Since some years I always thinking during Eastern, that it  would be nice to bake an Easter Pinze. Until now, I never did it, but this year it seems to be the perfect time. After a quick search in the internet showed me that there are two different recipe variation. One is made with anise wine, the other one with grated lemon or orange peel. I would never allow anise seeds into my kitchen, not to mention to bake with them… So it was an easy decison.

As basis for my recipe I started with Petras Recipe, but added a sourdough and a milk roux and changed the rest of the recipe accordingly.

When I take the bread out of the oven, it smells already very good, after fresh lemons. And its taste is great, too. Lemon with the tiny bit of tanginess from the sourdough make the bread taste like the fresh air in spring.

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And what did I bake with the homemade puff pastry?

Delicious Cheese and Herb swirls, made after a family recipe of my boyfriends family. The boyfriend loves them and eat the first batch faster then I could take a picture. For the second batch I forbid him to test them before I photograph the swirls -  afterwards the swirls were nibbled away fastly.

They are really delicious and are easy to vary, depending what cheese or herbs are used. At the moment, during spring time, I like to use fresh springs of clives, wild garlic, parsley and garden burnet. In the winter I prefer using frozen herbs, when there are no fresh herbs available.

And of course you can used bough puff pastry, then the swirls a made quite quickly. Its definitely a favourite recipe.

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In the past I was afraid of making homemade puff pastry – until I did it by myself for the first time. Then I realized that it’s not half as complicated as I thought it would be. Nowadays I like to make puff pastry by myself, because it taste much better then the bought one.

What I did with this batch of puff pastry I will tell you in the next posts!

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Sunday morning, sunshine instead of the precasted rain, a cup of coffee and a crispy butter crescent -  is there a better way to start the day?

I tested a new variation of my overnight recipes – Yoghurt-Butter-Crescents. After the Croissant bread it was time to laminate another batch of dough.

When I prepare the dough I decided to use some of the yoghurt I found in the fridge together with a milk roux as liquid component for the dough. I kept the yeast amount small to enable proofing overnight and this low amount of yeast made laminating easier, too, because the dough nearly did not rise during the laminating.

The yoghurt gave the crescent a slightly tart aroma and the long proofing make the taste more complex. The Crescents are light and crispy after baking and the honey comb structure of the crumb is not bad but still away from perfection. But this are the best croissants I ever bake so I am still happy with them!

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It’s time for another bread recipe after I posted so much sweet stuff in the last week. This Seed-Bread contains besides roasted poppy seeds, sesame and flaxseeds also amaranth seeds and polenta, which gave a nice aromatic taste to the bread. Amaranth is a good source for essential amino acids which are missing in wheat and corn and contains a lot of iron, magnesium, phosphorus, copper, and manganese. Its a very healthy “pseudo grain” and I try to involve it more often in our cooking.

The dough is prepared similar to the recipe of the sourdough bread with roasted oats. The gluten network is developed with folding the dough. No need for a food processor for preparing this bread.

The hot soaker I prepared with the polenta and the seeds adds moisture to the crumb and the bread stays fresh really long. But if you do not need two loaves of 1.2 kg each, it would be a good idea to half the recipe.

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The Boyfriend had his last day at the place where he worked as student help for the last five years. Next month we will begin with his practical semester. To make the farewell a little bit sweeter, we baked some chocolate cherry cake and cheese puff pastry swirls.

The chocolate cherry cake is colleague-approved, I baked them some month ago as a “Doktor cake” for my colleague Alex, too. It is a delicious but easy to prepare cake which can be transported without being damaged.

I found the original recipe on lecker.de, but I take the amount of sugar (450g!) as an suggestion and decided to use 200g less sugar then the recipe said. Even then the cake was sweet. I think, you could even reduce the sugar amount for another 50g without troubles. I used one egg less than the recipe asked for, too. This fits more to the content of our fridge .

The result is a delicious cake, with a lot of chocolate and fruits, a new favourite!

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In the next days I will post some recipes which are waiting to get on my blog since I started writing. This is the first one:

Sometimes inspiration will be followed by inspiration. That happened to me when Clair posted a comment to my almond honey crescents in which she wrote that the recipe inspired her to crescents with a cheesecake filling. This comment make me then think of this cheesecake squares.

The cheesecake squares are sweet pastry on basis of a rich yeast dough, made with a poolish for a complex flavour and water roux for a soft crumb.

The filling I used is similar to the filling of my favourite cheesecake recipe.

The cheesecake squares are a beautiful snack with a cup of coffee on a Sunday afternoons.

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I did it. I submitted my Ph. D. thesis yesterday. A great part of the work is now done. Now I have to prepare my defense in may. So I will prepare a talk and start reading paper and learning once again in some days. But at the moment I try to relax and enjoy the luxury of not writing 16 hours a day.

During this 16 hours-writing days in the last days before submission, baking bread had to be something fast. But to stop baking at all was no alternative, I needed it to keep myself grounded. The recipe for the Quark/Curd rolls is a fast one, at least in my eyes. It does not require a Starter, Poolish or Pâte fermentée , so you can immediately start with preparing the dough. It only require a Milk roux, which needs about half an hour for preparing and cooling down. I decided to call the Water Roux in recipes where I prepare it with milk “Milk roux”. It fits better to the ingredients used.

The fast curd rolls are very soft and stay fresh very long due to curd and milk roux. The curd give the roll a little tanginess, balancing the missing  flavours from a starter or prefement. Perfect for days with less time!

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Christine mentioned in a comment to the Overnight-Krustis, that a recipe for kneading with hand would be nice. That is true, of course and so I tested for the next rolls a variation without kneading by a machine. Really kneading was not necessary either, because the gluten network was developed by folding the dough every 30 minutes for 2 hours. After folding 3 times the dough had a nice silky sureface, telling me that the gluten network was now fine.

For Forming the rolls I tried a new Idea. After folding the dough into a square I used my dough scrapper to cut it into smaller squares. After I placed the rolls on baking tray, I used the dough scrapper again, pressing it lengthwise for about 2/3 into the roll. Then I left the rolls to proof overnight. The next morning I just had to place the tray in the hot oven without fussing over slashing rolls. They had a nice ovenspring and cracked nicely along the imprint I made with the dough scrapper.

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