500 g of dry blue poppy seeds

50 g raisins

50 g of dried cranberries

50 g dried apricots

70 g walnuts or pecans

100 g of candied orange peel

4 tablespoons of natural honey - 80 gram

100 g of sugar, e.g. cane sugar

2 tablespoons of butter - 20 g

From the given amount of ingredients you will get about 1300 grams of sweet poppy seed mass. Homemade poppy seed mass has a very wide range of uses. You can use it for sponge cakes, buns and poppy seed cakes. This filling freezes really well.

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1. Pour the poppy seeds into a pot and pour three glasses of water over them. Stir everything and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to minimum and cook for another five minutes. After this time, pour the whole thing into a large but fine strainer placed, for example, on a wide bowl and set aside for 20 minutes for the poppy seeds to cool down. During this time, you will also get rid of excess water. Poppy seeds strained in this way may practically not require additional pressing through cheesecloth.

2. Grind the slightly cooled poppy seeds, well drained of excess water, in a meat grinder with the smallest mesh attachment. Sometimes you have to grind it twice. This time, however, I only ground it once and I was pleased with the result.

3. Put the ground and cooled poppy seeds into a larger pot ,pour four tablespoons of natural honey into the pot, i.e. about 80 grams of honey (linden, acacia). Add about 100 grams of sugar (I used cane sugar). Add about 20 grams of real butter and add about 70 grams of chopped nuts. Walnuts or a mixture of walnuts and pecans are best. Other soft nuts will also work, such as cashews or pistachios.

4. Add all previously prepared dried fruits and mix the mixture. Place the pot on the burner with minimum power. Stir the poppy seed filling until the butter melts and the filling combines together. However, this should not take longer than five minutes.

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While the cooked poppy seeds are cooling (or at any other time), prepare dried fruits and other additions. In the photo below I have already prepared candied orange peel. I used 100 grams of such peel, but if you also have candied lemon, citron or papaya peel, you can easily make a mix of them with a total weight of 100 grams. Candied ginger and pineapple will also work, but they need to be cut finer. I also have 50 grams of small raisins and 50 grams of dried whole berry cranberries. You can also use larger raisins or golden raisins, which I recommend cutting into smaller pieces. You can replace the cranberries dried cherries, which should also be lightly chopped. I also added a few dried apricots with a total weight of about 50 grams. I chopped the apricots before adding them to the poppy seeds.

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