2012-04-24

Mandarin Yoghurt Crème

This delicious and not too sweet yoghurt crème with mandarins can be served with our without a sponge cake base. Since I wanted to finally try out my half-sphere-shaped moulds, which I got for Christmas, I made the crème without a cake base.
I found that the piece of apple and the balsamico crème that I used for decoration matches the yoghurt crème in taste as well as in style!




2012-04-19

Gaby's "Maultaschen" (German Ravioli, Swabian Pockets)

This recipe for "Maultaschen", a Swabian specialty, comes from Gaby, my first boyfriend's mom, just as the Easter Wreath and many more of my favourite recipes. I'd known for many years that she often makes Maultaschen, but I always thought she made the dough herself using a pasta machine. When I finally had my own pasta machine and a lot of free time as well, I called her up to ask for the recipe, and leaned to my astonishment that you can get that kind of pasta dough for Maultaschen readymade in the supermarkets of Baden-Württemberg! Here in Bavaria, a scant 200 km away, it's nowhere to be found! Of course, you could make the dough yourself, but the wide roll of dough is very handy compared to the narrow one that my pasta machine produces. The filling of Gaby's Maultaschen is rather special, too, as classically it contains sausage meat and spinach. This filling with minced beef and leek is less fatty and I like it better. Gaby's original recipe suggests 1 kg minced beef and only one piece of leek.

2012-04-16

Macarons au Chocolat - French Chocolate Macarons

As so often with good baking ideas, it was my little sister who thought of making French Macarons au Chocolat. After researching them on YouTube she found this French video, where this recipe comes from (I only reduced the amount of ganache a bit).
Thanks to the video, I've figured out that  "1 c. á thé" in French recipes means "1 tea spoon", for "cuillère à thé" - I didn't remember learning that in school! And we see yet again that baking educates. ;-)

2012-04-15

Gingerbread Hearts


Even though gingerbread already takes up a big part of this blog, I want to present another option for using gingerbread dough : the classic gingerbread heart, also known as "Wiesn-Herz" by Munich's citizens. I think it's a great gift for birthdays, child births and so on, and therefore always keep some of the readymade gingerbread dough in the fridge...

Zebra Muffins with Caramel Chunks

I think it's funny how we all searched for paper forms for muffins, especially when they were still hard to find, and now, you see a lot of chic bakeries just using plain baking paper squares instead - which seem even more chic to me than the good old paper forms! On the other hand, I thought it a bit exhausting to wrestle the dough into them. We shall see if my colleagues find the muffins comfortable to eat out of the paper squares tomorrow ;-)

2012-04-10

Easter Wreath


This easter wreath with nut or almond filling and easter eggs is always part of the classical easter baking mania at our house.
I use a quark (cream cheese) oil dough instead of a yeast dough, the recipe was one for "Nussschnecken" (spiral shaped nut pastries), which I got a long time ago from my first boyfriend's mom. Thanks Gaby!

Easter Sheep


Every Easter, my family becomes a bit baking crazed - there are such great things that you can bake! Several years ago, we added the Easter sheep to the tradition. Ususally, Easter is all about lambs, but this one looks more like a fully grown sheep with a LOT of wool! This year, I made two smaller sheep from spelt flour with one third whole grain flour. Thanks to it's modular construction you can divide it into small chunks at eat it in small bites ;-) 

2012-04-07

Coloring Easter Eggs with Leaves

For several years now, we color some of our easter eggs with leaves from the garden. It's amazing what kind of nicely shaped leaves you can find if you look closely!
Apart from eggs and egg coloring, you only need nicely shaped leaves and parts of old stockings, which are used to fix the leaves on the eggs.
It's rather fast and very pretty, isn't it?

2012-04-06

Bunny Bread

As soon as I posted my first easter bunny bread here, I found a much cuter bunny bread here. This one cannot be made with sour dough, only with yeast dough...and I found the recipe not very reliable, I had to use much more flour than was specified. 
Still, this one turned out cuter than my first try, right?

2012-04-04

Project Pizza Stone

I'm lucky enough to cook in a fantastic kitchen with granite work counters (which often mirror the flash when I take pictures but are otherwise awesome). Since a piece of the granite was cut out for the stove, we had a rather big and heavy block of granite sitting around, which lead to the idea of having it cut in shape to use as a pizza stone. Most pizza stones are made from chamotte (grog), but there are also some granite ones, only marble is chalkstone and therefore not suited for the heat differences, according to my research. You place the pizza stone on the grill rack of the oven (preferably with a margin of 1 cm all around to avoid areas of trapped heat), heat up the oven and bake the pizza or bread on the stone, which provides for the crisp pizza base by gradually suppliying the heat. You can use a wooden bread paddle to get the pizza into the oven, but since that seems to require some practice (and a wooden paddle), we used a wooden cutting board with a baking sheet on top. Sometimes you read that the pizza stone must have a porous surface in order to "absorb the humidity from the air", for which baking sheets pose a small problem. Since our stone has a smooth surface anyway (which is very helpful for cheese rests which tend to stink and burn in on chamotte stones), I guess the baking paper didn't matter. You could also remove it from under the pizza after 2 minutes of baking...but it worked very nicely like this, too!

2012-04-03

Pizzaiola

Pizzaiola is a tomato based pizza sauce, called "sugo" in Italian, that has to simmer for several hours. It keeps for quite a while and can be used as a pizza topping as well as a base for pasta sauces.
Since I use this Pizzaiola for my Pizza and the next post addresses the Pizzastone Project, I didn't want to keep the recipe from you!
Also, a nicely wrapped jar of Pizzaiola makes a great last minute gift!

Easter Bread in Bunny Shape

Since bread is a lot healthier than the traditional yeast dough easter bakings, I wanted to try and bake a bread in easter bunny form. I used the dough from "Sourdough bread Rudi", which is rather soft, but it did work out okay...right?

Entry Cookies (Black and White Doubles)

Theses cookies were a thank-you gift for a colleague who helped to shorten my way to work by a good deal. They display the shiny new gate that pedestrians and cyclists may use since this week, between the yellow stripes depicted on the cookies (which have been painted on the street just for this purpose).
In order to have room to paint, I used a rather big top of a storage tin as a cookie cutter, which makes for solid cookies! The dark dough and white chocolate filling reminds me of Oreo cookies.