When I saw Petras Apple Cake Elfriede this weekend I knew that I had to try this recipe. The picture of the cake looked so delicious.

Of course I change some small details of the recipe. For the nut cream I used almonds and no walnuts or hazelnuts like the recipe requested. I like to use the same nuts as I used in the crust so almonds were my first choice. The second change is caused by the fact that I read the recipe not attentively enough. So I mixed the cookie crumbles with the nut cream instead of sprinkle them on the top of the cream.

Its a really delicious apple cake which I can strongly recommend. I like that it is filled with lots of apples and the nut cream adds a delicious flavour to the cake. Only the crust could be a little bit more crispy for me. The next time I do it I will replace half of the honey with sugar hoping that this will make the crust crunchy.

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When my cousin told in august that she would marry in October I offered happily that I could bake the wedding cake. Maybe I was jumping up and down and asked “Can I bake the cake, can I bake the cake”, too.

Groom and Bride like the Idea and so I started to search the web for Inspiration. Finding a cake topper that fits in the budget was not easy. I liked a stylized Couple in white but this was to modern for my cousin and her fiancé. They wished for something more romantic. So I search the web for inspiration and fell in love with this cake. But for this cake I had to do the Cake Topper by myself. So I bough Polymer clay and start to model a wedding couple. This was easier then I thought.

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This bread results from a misunderstanding. My boyfriend asked if I could bake this delicious “Toastbrot” again. He was thinking about this bread that I baked already in different a Variation for last World Bread Day. I used this fast and easy recipe often in the last month because it is delicious and easy. And delicious and easy recipes were what was needed in the last busy month.

But I would never call it “Toastbrot”. It is very soft and fluffy for a whole wheat bread but typical “Toastbrot” is a white bread for me.

So I designed a recipe for a soft white sandwich bread and vanished into the kitchen. And when I just started to put the loaves into the pans my boyfrind look into the kitchen, take a look into the pans and asked me puzzled what I was baking. Well, that’s toastbrot, isn’t it?

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If anyone thought we finished the topic “Apples” already, he or she was mistaken. Every time I stroll through my parents garden, I come back with a arm full apples. And when I look at these apples they are the best because they came from the branches high in the tree, out of reach for ladder and apple picker, sun-kissed and heavenly red and sweet.

And so we are still cooking and baking with apples. This weekend I did some appel strudel with homemade strudel dough as dessert for lunch on Sunday. The filling I choose is a very simple one, just apples, sugar and breadcrumbs. No nuts, cinnamon or raisin, letting the apples shine with their great taste. We served the apple strudel with some whipped cream.

I found the filling in a old cookbook my mom own, “Wiener Küche” from Olga and Adolf Hess, published in second Edition in 1949 which my mom inherited from my granduncle. I love this book. It is ancient, it is filled with great recipe and good advices. I love to file through the yellowed pages to find inspiration and Ideas. I could although buy it as the new edition ( 43.Edition!), but I don’t like this. I would miss the decades that this book has seen.

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Other Blogs are already in the middle of the pumpkin weeks but in our kitchen apples are still the main actors. That is maybe due to the reason that pumpkin is not the favourite vegetable from all of us. Especially when I mention pumpkin soup I have to deal with a strong resistance.

But that was no reason for me not to try every pumpkin the pumpkin seller offers me at the harvest festival in our open-air museum. His favorite blue muscat pumpkin could not win me over but the “Australian Butternut” was my kind of squash. The green colour of its skin made me curios because it differed so much to the yellowish butternuts I know. And the flesh under the green skin was deep orange, nutty and slightly sweet. That was my kind of pumpkin without question.

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We still have plenty of apples so there will be a lot of recipes with apple in the next weeks for sure. We finished this years apple harvest. We picked all apples we could reach with ladder and apple picker, but there are still apples left on the highest branches.

Because we picked about 100kg apples this time we brought most of it to our local cider mill. There you can trade your apples for juice. For 100kg apples you get about 12 bottles apple juice.

But the most beautiful apples we place in baskets and store them in the attic. They will keep at least for a month or so, but this is a sort that can not stored for month like others. So eating and preserving apples is the order of the day.

And when we finished the apples there are still 50kg quinces waiting in my parents garage. But quinces keep longer, so I am still concentrating on apples.

The good thing is that the hot weeks in the summer made the apple delicious sweet. Most years they are quit sour and better used for cooking and baking than for eating raw, but this year even I like them on their own as a snack. But for todays lunch I used them for a swabian dish: Apfelküchle.

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Finally there is light at the end of the tunnel.

We nearly finished our scholarly paper and will submit it middle of this week.

I have to survive a two day long meeting and then my well-deserved vacation will start.

The last days I spent more 12 hours or more in the Lab to get the last missing data for the Paper. I shocked our cleaning lady regularly when I entered the building at 6.50 am. She does not expect somebody saying “Good Morning” to her at this time of the day.

Because I spent so much time in lab there was nearly no time for cooking or baking. But I still get delicious dinners because the boyfriend take care of cooking. One evening, when I was still in the train station on my way home, I told him what he would need for an onion tart and he prepared the dough. When I came home the dough had risen finely and we prepared the filling together.

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