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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Some time ago I saw a delicious looking bread that Judd baked: Pain aux levain aux grains melanges. I’m in love with breads containing mixed seeds and so I put the bread on my todo list.

This week I managed to bake it, finally – but with some adjustments. The sunflower seeds vanished magically before I started to bake bread and so I replaced them with hazelnuts. I love hazelnuts in autumn breads so for me the change was not so hard. Normally I have grains for home milled whole grain flour and white flour with Type number 550 so I adjust the ratio between the different flour types, because the flours I used had different Type numbers compared with the ones that Judd use.

The bread I get is delicious, full of flavors of sourdough, nuts and seeds and with a moist crumb because of the soaker.

If you want to win my Advent calender you have still time to do enter your name here until today night (13. November 2011, 23.59 Uhr).

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MC had the good idea to bake a local bread that contains ingredients which are an expression of the surrounding area. In my opinion this is a beautiful idea and especially in autumn there are a lot of local things that one could put in a bread to catch the essence of “Home”.

I changed her recipe so it resembles my home: A rustic country loaf, with the apple juice made from windfall fruits(Streuobstwiesen with apple trees are very typical here), hazelnuts and summer flower honey from a local bee keeper.

The apples I use are from an old apple tree in my parents garden. My grandparents planted about 50 years ago when they build the house. I love this tree. When I was small I often sat in the crown of this apple tree feeling safe and sheltered there. Later a nearly level branch became my “horse” with reins and stirrups made of rope. I spent many hours “riding” during dream worlds. 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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Sometimes the simple things are the best. For me Nut triangles belong to this categorie for sure  – the only time comsuming part is dipping the edges in molten chocolate. Who – like me – loose the patient after dipping half of the triangles can decorate the triangles with graphical patterns. That looks nice, is much faster and taste as good as the one with the nicely dipped edges.

I based my variation on the recipe I found in “Handbuch fürs tägliche Backen”. I doubled the amount of dough and filling because I never menage to fill a whole baking sheet with the amount given in the recipe andI reduce the over all sugar amount.  Instead of using chopped nuts I ground half of the using the coarse grater of my kitchen machine. And the greatest change is that I used quince jelly instead of apricot jam something that tastes very good. mehr…

The Yoghurt Whole Wheat Toast, a Variation of my Whole Wheat Sandwich-Bread that Lutz baked make me longing of a Yoghurtbread or Roll. Yoghurt in bread is something delicious. As a Breakfast roll we like the yoghurt sesame rolls very much. But always the same kind of rolls is boring and so I decided to bake some similar rolls but this time with whole spelt flour, some honey and caramelised hazelnuts – that is a delicious mixture.

When you prepare the caramelized hazelnuts I can recommend to make more then the recipe asked for. Then you can snack some and put some in the dough. I had to struggle with myself not to eat all of the nuts at once – they are so good! I roasted the nuts in the oven instead of roasting in a pan to get  more even roasted nuts.

The rolls are as delicious as I hoped for, slightly tartish from the yoghurt with a distinct sweetness from the honey and the nuts.

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I planned to bake “Kletzenbrot” this year. Kletzenbrot is named after the Kletzen which are added to the dough and this Kletzen are dried pears. But then I remembered that I have to big glasses filled with dried apples in the pantry because this autumn  I dried a lot of the apples we harvest. (I mentioned before that we harvest lots and lots of apples this year, didn’t I?)

So I decided to use some of this dried apples in the bread instead of dried pears. And so I call it Fruit bread and not Kletzenbrot.  The dough I used is a simple bread dough with sourdough. The sweet of this bread comes from the added fruits and nuts. It tastes most delicious cut in very thin slices and spread with some butter. It is my favorite bread for breakfast at the moment and it keeps fresh for a long time because of the fruits and the sourdough.

This fruit bread is my post for the last Bread Baking Day of 2010, which theme is “Bread with dried Fruits”. mehr…

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Nach all den süßen Broten, Keksen und Stollen in der Weihnachtszeit brauchte ich nun zum Ausgleich ein herzhaftes Brot, etwas mit viel Vollkorn und gesunden Zutaten.

Als ich nach Sylvester den Inhalt meines Vorratregals ansah, fielen mir die vielen halbvollen Tüten mit Nüssen auf, die von der Weihnachtsbäckerei übrig geblieben waren. Im Kühlschrank stand auch noch ein halber Becher Joghurt, der verbraucht werden musste. Somit war klar, das Brot würde nicht nur herzhaft und gesund, ich würde damit direkt auch noch meinen Vorratsschrank leeren.

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This post is written in german as well as in english. To read this post in english, please scroll down to the tab-bar and click on the tab “English”.

Nach dem Umzug ist in unserem Labor so etwas wie Alltag eingekehrt. Zwar funktioniert so manches noch nicht so, wie es sollte, aber es wird jeden Tag besser . Nur die Küche in unserem Sozialraum fehlt immer noch. Aber wir haben Tische, Stühle und eine Kaffeemaschine, und das sind doch die wichtigsten Dinge, die man für eine Pause braucht. So habe ich, mit etwas mehr als einem Monat Verspätung, endlich meinen Geburtstagskuchen mitgebracht.

Der Nusszopf, den ich gebacken habe, ist zwar ein wenig zeitaufwendig, doch das meiste davon sind Gehzeiten. Die saftige Füllung hält den Zopf lange frisch, daher ist es ein Rezept, das ich sehr gerne backe.

Das Rezept habe ich in den letzten Jahren immer weiter optimiert und an meinen Geschmack angepasst. Mit Zimt, Vanille und Karamell gewürzt, ist der Zopf für mich ein Herbst/Wintergebäck.

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This post is written in german as well as in english. To read this post in english, please scroll down to the tab-bar and click on the tab “English”.

Als Blatz bezeichnet man im Rheinland süßes Hefebrot. In Kölner Bäckereien findet man leckere Variationen mit Rosinen, Haselnüssen oder eingebackenen Zuckerstücken, die im Teig schmelzen, zur Weihnachtszeit auch mit Orangat und Zitronat. Besonders köstlich ist aber der Streuselblatz der Bäckerei Schmitz & Nittenwilm, den ich mir, als ich noch an der Kölner Stadtgrenze wohnte, immer geholt habe. Leider gehörte er immer zu den Spezial-Angeboten, die nur selten, ein oder zwei Mal im Jahr für kurze Zeit im Angebot waren, so dass man nie wußte, wann es diese Köstlichkeit das nächste Mal gibt.

Und hier im Oberbergischen haben wir zwar einen Bäcker, der sich auf sehr guten Mohn-Streusel-Kuchen versteht, aber auf meinen Streuselblatz muss ich verzichten.

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