Poppy Seed Roll

Remember how I wrote about all those wonderful, complicated cooking projects I was planning to accomplish this week? Well. I got back from Mexico (the weather was very nice, by the way) feeling lazy and languid. I grudgingly realized that I have a real life to attend to, but all I wanted to do was sleep until 11 a.m., go to the beach, swim, tan, eat, tan, swim, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat. I guess I'm not a real cook at heart. While I was away I didn't miss cooking and barely thought about it. Back at home, I lolled about the apartment and thought about making something half-way interesting, but then I got sick, which turned me off food and cooking for a few days.

So when I got better, what did I finally make? I pulled out some frozen dough from the fridge, smeared some pre-made filling on it, baked the whole thing and voila--I made a poppy seed roll. It's not as slatternly as it sounds. The frozen dough was 1/2 recipe of the sweet yeast dough I had made a couple of weeks earlier. The poppy seed roll recipe was from Please to the Table. I didn't have any poppy seeds on hand and wasn't about to shell out for two cups of them when I didn't know how frozen yeast dough would handle defrosting.

I added some walnuts and lemon zest to the canned poppy seed filling, rolled out the dough into a 12-inch square, spread the filling all around, rolled it up and baked it at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. The dough rose alarmingly in the oven. I don't know whether I'm doing something wrong, or if the recipe is faulty, or if this is normal, but Anya von Brezen's sweet yeast dough swells to gargantuan proportions during baking. While the roll was cooling my boyfriend remarked, "It looks pregnant." I thought it looked like a baby beached whale. But the roll was pretty good, canned filling and all.

Will I shake off my post-vacation laziness and cook something from scratch ever again? Stay tuned to find out!