Mona & Ougat Shoshanim

Here is the recipe to my Ima’s famous Mona and Ougat Shoshanim

The Mona is the traditional Chocolate Brioche that we use to break fast at Yom Kippour. My Ima would bake Monot for every sort of occasion.

With the same dough, she was also baking the Ougat Shoshanim (cake of roses) and it became her Signature Cake. She would not only bake them for myself, my sister or my brother every time we came to visit, but also for all of my cousins when they would come visit. She always had a few of those cakes in the freezer, just in case someone would come unexpected. When she would come to visit me in New York, she would always bake 3 or 4 Shoshanim and leave them in my freezer as a surprise.

Ingredients:
4 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup orange juice
250g Margarine
21g active dry yeast (3 mini bags or 1 square)
~1kg flour
A pinch of salt

Recipe:

In a medium bowl, Raise the 21g active dry yeast with 1 spoon of sugar and 125ml of warm water – wait for 15min for it to rise

In a large bowl, mix eggs, sugar, margarine, orange juice and yeast.
Add flour (and the pinch of salt) progressively and knead until the dough is formed and still a little bit sticky.

Let the dough rise for at least an hour.

Cut the dough in half.

1 – Mona
for the mona, take 2 little square of chocolate, place them in the middle of a piece of dough and form a meatball with the dough around the chocolate. paintbrush with the yellow of the egg and you can optionally add some granulated sugar on top for more sweetness.

2- Ougat Shoshanim
roll the dough flat until it’s less than 1/2 cm thin. Spread Nutella or any other chocolate spread. Roll the dough with the Nutella inside so that you have a nice long cylinder and then cut little pieces of about 3cm length and put them in a greased pan next to one another so that the “chocolate rose” faces up.
paintbrush with yellow of the egg and optionally add some sugar on top.

Bake at 350F for 25-30min until it’s golden brown

enjoy!