Yeast dough

For yeast dough to be successful it's really important to have fresh yeast. Use dry yeast before expiry date. Pressed yeast must be light-colored, without sour smelling. General proportion is 20g yeast per 500g flour. If the dough is made with almonds, raisins, other add-ins, than it's needed to add more yeast. For dough to rise, all ingredients must be of room-temperature, so take them out of refrigerator an hour before starting making a dough.

For pressed yeast: Sifti flour, to rich it with oxygene. Dissolve yeast in luke-warm milk. Do not warm milk over 30 C, otherwise dough won't rise, too hot milk will kill yeast. Add 1 tsp sugar and 2 tbsp flour to yeast dissolved in milk, flour it a little on top. Then loosely cover with towel or plastic wrap and let stand 15 min in warm place.

Make hollow in flour and pour in it yeast dissolved in milk. Stiri it a little with flour, then add other products recipe calls for and knead dough with all ingredients. Dry yeast can be simply stirred with flour.
Attention: add nuts, raisins, candies, dried fruits in dough later, when you are kneading it for a second time. Wrap all add-ins in flour before adding to dough.

Then you need to knead the dough, heavily pressing it with hands. Kneadi it on a lightly floured surface, kneading in more flour as needed to keep dough from sticking, until smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes (dough will still be slightly sticky).

Form dough into a ball and put in buttered bowl, turning to coat. Cover the dough with kitchen towel or plastic wrap and put in draft-free warm place to rise, until doubled in volume (about 1 hour).

Then knead it on lightly floured table couple of times, to loose closed air. Now your cake will be really light and friable. Before baking, let the bakery pan with cake stay in warm place for another 15 minutes to rise, then bake.