I like white nougat very much. And most I like hart variant, the Turrón Duro. In the last years I tested different recipes but I never found the perfect recipe for me because I always get the soft white nougat.
So I optimized the recipe once more this year and was successful at the end. With more sugar, a little bit of invert sirup and and summer flower honey is the nougat not as white as it could be but it is very delicious and just the way I love my nougat!
There are traditions I would never break with, like baking a nut braid for my colleagues for my birthday coffee break. Everyone loves this braid, its tender crumb with the generous amout of filling. And the filling helps to keep the braid fresh for a long time, too.
This year, anyway, I had to face a problem. A new colleague is allergic against hazel- and walnuts and is lactose intolerant, too. Luckily she can eat almonds and so I decided to bake a new kind of braid filled with caramelized almonds, tonka bean and a little bit of amaretto. The dough is made with lactose free margarine instead of butter but if you don’t have to cook laktose free I would suggest using butter for a even finer aroma.
Like the nut braid this braid is perfect for being taken to work because it tastes best the day after baking when all the different nuances of the spices melt together. The filling keeps the braid soft and fresh. But how much longer it could be kept I cannot tell you because 2 kg of almond braid where eaten from 16 persons in shortest time. Not a crumb was left!
A Butterkuchen in its simplicity is one of the most enchanting cakes for me. It is only made with some flour, milk, butter, sugar and yeast and allows each ingredients to shine. And when the fridge is still rather empty after coming home after our vacation trip, it is the perfect cake because it only needs so few ingredients. And after a short search in the cupboard I even found some almond splices which I sprinkled over the cake for the more luxury variant.
And because the sweet starter had to be fed after being trapped in the fridge for two weeks anyway I decided that I would bake the cake with sweet starter instead of yeast. To ensure that the starter is strong enough after sleeping in the fridge for so long I fed it once in the evening, put it in the fridge after 3 hours at 30°C and then fed it again the next morning. Due to the fact that a sweet starter will not let a dough rise as fast as with commercial yeast it takes from 8 o’clock in the morning until half past three in the afternoon until we could try the still warm cake.
It may not be the fastest method to bake this cake but you will be rewarded with a soft, fluffy cake packed with a lot of tender but complex flavour notes. And while the cake it technically baked with a sourdough, there is not even a hind if acidity. I love my sweet starter!
Nearly a year has passed since our visit in Alsace in our summer vacation. One of the souvenirs I brought home after two splendid weeks in france was a clay baking form for Kougelhopf. It is sitting on my kitchen cabinet since then, waiting for me to create a recipe for Kugelhopf.
This weekend I finally found the time to study different Kougelhopf recipes. But I did not like them, all of them use a lot of yeast and give the dough no time to rest properly to develop a good flavour. And I wanted a recipe which uses a preferment for better taste and longer shelf life! And so I decided to use my own interpreation with a sweet starter which helps to rise the buttery dough without using a lot of yeast.
The cake is more time consuming then other recipes you may find in the web, but it develops a fine complex flavour and light and feathery crumb. I imaging that even my alsacian great-grandmother would have enjoyed it!
This year is a great year for berries. In my parents garden the red currants bushes bent down under the load of ripe berries. Two weeks ago I picked enough berries to cook enough red currant jelly for the coming year and it you could hardly see that I take any fruits. And so I picked another 2 kilogramm berries in betweeen two thunderstorms last Friday afternoon. The most of the currants are cleaned and froozen, the rest I used for baking a cake.
I found the recipe at Chili & Ciabatta, but due to the leftover in my baking drawer I changed the dough already a lot, adding grounded almonds and chocolate. And the for the vanilla creme I go for a different recipe because I do not use gelatine.
And even if the recipe is a different one in the end, the cake tastes fantastic. A sweet vanillacreme is balanced by the tarte red currants and with chocolate you can never do wronge!
I like to eat some “Zopf” (or Challah or some other kind of soft braided bread), especially for breakfast on sunday. In the last year I often baked Schwiss Butterbraid. I like it very much but for the most people who grow up in Germany this kind of bread has to be sweet while the swiss version is not sweet. And for those with a sweet tooth I baked this sunday braid. It is so delicious, that I baked it for the goodbye breakfast of a colleague again. And each time I bake it I’m thrilled because of its buttery, sweet flavour and the soft crumb.
A big portion of cream makes the crumb incredible soft and fluffy. And the advantage of cream instead of butter is that the dough (or the shaped bread) rise well in the fridge. With higher butter amounts I made the experience that the butter hardens in the cold and so hinder the dough to rise proberly. And for forming the dough ít is necessary to keep it in the fridge for at least one hour. But then braiding will be easy.
For a good flavour and good oven spring I included my sweet starter in the recipe. If you don’t have one, you can use instead some Lievito madre or a Biga, which rise overnight in the fridge.
When I baked the little Colombinas about five years ago I was already searching for the traditional paper mold for Colomba pasquale. But I had no luck finding one neither in the “real word” nor in german onlineshops. And so I finally give in and bought a silicon mold, ignoring my dislike of this kind of baking molds. And the mold was delivered just in time, so the only thing I had to was to refresh my sweet starter and start baking.
Raisins and candid orange peel would make my beloved one rather unhappy, so I choose semisweet chocolate drops and chopped candid almonds instead. The fits well with my first colomba memory, when some years ago a former colleague brought back a big, chocolate filled colomba after visiting her parents in Italy. The dough for the dove is similar to my pandoro recipe, but this time I kneaded the butter into the dough. The dough was easy in handling and after baking I was able to unmold the colomba without any problems, much to my relief.
After cooling down we cut the dove and the first bite of it was pure delight. The crumb could be torn into long strands and was as light as a feather, and the combination of chocolate and candied almonds is great, too! This colomba is a real dream dove!
There are three recipes I bake each year for christmas: Vanillekipferl (with or without almonds), Liebesgrübchen and Linzer Ringe. These are family recipes, and a christmas “must have”.
But each year I have to bake some new recipes as well. And one of the recipes I tried this year are these quince stars. When I made my traditional Linzer Ringe recipe I had the Idea of a cookie made with a quince fillung and some grounded almonds and a little bit of tonka bean in the dough. I use the tonka beans always carefully because while they taste delicious, their aroma is a strong one, too.
I like my spontaneous recipe vey much, the combination of almond, quince and tonka bean fits very well!
Stollenkonfekt – this is Christstollen baked as little bits. I saw it often in the last weeks in the supermarket. And I thought “I can do some of this delicious bits by my own!” This was the beginning of this recipe. I made some adjustments in my favourite Christstollen recipe, increasing the amount of water roux to prevent drying out in the oven and cutting the marzipan into the small cubes. I halve the recipe so it will yield one tray of Stollenkonfekt.
And because the Stollenkonfekt is so small, no one will recognise when you taste one or two still oven warm. They then already delicious, moist and fluffy. That makes it even harder to wait the one or two weeks of rest a stollen needs so the different flavours can infuse and melt together. But the taste is worth the patience. The crumb gets denser during that time and stays incredible moist. A perfect little bit of stollen in a size which fits on every christmas cookie plate.
I do not make an changes on the recipe of my Christstollen, but some members of our family do not like raisins, and so they do not like Stollen as well. So an alternative was needed! Years ago I already baked a Almondstollen for them, but Almondstollen always has the tendency to get very dry. And that is not so surprising when you take out the ingredients that keeps it moist like raisins for example! But nevertheless I take the challange once again and baked a Marzipan Almond Stollen this year.
The basis for the recipe is the proofed and true recipe of my Christstollen, of course without the raisins and with more almonds. For moisture I use a water roux and added grated Marzipan as well, which adds a nice flavour, too. The fine almond flavour get enhanced from some Tonka bean, and for the classical stollen flavour I grounded candid orange peel in the food processor as fine as possible.
After two weeks of ripening we tested the stollen, and it was still moist. Not as moist as Christstollen, but so much better then every Almond stollen I ever baked before! And it taste very good, too! Maybe I have to bake to different kinds of stollen from now on…