Category Archives: Cake & Pastry

May 4th, 2012

Cream puffs with Vanilla rhubarb

Windbeutel mit Rhabarberfüllung

Since days I am dreaming of some kind of rhubarb cake. So when I spotted some beautiful red rhubarb stalks in the organic food shop I decided immediately that I would take some home with me (especially when the organic grown rhubarb was better looking and cheaper then the conventional grown I saw earlier this week in the supermarket).

On my way home I started to think about what to bake with the rhubarb. I’m still learning for my disputation, so time for baking is short. So I decided to do make cream puffs with oven roasted, vanilla flavoured rhubarb. Something that is easy but delicious.

When I tried the rhubarb when I took it out of the oven, I could hardly stop eating everything. It tasted so good. (Note to myself: Next time double the amount of the oven roasted rhubarb, then I would have some to stir in yoghurt)

The cream puffs are even more delicious then the plain rhubarb: a little bit sweet, a little bit sour, embraced from vanilla. Hmmh…!

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April 2nd, 2012

Cheese and Herb swirls

Blätterteig-Käseschnecken

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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April 2nd, 2012

Puff pastry

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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March 29th, 2012

Chocolate Cherry Cake

Schoko-Kirsch-SchnittenThe 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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March 22nd, 2012

Cheescake Squares

Quark-Ecken 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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February 19th, 2012

Fried dough: Geknotetes and Berliner

Geknotetes I’m always relieved when the time of carnival lays behind us, as I told before. Sarah of Life ain’t no ponyfarm draws comics that perfectly shows how I feel during the “Fifth season”.

So only good thing in carnival for my opinion are the sweet pastry  which is baked during the “jecken Tage”. And baking some kind of fried pastry is the only thing related to carnival I do each year. This year I did Berliner and something which my family calls “Geknotetes”.

This year I used a new recipe which I developed using Water Roux and Poolish for a extra soft crumb and for a aromatic taste. I made the Berliner small and proofed them shorter then last, which created a strong ovenspring which results in Berliner with the typical white “Collar” I am try to get for years. The other important thing is that the frying temperature should not be higher then 160°C.

For filling the Berliner  I used the same  construction as two years ago: a syringe which I combined with a 10 cm long cut of a drinking straw. That works like a charm and I don’t have to buy an extra filling tip.

I am a little bit proud of my Berliner this time, I never get this beautiful collars  before and they tasted good, too.

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February 5th, 2012

Almond Honey Crescents

MandelHonig-Hörnchen At the moment I stay often very long in the lab to finish the missing Experiments of my thesis. Around late afternoon/ early evening I often get hungry when lunchtime was already 5 hours ago. And when I am hungry and tired I am lacking motivation and concentration. That’s not good if I plan to work another two hours!

To prevent this I baked some wholewheat almond-honey crescents for the coming week. The original Idea is from “Das große GU Vollwert-Kochbuch”  but I changed the recipe so much in the last years that you can not recognize the original recipe anymore. I use more liquid and less yeast, I removed the soybean flour from the recipe and added a sourdough. The filling contains less butter, cinnamon and eggs but additional cacao and a pinch of salt.

I like the result very much: Delicious, filling with enough honey to give me a little more power. The long days in lab can come, I’m prepared now!

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December 28th, 2011

Orange Swirls

Orangenwirbel

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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