It's damson plum season here, and that means... cake time. Plum cake time! "Zwetschgenkuchen", as it is called here, is one of my favourite cakes ever, and there has to be some of it every single year when the damsons are ripe.

This year, I did some experimenting with the fruits on a shortcrust base, and accidentally stumbled across my new totally favourite shortcrust recipe. The secret's not in the sauce, but in the sugar:

450 g flour (I use spelt flour)
100 g mascobado cane sugar (I use the GEPA sugar)
1 large egg
250 g butter
pinch of salt

That's it - worked like the usual shortcrust pastry dough: mix flour and sugar, crumble in the butter so you have a homogenous mixture of small powder-coated butter bits, then knead in the egg until you have a smooth dough. Let it rest in a cool place for at least one hour.
Bake at about 175° C in a fan oven.

Shortcrust dough is lovely anyways, but the mascobado sugar adds a kind of rich caramelly taste that is just... wonderful. Normal brown sugar will alter the taste of baked goods, and mascobado does the same but to a slightly different taste, which I prefer a lot to the "normal" sugar. (I'm using this stuff for almost all my sweetening needs these days. Totally in love with it.)

Half of this amount of dough will be enough for one 26 cm round cake or 12 thin muffin-sized shells; the whole amount is enough for one baking sheet. Cover with halved damsons (at least 750 g for the round cake; you can fit much, much more if you set them almost vertical). If you put a little dry semolina on the dough before putting on the fruit, it will soak up juices and prevent the crust from getting too soggy too quickly. Bake for about 30-35 minutes... and enjoy.

[caption id="attachment_2586" align="alignnone" width="640"] A muffin-sized shell filled with damsons. There's my name written on it. (As in: I will definitely eat it this afternoon...)

It's World Baking Day today (thank goodness for Twitter, which is letting me know about such incredibly important things) so I'll share a recipe with you. It's not a classical cake, but can be eaten as a dessert: Quarkauflauf (curd cheese casserole). Basically, this is rather close to a crustless cheesecake.

[caption id="attachment_2417" align="alignnone" width="452"] There you go: Curd Cheese Casserole, fresh out of the oven, with cherries on top.


I remember this being an occasional sweet lunch when I was small. It was only occasional partly because sweet lunches were just not the rule, and partly because my dad is no fan of curd cheese, and didn't much like this as a meal. All of us had some meals we weren't too fond of, and these would thus be only very occasional - so that nobody had to suffer too much under the taste preferences of the rest of the family.After I moved out from home, I more or less forgot about this dish - until I rediscovered it a while ago, when I was looking for something to do with a leftover pack of curd cheese. This time around, I completely fell in love with the stuff, as it can be eaten hot or cold, it freezes well, goes with a lot of different kinds of fruit, and is quick and easy to make.

• 2 eggs
• 250 g curd cheese
• one tablespoon starch or about 30 g protein powder (neutral)
• about 50 g sugar (or less, if you prefer it less sweet - I use about 20 g of unrefined sugar, as the fruit delivers enough sweetness for my taste buds, and I like the taste the unrefined stuff brings into the mix)
• one teaspoon baking powder
• 200-300 g of fruit (tangerine, apple, cherry or plum all work beautifully for this)

Put everything except the fruit into a bowl and mix to a creamy consistency. Place into a suitable casserole or several smaller forms; I split this mix into 3 small oven-safe glass forms. Add the fruit of your choice either on top of the mix, or layer it between two layers of the curd mixture.

Bake for about 15-30 min at c. 170°C (fan oven) depending on your oven and the form(s) you filled it into; it should still be moist on the inside, but golden on the outside.

(If you are wondering about the protein powder substitution - I'm still getting rid of excess weight, and this is a relatively easy way for me to get enough protein per day.)

Happy World Baking Day!

Most of the recipes that I've posted during the last years were for baked goods (because I just love to bake), but today I've got something non-baked for you: Pickled Herring, as it's traditionally eaten in many parts of Germany. (Well, mostly - I made a few tweaks.)

Pickled herring (or green herring) is young (not yet fertile) herring that is put into brine and left there to ripen for a bit. These are often prepared "nach Hausfrauenart" (housewife's style), which is in a thick creamy sauce together with apples, onions and pickled cucumbers and usually eaten together with potatoes. I really love this dish, and since the fishmonger at the market in our town sells brined trout (which, taste-wise, is very close to pickled herring), I get to enjoy this more often these days.

It does not look spectacular...



...but oh, the tastes and textures!

To serve one to two persons, depending on how hungry you are (and if you serve it with potatoes or not):

~150 g brined herring (or other brined fish), filleted
about the same amounts apple, pickled cucumber, and onion

Cut the onion into rings (traditional) or dice it finely (I prefer that). I like to marinate the cut onion for a bit in a splash of the pickling liquid from the cucumbers, but that's optional. Cut the cucumbers into pieces (I dice everything!), peel the apples and also cut them up.

Traditionally, you now add a mixture of sour cream, cream and maybe even mayonnaise (you want a thick creamy consistency in the sauce), mix that with the apples, cucumber and onion, insert your brined fish and let it stand at least for a few hours, overnight is even better, for the flavours to mix and develop. It's usually quite a lot of sauce, much more than I used for the version in the photo. You won't be needing salt for this, as the brined fish is salty itself (in some cases, it's even recommended to soak it in water first to remove some of the salt), but an absolutely necessary herb for this is dill - so do add some, at least, up to a generous amount, or it won't be what it is supposed to be.

I prefer preparing this dish as a kind of salad, so I dice the fish up as well and go easier on the sauce amount. I've also recently discovered skyr, which is a traditional Icelandic dairy thing somewhere between curd cheese and yoghurt. It is fairly thick in consistency, has a lot of protein and little fat, and also works wonderfully as a sauce for this. For the salad in the picture, I added about 150 g of skyr - so it's basically about equal amounts of each ingredient (except the dill, that would be overdoing it). With the splash of pickling liquid that I marinated the onions in, the skyr ended up the perfect sauce consistency.

The result? The apple, cucumber and fish pieces are all sour, but each in its own way, and they have distinctly different textures. The onion adds some zing to the dish, and a fourth texture, while the dairy envelops all of these and lends a rich creamy mouthfeel to the whole thing. I will eat this straight, with a spoon, no need for potatoes, and be utterly ridiculously happy.

Obviously, you can adapt the amounts of the individual ingredients if you prefer more apples, or no onions, or whatever. (There's even a version where the apple is replaced by pineapple, though I'm not really fond of that.) If you're serving it with potatoes, it's advisable to make some more cream sauce, as that goes really well with the 'taters and it will be a little dry otherwise.

If you can get brined herring, feel adventurous, and do try this dish - let me know if you liked it. I hope you will!

I'm back - which meant returning to a huge backlog of emails, a stack of things to send out, and a cat very much in need of cuddles (even though her catsitters surely petted her and played with her). We had a wonderful time - and if the year 2016 continues as nicely as it started, it will be beyond awesome!

Speaking of starting the year - last year, we started a new tradition, which pleases me no end. It's traditional in Germany to clink glasses at midnight - usually with some sort of sparkly wine or champagne. Since I don't drink alcohol (I don't like the taste of it), I've always used something else. From juice to sparkling water to weird carbonated wellness drinks to non-alcoholic champagne, I've tried it all, but somehow, somehow it always falls short. (The non-alco champagne was nicest for the festive feeling, but I don't like the taste enough to finish half a bottle or more, and so wasting most of the bottle always rued me.)

Last year, though, I finally had an idea which was pleasing to all in our group: We had mousse au chocolate with the champagne, so I could clink my chocolatey glass with the champagne glasses, feeling appropriately festive. We did repeat it this year, and I think it was the first time in my life I've had the same stuff as everybody else for this celebratory moment. Plus, a year that starts with chocolate mousse... it just has to be a good one, right?

In case you're interested, the mousse I made this year consisted of 200 g good, dark chocolate and five eggs. Melt the chocolate, gently, on low heat; separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites until very stiff. Beat the egg yolks, adding a little hot water (I added about 100 ml); this will increase their volume a lot.

Now mix the almost cool (but still liquid) chocolate into the egg yolks; best is probably to do it slowly, spoon-wise. Fold the egg whites and the chocolate-yolk mix together, then pour into glasses and let it sit in a cool place for a while. (My mix was just the right amount for seven smallish drink glasses.)

I've been sharing a seasonal baking recipe every year for a few years now, and I can see the day coming when I will run out of recipes... as while I have about a dozen different cookies on the plate when the baking spree is all finished, five of the dozen are made from the same basic cookie dough, only turning into different contraptions by filling and topping them.

So here you go - the basic cookie dough that I use:

500 g flour (wheat or spelt)
250 g butter
120 g sugar
1 pinch of salt
2 egg yolks
1 pck vanilla sugar

Make a mound out of the flour, sugar, salt and vanilla sugar; cut or crumble in the cold butter until it is finely mixed in with the flour. Mound the mixture up again, make a well in the middle, put in the egg yolks. Quickly knead together until it forms a solid ball of dough; it should not stick to your hands anymore. (The original recipe called for 250g sugar, which makes them very, very sweet. If you prefer your cookies even less sweet, you can cut down the sugar a little more.)

Let it rest in a cool place for at least one hour - though it can stay in the fridge for a few days as well (won't hurt it).

Roll out, cut out cookies, and bake them for about 6 minutes at 170°C in a convector oven.

I roll the dough out very thinly, about 1.5-2 mm thin, and it takes exactly 6 mins in our oven for the edges to just start turning golden - that's when I take them out.

I leave some plain, some are filled with praliné and topped with chocolate, some are filled with red currant jelly and topped with chocolate, and some are topped with praliné and a layer of marzipan. (Roll out the marzipan on a bed of powdered sugar, cut with the wrong side of the cookie cutter you used for the cookies, and stick on with melted praliné.) I also have a sheep-formed cookie cutter, and these get a choc or praliné cover on their bodies, where the wooly bits are, then are dunked in ground nuts or almonds to make them fluffy.

Voilá - five different types of cookies from one batch of dough.

The other seasonal recipes that I blogged in the past are:

• Lemon Lozenges
• Chocolate-Coffee-Nut Spheroids
• Schokogongs (Chocolate THINGS) and how to make the praliné for filling them
• Marzipan-stuffed dates
• Gingerbread, without flour (Nuremberg type)

 
 

I spent this Saturday giving a long workshop, so today is destined to be non-busy, making up for the half-weekend. The cat, as usual, is happy to help relaxing by snoozing right at my feet (and also making it nearly impossible to move the chair).

For you who are busy, though, I have some links!

Apart from the famous Herjolfsnaes garments, there's another site with textile remains in Greenland, called Garden under Sandet. The fur finds from there have recently been analysed, and what was thought to be bison, muskox and bears have turned out to be horse and goat. The full article is up at Elsevier (paywall).

A video on Youtube shows several historic egg preservation techniques.

Finally, if you read German, Mathis from Schauhuette has posted a thoughtful piece about the payment and situation of private archaeology businesses in Germany.

It's the time of the year when the elderberry trees are blooming here, and I can smell their sweet scent through the open windows.

Elderberries outside the window... in full bloom.

Which means it's the time of the year for a very traditional food - fried elderberry flowers. They are known as "Hollerküchle" hereabouts, and the typical batter for them is made with beer:

2 eggs
100 g flour
125 ml beer
1 pinch of salt

all mixed together into a batter. If you don't like beer batter, you can substitute milk or even (sparkly) water. The batter should be enough for about 12 elderberry flowers - use them as fresh as possible. If you want, you can dip them in cold water until clean, then let them dry off. (I usually pick only clean ones and save the washing.)

Dip each flower into the batter, then fry in hot oil or (even better) hot clarified butter until golden brown. Serve hot, sprinkled with confectioner's sugar or a mix of sugar and cinnamon. It's a lovely dessert or, if you make more of it, a lovely sweet main meal.