Category Archives: Cake & Pastry

October 10th, 2010

Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , , ,   13 Responses

Kürbis-ZimtschneckeOther 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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September 20th, 2010

Rheinischer Apfelkuchen – Riemchenkuchen

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: ,   13 Responses

Rheinischer Apfelkuchen (2)

This year is a good year for apples. The old apple tree in my parents garden nearly collapses under the weight of the fruits. So we started this Saturday to harvest. We stopped after we harvest everything we could reach with our hands or with the fruit picker. This yielded about 50 kg of fruits and there are still lots of apples on the higher branches (I would guess that there is still 100kg fruits on the tree).

We take about 12 Kilograms apples home and preserve them today in weck glasses, made chutney and apple sauce. Some of the apple sauce were used as filling in one of my favorite cakes: Rheinischer Apfelkuchen, often called Riemchenkuchen, too. The word Riemchen means little lace and refers to the lattice on top of the cake which is formed by dough stripes. It is a local speciality typical for cologne.

And what will we do with the remaining apples? Because the apple is perfect for cooking but can not be stored for more then some weeks, we will bring them to a local cider mill, where we are paid with apple juice for our apples.

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September 5th, 2010

Vanilla Cardamom Fans

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , , , , ,   3 Responses

Vanille Kardamon FächerLast Sunday we visit my sister in the new house. Because “it’s always good to have some pastry during renovation” (that’s what my sister told me early on the phone) I decided to bring something sweet.

I was longing for something fluffy yeasted pastry. So I thought first of my favourite braid filled with nuts. But then I remembered that my parents would join us, too and my mum suffers of lactose and fructose intolerance. So the braid was out of question, we need something without milk and nuts.

So I started to think: What happened when I just leave out the nuts? Then I would end up with dried breadcrumbs as filling. Hmmm. Bread crumb as filling sounded a little bit strange. But on the other hand we eat noodles with sugar and bread crumbs as children, and we liked it. So I give the idea a try and the filling worked out just fine.

Seasoned with Cardamom and Vanilla nobody missed the nuts. And its a good way to used up dried breadcrumbs. Continue reading →

June 13th, 2010

Doktorhut-Muffins

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , , ,   8 Responses

Doktorhut-muffin (2)Its more then a year since we had the last PhD-Party. Thats more than enough time to collect new ideas for the Doctor cake. And its nearly one year ago that I saw this beautiful muffins with graduation cap decoration at Tastespotting.

And at this time I made a note for myself that for the next disputation I would bake this kind of muffins. And this week one of our colleagues got her PhD and it was time for party and and for graduation cap muffins.

I made some changes and decided to use small waffle cookies to create the caps. And preparing the caps was really simple. I dipped the round cookie in some molten chocolate, place it on the flat and square one, let dry a little bit, then turn them around and place some liquorice and a small chocolate lentils on the top. I prepare all of the caps at the weekend and stored them in the cookie jar (I also threaten the boyfriend that something really mean would happen to him if he eat one of them 😉 ). The evening before the party I bake the muffins using this recipe. After they cooled down I top them with some molten chocolate and place the caps on then. For transporting them to the lab I stored them in some tin jars and luckily all of them survived travelling with train fine. Continue reading →

June 6th, 2010

White Chocolate-Mousse Torte with raspberry filling

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , ,   No Responses

Weiße Schokoladenmousse Torte

I planned to bake a special cake for my dad’s birthday. In Michaels Suas’ “Advanced Bread and Pastry” I found a recipe for a White Chocolate-Mousse Torte with raspberry filling. That sounded perfect for this hot and sunny Summer afternoon. The recipe sounds a little bit complicated but the sponge and the raspberry filling can be prepared in advance. And it is really helpful to have an empty dishwasher, so you can put away all the bowls you will need while preparing the torte.

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May 30th, 2010

Granola Bars

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , , , ,   6 Responses

Müsliriegel

Last week Steph of Kleiner Kuriositätenladen baked granola bars for the Blogevent “Essen für Unterwegs” (which I hosted this month). Her recipe contains cranberries but no nuts. I wanted my own granola bars, but I wanted something with nuts, something with almonds and apricots.

So I did a research at Tastespotting and after reading some recipes I had a plan. I combined details of different recipes: oat meal, rolled oats, almonds, apricots, some seeds. Then I add some egg white to the mixture to improve the texture.

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May 24th, 2010

Burger Pretzels – Bread Baking Day #30

Category Bread Baking Day, Cake & Pastry  Tags: , ,   6 Responses

Burger Bretzeln

Bread Baking Day’s Topic is “Breads with a Twist” and its hostess is Natashya form Living in the kitchen with puppies. While still thinking about a recipe I saw a show on TV where they explained how to make “Burger pretzels”. This is a local speciality which is selled mostly around the castle Schloss Burg and which is part of the “Bergische Kaffeetafel”. This is a tradition similar to afternoon tea in Greatbritain. The “Bergische Kaffeetafel” is served with Coffee from the Dröppelminna, the dark rye Schwarzbrot, sweet white bread called Stuten or Platz, heartshaped waffles, rice pudding with sugar and cinnamon, Burger pretzels, curd, sugar beet molasses, cheese and bacon.

This preztels have not the typical form of a pretzel we know from South Germany but its ends are twisted for four times.

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April 11th, 2010

Mohnkranz

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , ,   4 Responses

Mohnkranz Mohnkuchen wird im Moment viel gebacken. Chaosqueen hat Schmandkuchen mit Mohn gebacken, bei Fool for Food und Zorra von 1x umrühren bitte gab es Mohnzopf zu Ostern. Und auch ich reihe mich die Reihe der Mohnkuchen-Bäcker ein, denn meine Mama hat sich zu ihrem Geburtstag Mohnkuchen gewünscht. Und da sie weder Laktose noch Fruktose verträgt, musste ich mein Rezept etwas abändern. Fruktosefrei zu backen ist unmöglich, aber Fruktosearm geht. Daher wurde ein Teil des Zucker durch Traubenzucker (Glukose) ersetzt. Der Teig ist der gleiche wie der für die laktosefrei Challah, die Füllung habe ich ganz leicht an das Rezept aus “Handbuch des täglichen Backens” angelehnt(ganz leicht heißt: keine Milch, keine M

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March 28th, 2010

Zimtwirbel

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , ,   12 Responses

canelsnurrer (2)Die Schneckenplage geht weiter! Nach den leckeren Kakaoschnecken gab es bei Küchenlatein inzwischen Zimtschnecken in drei Varianten. Die verschlungen Canelsnurrer fand ich besonders schön. Und als ich bei Pain de Martin ein sehr ähnliches Rezept sah, bekam ich den Gedanken an diese Zimtwirbel nicht mehr aus dem Kopf. Gestört hat mich allerdings bei beiden Rezepten die für meine Geschmack zu hohe Hefemenge. Also habe ich ein wenig gebastelt, und meine eigene Variante entworfen.

Damit die Hefe Trieb entwickeln kann, ohne von der hohen Zucker- und Buttermenge gestört zu werden, habe ich den Poolish, Mehl, Wasser und Hefe gemischt und ca 35 min gehen lassen, bevor die restlichen Zutaten hinzugefügt werden. Zucker und Butter werden erst gegen Ende der Glutenentwicklung hinzugefügt, da diese die Glutenentwicklung beeinträchtigen. Continue reading →

March 12th, 2010

Cacao rolls – Kakaós csigák

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , , ,   21 Responses

Kakaoschnecken (4)They are baked in so many german Food-Blogs at the Moment : Anikós cacao rolls. It took me a while to jump on this bandwagon because I have a lot of work in lab but last weekend I managed somehow to bake them. And I can just repeat that everyone said before: They are divine. Fluffy with the taste of semisweet chocolate, just what you need when you come home after working most of Sunday in lab.

I changed the recipe a little bit (Am I always writing this sentence? I fear that I do this.) The biggest change is that I double the sugar amount in the dough because Zorras mentioned in her post that the rolls are not sweet enough. Then I used a pâte fermentée, but I am sure that the recipe will work without it, too. And then I add a little bit of cardamom into the filling, like Hedonistin did. Continue reading →