Well, well, well! Look what I made! I’m so pleased. All credit must be given to Andrea Slonecker over at Food & Wine whose video on this made all the difference. These probably look like croissants, but they’re not, these are bread. The bread dough is rich in eggs and butter. Please review Andrea’s video and make sure you have enough eggs (5) prior to starting.

  • Dough Ingredients
  • 3 cups flour, divided
  • 1 envelope active dry yeast (2-1/4 tsp.)
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • 1 cup milk, heated to between 100 and 115 degrees F
  • 1/2 cup butter (4 oz. or 1 stick), melted
  • 3 large egg yolks
  • 1 tsp. kosher salt
  • Streusel Ingredients
  • 1 Tbsp. melted butter
  • 2 Tbsp. sugar
  • 2 Tbsp. flour
  • Cream Cheese Filling Ingredients
  • 8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature
  • 2 Tbsp. powdered sugar
  • 1 large egg yolk
  • 1 tsp. lemon zest
  • Egg Wash Ingredients
  • 1 large egg yolk
  • 1 Tbsp. milk
  • A Variety of Jelly or Jam or Pie Filling

Dough: I used a stand mixer. Stir together 1 cup flour, yeast, and sugar. Stir in warm milk and let sit until bubbles form across the top of the mixture. While you’re waiting for that to happen, in a separate bowl, mix together the melted butter, egg yolks, and salt. Stir the butter-egg mixture into the activated yeast mixture. Mix well. One cup at a time, stir in the remaining 2 cups flour. Let it knead on low speed for about 4 minutes, only adding flour if absolutely necessary if the dough is still tacky. Add as little flour as possible, it’s supposed to be a very soft dough. Once the dough is smooth, cover and set aside to rise until doubled, 1 to 1-1/2 hours.

Streusel: While the dough is rising, in a very small bowl, stir together melted butter, sugar, and flour. Set it aside so that once the butter cools and firms up you can break the mixture into a crumbly mixture to sprinkle on top of the Kolaches. For now, just set it aside to cool down.

Dough again: Prepare a sheet pan with parchment paper. Once the dough has risen, punch it down and divide it into a dozen equal pieces. Roll each piece into a smooth round ball. Place the dough balls, evenly spaced, onto the prepared sheet pan, cover with a damp cloth, and let them rise until nearly doubled, about 45 minutes.

Cream Cheese Filling: While the dough balls are doing their rise . . . In a food processor or mixer, stir together all the ingredients (cream cheese, powdered sugar, egg yolk, and lemon zest) until smooth. I used a food processor and it worked well. Set aside.

Egg Wash: In a very small bowl mix together the large egg yolk and milk.

Assembly: Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Once the dough balls have nearly doubled in size, using several fingers, make a well in the center of each dough ball about 2″ in diameter. This is where watching the video comes in handy. She really dug a spread-out center in each dough ball. Make sure not to pierce the bottoms.

Once each dough ball has a well, use a pastry brush to brush the sides of the dough balls with the egg wash.

Place one tablespoon of cream cheese filling into each well and leave an imprint for the jam filling to go next.

Place one tablespoon of jelly, jam, or whatever kind of filling you’re using into each cream cheese well.

Break up the firmed streusel topping and sprinkle it across the tops of the Kolaches.

Bake at 375 degrees F for 20 minutes or so. Mine took quite a bit longer than that. I waited until the edges were a dark brown.

Enjoy! These are beautiful and delicious. They weren’t hard to make.

Notes: I used bread flour, but I wonder if all-purpose would have been better. This dough is like challah or brioche, so it’s supposed to be soft. I always use salted butter, but I don’t think it matters. I used my stand mixer for the dough and my food processor for the cream cheese filling. I use extra-large eggs and I think that’s one reason it took longer to bake, because my Kolaches had more liquid. I also didn’t spread mine out as much as Andrea did in the video which I think also contributed to the longer bake time, mine were thicker. Andrea didn’t put cream cheese into all of hers, she just put jam into a few of them. It still worked great. I am so, so pleased that these turned out. I love it when I have all the ingredients on hand and it goes according to plan.