I mentioned Zwetschgen yesterday, right? Well. Zwetschgen. I love them. I also love poppy seeds. And fortunately, those two go together very, very well... so recently, this happened:



Zwetschgenkuchen mit Mohngeheimfach (Plum cake with a secret compartment for poppy seed filling). (Yes, obviously the secret compartment won't stay secret very long, but a cake has to be named in some way, right?)

And here's the recipe:

Yeast Dough:
500 g flour
80 g butter (soft)
pinch of salt
20 g yeast
200 ml milk
70 g sugar
1 egg

Filling:
250 ml milk
145 g honey
35 g sugar
150 g poppy seeds (ground)
30 g semolina
good pinch of ground cardamom

Topping:
about 1.5 kg Zwetschgen

Make yeast dough (add the butter, egg and salt in last, after having kneaded it for a bit) and set in a warm spot to rise. Mix honey, milk, sugar and cardamom and bring to a boil; add semolina, let it bubble up once, then stir in poppy seeds and set aside to cool.
Divide dough into two parts; cover bottom of a deep baking sheet with first half (the rolling pin is your friend), spread filling on top, cover with second half of dough. Set aside to let rise once more.
Pit the Zwetschgen: cut around so the two halves still hang together, remove pit, then cut into each half so the four quarters still hang together (they stack better on the cake if prepared thus). Place on top of the cake, overlapping.

Bake at about 170° C for c. 50 minutes (heat from top and bottom, no fan. I can do no-fan cakes now! Hooray!).

Enjoy. Tastes best when still slightly warm from the oven, and goes very well with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

Late summer is a season for delights - our peaches are ripe now, the first late-summer and autumn apples are also ripening, and of course there are the Zwetschgen, this kind of plum that lends itself to baking and cooking like nothing else does. Few things are better than Zwetschgen on a cake with Streusel... or even without.
There's another delight of the season, however, and that is elderberries. As fond as I am of elderberry flowers (excellent fritters, lovely syrup, wonderful jelly - though I only make fritters, because I am lazy and our tree doesn't yield so much, flower-wise, without getting a jetpack or some way to turn off gravity), it is totally worth it to not harvest all the flowers, because then... there's elderberries later on in the year.



While one should not eat them raw (they are slightly poisonous when uncooked), they will add colour and wonderful flavour to cooked dishes. So when we happened upon some windfall apples, I took this as a sign to get out the ladder and harvest some elderberries... and a while later, we had dinner.

Curd cheese casserole with elderberries and apple, seasoned with a little cinnamon. A seasonal delight indeed!

As you can probably tell from the rather late blog, I'm not yet back in the groove. I'm working on it, though - as on what feels like a gazillion of other things. Plus, there's some baking going on, because obviously the new oven has to be tested. Thoroughly.

I've made, for the first time in my life, "Ofennudeln" - which is either a dessert or a sweet main dish, consisting of a yeast dough either unfilled and eaten with compote or apple sauce or vanilla custard, or filled with something - such as sweetened Quark and plum jam. These will definitely happen again - I really liked them. (One of the reasons why I had to make a yeast dough: The oven has a shiny programme for quality raising time for the dough.)



The latest experiment, though, was not so successful. I've been pondering trying out bean brownies for a good long while now, and I finally got around to doing this. The main reason this time was weird beans that stayed dry and unpleasant on the inside even after being boiled for a good long time... so I decided to puree them and turn them into bean brownies. The second reason? A new variation on the topic of baking frame - a silicone band with magnets that latches onto the baking sheet in almost any shape.

Well.



The baking band works very well. The bean dough recipe also results in something edible, though the Most Patient Husband is really not impressed with the stuff, and I would file it under "yes, edible, but not happening again". The texture is neither properly cake-like nor properly brownie-like; I can definitely taste the beans, and it's not very chocolatey. I don't find the texture unpleasant, but it's unexpected and somehow not fitting the idea of brownies.

So that is not going into the stack of recipes that will be made again...

If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that I like buttercream... though there is one thinkg that still eludes me, and that's a good chocolate buttercream.

Basically, there's a few different types of this stuff. There's French buttercream, which uses egg yolks (whipped up into a froth), sugar, and butter as a base; Italian or Swiss buttercream, which use a kind of meringue fluff made from egg whites and sugar to mix with the butter, and the good old German buttercream, which is a base of custard (with or without egg added) that is beaten into the butter. (Theoretically there is also American buttercream, which is just butter and sugar.) All of them are nice (well, I never tried the American version, since the first thing I do is reduce sugar amounts, and that type won't work anymore that way), all of them are water-in-fat emulsions, which means that there is a point where you cannot add more of the base to the butter, and I suspect all of them are both softened, texture-wise and stabilised, emulsion-wise, by sugar (which would explain why I sometimes have trouble with the amounts of custard per stick of butter given in a recipe where others don't - one day I will try it. Possibly.).

[caption id="attachment_3941" align="alignnone" width="640"] This is what happens if you beat in too much of the watery base - even if you have enough emulsifying agents in there, you start to get pockets of the watery phase. Next step if you beat in even more: "curdling". Which means you need to have a bit more butter, whip that nice and soft. Then beat the curdled stuff into the butter, and all will be fine again.


Now, my problem is this. If you make a ganache (a filling of cream and chocolate), it is very nicely chocolatey, but it's also very solid. Combining that with a buttercream filling makes for a weird difference in texture that does not please me. So I thought I might solve the problem by making a chocolate buttercream instead, using a recipe I found for Swiss buttercream... and unfortunately, while it did taste very nice, it was just as hard and solid as the ganache. So not a winner either. (The recipe promised very high fluffyness, by the way, "like biting into a chocolate cloud". Well, no. At least not here.) Now I have gotten around to try the good ol' German style buttercream, which has you make a choc custard and then add that into the butter. The result had a pleasing texture, but a relatively mild taste that was somehow chocolatey but not really in-your-face-here-comes-chocolate-y, which is what I sort of hoped for or expected.

So... the search will go on. Maybe some French buttercream with chocolate in it next? Or a different recipe for the custard, making it more chocolatey? Hm.

If anyone here has a recipe for glorious, not-concrete-solid choc buttercream, by the way, please let me know!

We have a small red currant bush in our garden, and now is the time when the fruits are ripe... so it's glorious, glorious custard time!

I love red currants best in two ways: As jelly sandwiched between Christmas cookies, where there is just no replacement for their taste, and buried under hot vanilla custard in the summer. This is one of the childhood tastes that just lingers with me, even though I am making it with different custard today... but it still is a comfort food for me. And it's utterly delicious (or at least I think so). And easy to make to boot:

Pick (or buy) ripe red currants. Make custard according to the instructions on your vanilla custard mix packet, or however else you prefer to make your vanilla custard. While it is cooking, wash the currants, shake them dry-ish, strip them from their stems, and place them into a bowl. If you like your sweet dishes sweet, sprinkle a little sugar on top of them.

Gently pour the hot custard on top of the fruit and let it sit for a bit. That's it. Enjoy.

[caption id="attachment_3882" align="alignnone" width="640"] It's not looking spectacular, I know... but the taste is wonderful.


I like it best when still warm, but it's also delicious when cold. Currant season. I love it.

If you're interested in medieval cooking, here's something new and exciting for you: Prospect Books is publishing "Zinziber: Sauces from Poitou. Twelfth century culinary recipes from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, MS 51".

The book is featuring recipes found on a single sheet contained within a manuscript with medical recipes, and it dates to the middle of the 12th century. This makes is a very, very early document about medieval food and cooking.

The book contains a transcript and translation of the recipes plus an attempt to recreate the dishes, a discussion of culinary traditions and flavourings, and modern recipes to try yourself... and it definitely sounds very, very interesting.

It's hot around here - incredibly hot, with the months' temperatures more like those we're supposed to have in July, and a warm one to boot. I've used up the water in the rainwater tank for washing wool, so I don't even have the opportunity to go bathe my arms in cold (if sheepy and slightly dirty water) several times a day...

I won't complain, though. Just hang in here and drink lots of water and iced coffee and tea (hot tea, mind you, somehow hot English tea is something I love both when it's cold and hot outside).

Speaking of tea - if you read German, you might be interested in Christa's article about tea in the Middle Ages. (Spoiler: It was not consumed as a normal beverage like it is today.) I always think it's rather funny how many people hanging out in the Living History scene have a very deep fondness for coffee and chocolate... even though both are obviously very much out of place for medieval kitchens!