A recipe for Finnish custard buns

AKA possibly the best pasty ever created

Dallaspulla

The final thing I ever cooked for staff food as a restaurant cook was a Finnish sweet bun called Dallaspulla.

The practice at the last restaurant I cooked at was always to make something special yourself if it was your birthday, for example, or, as in this case, your last day working there.

And on that final day, what I wanted to make was a sweet Finnish bun my Finnish wife had introduced me to years before when we were yet girlfriend and boyfriend visiting each other on different sides of Europe while negotiating a long distance relationship.

This bun is a creamy, vanilla-filled thing of beauty.

It is like a less delicate, ballsier, (very) distant cousin of the French pain au raisin. A cousin who, having moved to colder climes up north, has long-since upgraded his flaky pastry for hearty bread dough, and decided raisins were no longer worth the bother.

The subtle custardiness of the pain au raisin is dialled up immeasurably in the Dallaspulla through the use of what in Finnish is called rahkaa, a fresh cheese not dissimilar to fromage frais/blanc (outside Finland you might find rahkaa called quark in shops). This is sweetened with both sugar and custard powder to create a rich yet balanced vanilla filling, almost like cheesecake, that runs through the entire bun.

There are other custard buns in the world.

But there is only one Dallaspulla.

Here is how I make it: