It is done! Not my Ph.D. Thesis – I am still working on that – but the Paper to my side project is published. When I am thinking that this was “only” my side project, its amazing how often it played the chief part in the last  two years . After some rejections is finally accepted and now I can use all of my energy to finish my main project. When everything works as planned I will end the experimental part of my thesis end of this month and will start writing. That is the plan I have at monent … we will see what will happen. Life in lab is never easy to plan…

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And now we have 2012. I hope your new years eve was nice as the one we had!

We tried already our new year pretzel for a late breakfast, so there are no pictures of the pretzel as a whole.

This year I decided to bake it with a mild sourdough, water roux and less sugar. I kept the sourdough overnight at 25°C which gave it a delicious smell like yoghurt and slightly sour taste, which makes it perfect for a sweet dough.

The dough itself is very soft. Experience with handling soft dough is required, so for beginners I would suggest to prepare the dough with 50-60g less water. That would make handling much easier.

I kneaded the dough very long, so the gluten network was well developed and the bread could rise highly. Using Egg white keeps the crumb bright and white. I think its fit to the fresh new years morning and I used some frozen egg white from christmas baking.

The pretzel has a nice complex taste, a little bit of youghurt and has this slightly sweetness, that fits so well to both sweet jam and salty cheese.

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Of course I did not only make a variation of Martins recipe, I although baked the dough with the orginale Orangefilling. I used the same dough as for the Saffron Stars,  again with reduced sugar amount. The Orange swirls are sweet enough with all the sugar in the filling.

The advantages of the long and slowly proofing over night I explained already at the Saffron-Star post, and so I will only speak how great the Orange swirls taste. They taste very intense of Orange, with hints of saffron and caramel. Maybe the saffron is not necessary in this recipe because the orange aroma is the central taste of this sweet pastry. 

In my eyes you can eat it all the time: you can eat it as breakfast, as a snack with a cup of coffee, as lunch, as dinner…

Yes, I like this orange swirls very much!

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I was very sad when Martin from Pain de Martin posted this summer that he would stop blogging. I liked Martins Ideas very much and his recipes often inspired me to my own recipes.

And so I was very happy when I saw some days ago that he started his new blog Lite mer bröd.  When I read the new entries I found directly one I wanted to try: long fermented saffron buns with an orange filling.

I decided to try a variation of this recipe for breakfast on Christmas. So I skipped the filling and reduced the sugar amount. For kneading I do it like I do all sweet dough: I knead the dough until medium gluten development without sugar and butter. Then I add the sugar gradually and at the end the butter. That yields a dough with a good developed gluten network because sugar and butter cannot interfere with it.

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I baked some Madeleines for the christening of my little niece. I posted the recipe for the normal Maeleines some time ago, but at this time of the year I had the feeling that only one sort of Madeleines would be to boring. And so I seasoned the Madeleines with some cacao and gingerbread spice.

And so I had a delicious Christmas-Madeleines.

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Its already the third advent and I still did not post a single Christmas cookie recipe! I have to change this immediately!

But until now I bake the traditional cookies in our family: Vanilla crescents, Liebesgrübchen, Black and white Kisses and Linzer Rings. But in the December Magazine of “Schrot and Korn” there were a cookie recipe that temped me very much. Little Plum Packets a butter cookie filled with plum butter and ground nuts.

They looked very complicated but when I read the recipe I realise that they are much easier to do the I thought. You just has to cut out stars, place a little bit of the filling in the middle and fold the pointed ends of the star over the filling and close everything with a hazelnut.

The cookies are great: a soft fruit and nut filling with hints of vanilla and cinnamon. I like them very much!

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This Thursday we had once again a Disputation. After we prepared the traditional Doctor hat and Doctor wagon I came home late at Wednesday night and started to bake the Doctor cake. Normally we bake some kind of chocolate cake, but this time I felt very Christmassy and so I decided modify my chocolate cake recipe. mehr…

Scones are my new favourite for a easy snack on sunday afternoon when I longing for something sweet. The raspberry scones I made in September tasted great and so I wanted to try another variation. When I saw that the last apple from my parents garden started to shrivel a little bit I decided to make apple scones with some whole wheat flour, almonds and some “winterly” spices. It is not Winter now but the last mornings were ice cold, and so cardamom, allspice and cinnamon seemed to fit very well.

The Whole wheat flour and the almons at a little bit more substance to the scones and the apple balance nicely tart and sweet.

I like the scones best with some cranberry jam and a cup of Earl Grey tea.

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Its nearly two weeks ago that I posted a recipe! At the moment my work is once again consuming most of my time, but hopefully this part of my Ph.d. thesis will be finished successfully in soon future. I will tell you more about it then.

The bad thing with stressful days is that it makes me always susceptible for colds. After I had a really bad at the beginning of October the second cold for this month sent me last week straight to my bed again. I drank a lot of tea, eats a lot of vitamins and now the fever is gone. I am just still very hoarse and coughing badly.

But I am fit enough once again for reading blogs and for baking. Paule baked Quitten-Schuedi this weekend, a cake with yeast dough and quince sauce. I liked the Idea of using some of last years quince sauce I had still in the freezer. I need new space to freeze my share of quince from my parents garden that at the moment is still waiting in a small laundry basket in my kitchen. mehr…

About one and a half year ago every german food blogger seemed to bake cacao rolls. Anikó blogged the tempting recipe and everyone had to test it, myself included.

When I saw the chocolate hazelnut rolls on The Patterned Plate I had to think about these rolls once again. But this rolls are also filled with hazelnuts (as the name suggested ). The description of a nutella-ish taste was so mouthwatering that I had to bake such rolls at the same weekend.

I decided to use another recipe for the dough because I was dreaming of heavenly soft and fluffy rolls. The dough is not so easy to handle but its worth the work because the rolls rise to be as light as a feather. I let them rise overnight in the fridge, it is a convenient method to get sweet rolls for breakfast without a lot of fusing in the morning and the slow rise contributes to the good taste, too.

I added some Cardamom and Cinnamon to the filling – just a tiny little bit to the spices in the background without overpowering the hazelnuts and the cacao. And I pour some boiling milk over the rolls after one third of the baking time, a trick I borrowed from the cacao roll recipe to make the rolls extra soft.

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