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Katrin Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
Yes, that would sort of fit that aspect - but you can also go from bits of woods to sticks if you ar...
Bruce Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
I think the closest English equivalent would be 'Down the rabbit hole'. It has one entrance (No, not...
Harma Spring is Coming.
20. Februar 2024
I'm definitely jealous! Mine disapeared except for one pathetic little flower. But the first daffodi...
Gudrun Rallies All Over Germany.
23. Januar 2024
Vielen Dank für den Beitrag. Ja, wir müssen darüber reden, gegen das Vergessen. Zum Glück haben mein...
Anne Decker Aargh.
17. Januar 2024
This is less likely to have an effect on your personal samples as you likely wrap the same way for a...
MäRZ
20
0

Oopsie.

I managed to totally forget blogging on Friday - there was just too much stuff going on. 

First, I was being very adult-y and sensible and had a doc's appointment to check for skin issues (cancer screening and mole check); I'd gotten some weird light spots in the upper torso area, and I was actually steeling myself for a kind of skin cancer diagnosis when going there. Fortunately, it's just an overactive dermal yeast and almost purely cosmetic, so now I'm quite relieved (and equipped with a cream and a special shampoo to curb the overenthusiasm of that specific yeast). 

After that, circumstances called for a baking spree - I'd promised a cake as a birthday present. A Snickers cake, to be precise. Which is a concoction consisting of a bit of dough glued together with liberal amounts of buttercream in three different flavours - chocolate, peanut, and caramel. 

Pro tip #1: If you actually buy caramel, and not sweetened condensed milk by accident, you don't need to boil the milk into caramel as an additional step.

Pro tip #2: If you read your notes correctly, you don't leave the cake itself in the oven for double the time necessary. (It was still fine. Phew.) It was a little flatter than I had hoped for, which made cutting it more of a challenge, but I did manage. (It's baked in form of a long rectangle, then cut in half lengthways, then the two halves are halved again with a horizontal cut so you have, in the end, four very thin and long pieces of dough. When fully assembled with the buttercream layers inbetween, you get something more or less with the proportions of a snickers bar. Which, by the way, will not fit on a standard long cake platter as it is, you guessed it, too long.)

Pro tip #3: If you try to mix double the amount of custard into the butter, you will kill the buttercream. (It's a water-in-fat emulsion, and it can only take so much of the water phase before it flips and "curdles".) If you don't realise what you are doing, you will manage to do that twice.

Which leads me to pro tip #4: Don't take skimpy notes, write things down properly. There's no guarantee you will really re-bake the cake after a short time, still remembering the bits you did the previous time in detail.

So... I had a bit of trouble getting the cake all done, but in the end, it wasn't more ugly than my regular not-so-much-trouble cakes, and (most importantly) it tasted really nice. Makes a large, very solid cake that is rather easy to transport, but should be cut in slices not more than a centimetre wide, meaning it makes about, oh, 30 and a bit servings? It will also freeze rather well, which is a good thing, as it's rarely all consumed at once!

That cake is also one of the test opportunities for my (still ongoing) quest to find the perfect chocolate buttercream, by the way...

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MäRZ
14
1

Pi Day!

It's Pi Day today!

I like pie. If it has pie in the name, and does not contain cheese, chances are high I'll go for it and enjoy it. Apple pie, shepherd's pie, Coastal Fish Pie, put-some-leftovers-into-a-shell-of-dough-pie... I love them all.

Unfortunately I get to make them way too rarely because, unfortunately, making pie is not a 20-minute-cooking-time lunch. It takes less time (obviously) if you have the filling prepared beforehand (hello, leftovers from another meal), but there's still the dough to be made, and it has to bake. Since my usual cooking plan is "go into kitchen, open fridge, see what needs to be used, put in pot, leave to cook, hope for the best", it also means I have to remember in time that there's something planned that needs prep time and then baking time, and thus I have to start early enough.

That all said... pies have happened here in the past, and will happen again, and there are a number of pie crusts that I've used. One of the versions that are pretty quick to make is the Hot Water Pie Crust:

 Hot Water Pie Crust

150 g fat (suet or butterfat)
150 g broth (or 60 g milk and 80 g water)
480 g flour
1/2 tsp salt

Heat fat and liquid together, then pour into flour mixed with salt, mix with a spoon, then knead until fully blended (should not take long). You can roll it out and use it at once, no rest time needed.

I bake it at 220°C in the no-fan setting for about 30 to 40 minutes. Filled with delicious stuff, of course.

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DEZ.
14
0

A Curious Recipe Book.

We were wondering about old-style recipes for cakes a while ago, inspired by some quite old (Art Deco) tableware, which had rather small plates for the cakes (or whatever else would have been served on them).

So I did as you do when wondering about stuff like that - I went into the Internet Archive and the Open Library and had a rootle around for recipe books from the end of the 19th century.

One of the books I came across was a really curious example, with a lot of advertisements, and a lot of recipes, but not just for cooking, no, for about everything from dyeing wool to dyeing hair to cleaning stuff to baking to curing sick horses. It's called the Brill's Family Recipe book. 


I'm not sure if I will actually try one of the cake recipes - but it was definitely very amusing to leaf through this curious mixture, and it does give an impression of what was considered important or necessary recipes back then. 

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AUG.
26
0

Holiday Travel Souvenirs.

Holiday travels are wonderful - seeing new places, meeting new people, eating new and different foods, talking different languages (or at least trying to). Then you arrive home again, eventually, bringing with you... well, what do you bring with you from holiday trips? Memories, of course - which may or may not fade over time. I'm not a diary person, but when we are on holidays, I write a little travel diary. That is something my mum always did, and because memories may fade, or it could be handy to look up where one stayed a few years ago, or some highlight of a trip, I also made this a habit. 

Then, of course, there's photographs. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I really enjoyed taking pictures during holidays, but somehow, that enjoyment got less and less over the years. Maybe it has something to do with me taking the camera mostly for work purposes, more and more so as time progressed. Mostly, though, the reason is that when I'm taking photos, some part of my brain gets obsessed with looking at things only in "will that make a good picture"-mode, and that distracts me from actually enjoying things, or looking at stuff just so. Fortunately, the Most Patient Husband of Them All does not have a similarly weird brain, and he takes a picture here and there and now and then, so we go home with a few images for our collection and to keep memories alive and to show them to friends and family.

Sometimes there's also something that we buy to take home with us. I have blind-baking ceramic "beans" that we bought on one of our England journeys years ago, and when I take them out to use them, I remember that trip. 

There's only so much you need for a household, though, and only so much stuff you want to buy and lug home from travelling. So my most favourite type of holiday souvenir is... a recipe.

I'm fond of good food, and I very much enjoy eating "foreign" things when abroad, and trying stuff that is a regional speciality. And sometimes, something is delicious enough for me to look up the recipe (or several of them, since, you know, Internet recipe search) and integrate it into our portfolio of things to cook here. Which means that I both get new ideas on what to cook or bake, and I have something reminding me of glorious times in other places, and it's something that does not need storage space (apart from the bit of space in my cook book).

Cinnamon rolls remind me of trips to the North - Scandinavia or Finland. Scones are, of course, England and Ireland. Just like pies, which I make way too rarely. There's Sächsische Quarkkeulchen, from our hiking through the Sachsenforst, there's Crostata reminding me of the Embroidery School in Muro Leccese this spring, and most recently there's Pressgurka, from our stop in Sweden on the way back home this summer.

Definitely my favourite kind of holiday souvenir, these recipes!

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APR.
21
0

Fair Food.

No, this time I'm not talking about food that is paid for fairly - but fair food as in the things I eat when on a fair. 

There is, obviously, a huge difference between going on a fair as a visitor and going on a fair as a vendor, though in both cases, I tend to bring my own food. Most of the time, the things offered at the food stalls are not, um, top-quality stuff in regards to ingredients and taste, and they are usually also quite high-priced. 

When I go to visit the Spiel game fair at Essen, the usual stuff we're taking along is sandwiches, some fruit, and a bit of chocolate or other sweet stuff. There's a nice breakfast in the morning and the group goes to have dinner at an Italian or other place in the evening. Packing and food prep for that is easy, as it's only the sweet stuff and maybe some extra fruit to pack and bring along, the sandwich ingredients are provided at breakfast time, as is more fruit. So nothing to think of or prep in the days before.

When I'm on a fair as a vendor, it's a wholly different picture. Sometimes breakfast is provided, but that's the exception; usually it's pack your own for all the event. Which means packing food that is ready to eat, does not need to be refrigerated, is more or less sensible, easy to eat a bit of and put away again (in case customers come along while you're munching), and preferably also tasty.

Bread and smoked sausages as well as boiled eggs are among the typical things that fit these requirements. Chocolate, of course - my rule is to take one bar of chocolate per day, just in case things happen and there's no time to eat properly. Carrots, radishes, and cucumbers are good choices for getting some fresh stuff that does not wilt when you look at it oddly. But something that is not bread is also very nice to have.

One of my not-bread-meal staples for these occasions is Quarkauflauf - which is, more or less, a crust-free cheesecake with fruit in it. And today's the first time since ages that I'm prepping this. With Zwetschgen as the fruit, that lovely variety of plums that I like so much, and that I find is unrivalled in Quarkauflauf. I don't really know why I haven't made this since the last fair, but I can tell you that I am very much looking forward to this fair food, to be consumed this weekend in Hohenlohe!

In case you're in the region, come see me at my stall, the fair runs Saturday and Sunday in Blaufelden. And if you have suggestions, or a favourite food to take along on travels or events, let me know in the comments - it's always interesting to hear what other people have to keep them going on events!

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JULI
14
3

Vanilla Ice Cream.

One of the things that become hard to buy if you want to buy them plastic-free? Ice cream. Which is a pity, since I love ice cream. (Though this year, the everlasting, returning-daily rain has somehow curbed that craving a bit.)

We bought an ice maker gadget a few years ago, to be able to make our own ice cream, so the solution to plastic-free ice cream was already at hand. The problem? Finding really good recipes.

Especially for that staple of ice creams: Vanilla. Most recipes you find are really, really heavy on cream and egg yolks, and I plain refuse to use 6 egg yolks for a 6-person serving of vanilla ice cream. (Egg yolks, fat, and sugar are all ingredients that make the ice cream creamy, so much of them will make much creaminess.)

I thus went and tried something with just a bit of this, and that, and it actually turned out fantastic - it's not freezing up rock-solid, it's sweet but not too sweet, and it tastes a lot of vanilla. So here you go:

13 g vanilla sugar (homemade, it's a mix of 9 parts sugar and 1 part vanilla)
400 ml milk (full-fat)

Stir vanilla sugar into the milk and bring to a boil; simmer gently for a few minutes to bring out the vanilla taste. Take off the heat, mix in

70 g sugar
12 g cornstarch (stirred into a little bit of water)

and bring to a boil again. Mix in

100 g cream (cold)

- this should cool your mix down to about 70° C; if not, make it so. Then stir in

1 egg yolk

and stir gently until slightly thickened.

Let it all cool off, place into the fridge until it's really cold through, then use your ice maker to make ice cream from this.

And if you do... let me know how you like it!

 
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APR.
07
0

Easter Cake, Continued.

It seems that the shapely Easter Lamb/Bunny cake is actually not a global phenomenon... so here's a bit more about it.

Baking shaped cakes is in the tradition of the "Gebildbrot" (image-y bread; link takes you to German Wikipedia, which has some images), and that reaches back a bit. It also seems to be a German-Austrian thing, though specially shaped baked goods do occur in other countries.

[caption id="attachment_5964" align="alignnone" width="300"] If you eat the antlers first, it looks much more lamb-like...


We have the Easter bunnies and lambs, though. There's also yeast dough bunnies and lambs. Plus, in the wintertime, there are gingerbread men, and other gingerbread shapes. There's the Stollen, too, which is supposed to remind, with its form and white sugar covering, of the swaddled child. And even the very common find-it-at-every-bakery-every-day pretzel is a form of Gebildbrot. Then there's the Plätzchen, with their many shapes and forms, that get baked for Christmas (and, to a lesser extent, for Easter).

Anyways... back to the lamb. Traditionally, the way I know it and grew up with, the cake made in lamb-shape is a very simple one, nothing fancy: flour, eggs, sugar, baking powder, a bit of lemon peel grated in and maybe a dash of lemon juice. That's also the kind you would get at a bakery. When I was small, our church also gave out a lamb as a present to each of the helpers with the festive service. (Everyone who attended got an egg, coloured, of course, that had been blessed.)

The moulds are usually considerably smaller than normal cake tins, so my mum always made additional small cakes to use up the batter. The cake she made in the bunny mould was usually a marble cake, one of the usual suspects to be made in our home (with lots of dark and little light dough, because everyone liked it better that way). I made an eggnogg cake for the elk, because of eggnogg being there, and anything with eggs is considered quite easterly, so it sort of fit. (Delicious, too, by the way.)

Baking in these shaped moulds is quite fun, but you do need to grease them thoroughly and then powder them with crumbs, or ground nuts if you like nuts, so the cake will not stick. My elk has an anti-stick coating, which does help, but it still needs the assistance. The older bunny mould my mum has really, really needs the buttering and crumb-coating, else you'll have bunny crumbs only. Also I tend to fill in too much dough, and there's always some left over anyways, which means it's a good idea to have an extra small cake tin or some muffin thingies handy. Unless you like to eat lots of raw cake batter, of course...
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