minutes at 375°F on rack 2. The baking sheet was lined with a silicone baking mat.