Blog Move!

Hey everybody!

I've moved my blog to http://classic-crumbs.blogspot.com!

June photos and cake!

What I've been up to since I returned stateside...

Monsieur Buttons!

Awww, my two favorite boys.

The original recipe for this cake can be found at that wellspring of fabulousness, Smitten Kitchen, HERE. I multiplied all of the measurements by 1.5, so that I could make the cake in the a pretty little Bundt pan, since I didn't have the 9" round that the original calls for. I also replaces the raspberries with cherries, since a certain guy I know would eat himself to death on cherries if given the chance...

Preheat the oven to 400.

1.5 cups flour

3/4 tsp baking powder

<3/4 tsp baking soda

3/8 tsp salt

3/4 stick unsalted butter, room temp

1 cup sugar

3/4 tsp vanilla

3/4 tsp lemon zest

1.5 large eggs [just crack the second one, beat it up a bit, and pour half of it into the batter]

<3/4 cup buttermilk, very well shaken

1.5 cups cherries, pitted

To pit the cherries, use a small paring knife and cut the cherries in half around the pit, like you would an avocado. Then, using a toothpick or -- even better -- a bobby pin, poke/scoop out the pit. I suggest wearing some gloves while doing this, or you'll be stained purple for days.

Mix the flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda in a small bowl with a whisk and set aside. Then, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla and lemon and mix again. Then, add the eggs one at a time and mix. Finally, in rotations, add the dry ingredients and buttermilk, ending on milk. DONT OVERMIX! I think I overmixed this a little, since the crumb wasn't as buttery and fine as I would have liked. The cake was nonetheless tasty and delightful, and not too sweet. Great for breakfast!

Return to the American Blogosphere

please stay tuned as we make the move from travelogue to your promised blog of all things baking, photography, and PhD action.

More adventures in baking in Germany

It all started with a trip to the "big grocery store" the last time Sylvi and I baked [see the post for delicious banana-chocolate chunk-oatmeal cookies]. We had previously discussed taking a furlough from cookies and baking a cake, and as we were walking down the aisle with all of the different baking mixes -- Sylvi showed me that they do, in fact, have pancake mix -- she stopped to tell me about this one fancy-looking fare called "Russischer Zupfkuchen," and said that we must bake this cake, but from scratch. And that's how we ended up in the kitchen on Thursday, elbow deep in an impressive amount of butter.

So, translated, this cake is called a "Russian Pulling Cake," and we've deduced that the "pulling" part comes from the fact that you can pull out the little chocolate dough pieces from the cake filling. I'm not entirely convinced, and yet I can offer no better explanation. This is kind of like a cheesecake, only a bit lighter, with a sort of mosaic of brownie action going on. Sylvi says she has always thought the dough pieces are flattened and put in the filling, but the recipe we had said to make little balls and -- literally -- "throw" them into the filling. And so we did. It was truly amusing. 

Now, I've made my fair share of seemingly complicated cakes in my day [the cranberry swirl cheesecake with gingersnap crust from Christmas 08 rings a bell. Also, the ill-fated masterpiece, that authentic Schwärzwalderkirschetorte (German Black Forest Cake) that I toiled over for hours making for a certain ex's birthday and he didn't eat any of it...], but this one is definitely a little bit time consuming and, above all, messy -- if you're a klutz like I am. But it's certainly not difficult, so I challenge you all to go out, get yourself 500 grams of butter, and give it a shot. The photos will convince you. Recipe at the end.

in German, the word they use for the bottom of 

the cake or tart, etc is the word for "floor".

I think they should chance the name to "Cow Cake" = "KuhKuchen".

It just sounds awesome. 

[We got our recipe HERE. Another blogspotter doing the world a favor, and baking!]

Ingredients:

for the chocolate portion:

400g flour

200g butter [room temp]

85g white sugar

40g baking cocoa

2 eggs

1 tbsp baking powder

for the filling:

250g butter [room temp]

125g white sugar

500g margerquark

3 eggs

1 tbsp vanilla sugar

oh no! Don't know what quark is? Well I'll tell you, we're not talking infinitesimal parts of atoms, here. Quark is a soft, mild cheese that people here love. It tastes like cheesecake filling, no lie. If you haven't got access to this delicacy where you are, I've approximated the taste to be something like 3 parts ricotta to 1 part sour cream, for the right consistency and flavor. The recipe we used also said you can use yogurt, but I don't feel like it has the same thickness. Cream cheese would be much too thick. Perhaps you could mix yogurt and cream cheese? But I feel like this would be just a bit *too* tangy. Trust me, go with the ricotta-sour cream equivalent. I feel it in my culinary gut. It's the right call. Also, as regards vanilla sugar, you could also just use 1 tbsp vanilla extract.

To start, preheat your ovens to 200C -- that's 392F [we'll say 395. Or 400] and grease a 9 inch springform pan [all we had was a bundt-style springform, but it worked just as well] . Then, attend to the dough that makes the "floor" of the cake and the tasty little spheres. In a bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder. In another bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Add the egg and mix until fluffy. Then, add the flour mixture to the butter and knead with your hands until it just comes together. Use 2/3 of the dough to cover the bottom and sides of the pan [just as you would graham cracker crust for a cheesecake] and reserve the other 1/3 for later. Next, cream together the butter and sugar for the filling. Add the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla. Then add in your quark or substitute cheese fillingness. Pour the filling into the pan. Next comes the fun! Roll the remaining chocolate dough into small balls and toss them into the filling. I realize now that the point here is to have them at different levels within the strata of the cake. 

The recipe says to bake this 1 hour on the middle rack, but we got some burnage on the top of our cake, sadly. I would advise to put some foil over the pan for the first half of baking, then remove it, rotate your pan for good measure, and finish baking. But you know your oven better than I do. 

Two weeks notice cookies

Soooo, only 2 weeks left until I'm on a plane and USA-bound! I'm kind of feeling that this is at the same very short and very long. I'm not sure what I'm going to do to fill my days until then, since one can only clean and organize for packing so many times. To occupy ourselves last night, Sylvi and I spent another evening in the kitchen baking some American-style cookies. BUT FIRST! we went to a great big grocery store that is about 923218x awesomer than the one right by my apartment, so that I could see that Germany did, in fact, have grocery stores that rival their American counterparts that I have so been missing... 

We whipped up some Banana-Chocolate Chunk-Oatmeal cookies, the recipe for which I found HERE, at one of my all-time fave foodblogs. My cookies came out really moist and sticky, though, so I'm not sure what happened in translation. They were still delicious, though! The little touch of cinnamon definitely does something magical, if you ask me. Also, fab German chocolate chunks... recipe after the tasty photos...

Banana-Chocolate Chunk-Oatmeal Cookies

makes about 2 dozen cookies

Preheat oven to 350

Ingredients:

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, unbleached please. I bet this would be great with whole-wheat.

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

6 tbsp butter, room temp. unsalted!

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

1 large egg, room temp

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup oats [not the quick-cook kind]

2 cups [12 oz] chocolate chips [we used 200g german bittersweet chocolate, chopped]

2 bananas, mushed

1. In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, salt, and spices. Set aside.

2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugars with a hand-mixer until fluffy, about a minute.

3. Add the vanilla to the butter and sugar, then add the egg. Mix once more.

4. Scrape down you bowl, and add the flour mix in small increments -- about 3 -- but don't overmix. Gluten, overdeveloped proteins, etc...

5. Add in your bananas and oats. Stir with a spoon.

6. Spoon in the chocolate.

7. Using a tablespoon, drop spoonfuls onto a baking sheet. Or roll in your hands. Our mix was a bit too wet and sticky to do that, though. I think the Germans oats aren't as big and absorbent.

8. Bake until the edges and brown the tops look done. Original recipe says about 18 minutes, I did about 12 and my cookies were a bit underdone, so I'd aim for 15 minutes. You'll know by the smell, which is delish!

Crumble these and serve one vanilla ice cream. It's just a suggestion. But it's a really fab suggestion. 

One-pot amazingness.

Okay. So, first, I found the most incredible baking blog ever. I spent a good hour or so looking through all of it. I wanted to start making a list of the recipes I wanted to try, but then realized it was about 99% of them and gave up. All that time I waste on Stumble actually led me to to like, a baking oasis. But, I ask you, WHERE does this lady get off having a double oven, when I don't even have a four-burner stove? 

On that note, my stove did not fail me last night. This is quite possibly the best thing I have cooked since being relegated to Germany and forced to live a life without the glory that is Stop&Shop. Now I don't think I've ever even eaten Mexican-style rice, but I had a pretty idea of what must go into it, having seen it before; not too sure if this meal is authentic is any way, but I do know that it is all of the following: delicious, 30-minutes, one-post, cost me less than 10 bucks to make, will feed me at least four times. You could also easily make this vegetarian or add a different meat, or different vegetables... I don't know. You could do anything with it -- it's that good.

MexiRice with Chicken

Ingredients:

2 chicken breasts, cut into small chunks

1.5 cups long-grain rice [I used a Basmati/Wild rice mix that my roommate had lying around and won't eat because she's on a diet. Since when does rice make you fat?]

1 cup tomato juiciness from a can of either crushed or peeled tomatoes

2 cups water

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 tablespoon vegetable boullion [or i guess use 1 cup veg. broth or stock in place of 1 cup water. all i have here is powdered veg boullion]

1 green pepper, diced

1 medium onion, diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 tbs olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

In a pot, sautee the veggies for about 3-5 minutes over medium-high heat in a tablespoon of olive oil. Add in the chicken and the chili powder and continue cooking for a few minutes, just so that everyone can get acquainted. Add in the tomato juice and water, as well as a bit of the tomato chunks, if you like them. I don't really, so I didn't add much. Bring the mix to a boil, add in your rice, and cook at a low simmer with a lid on for 20 minutes. Salt. Pepper. Serve.

Now, this is all based on the manufacturer's instructions for my rice: 2 parts liquid to one part rice, boil liquid, add rice, simmer 20 min. If your rice has different instructions, adjust accordingly!

Go make this! Tonight! Now!

Hello again, blog.

Wow, sorry folks; haven't updated much lately, save yesterday's "shameless self-promotion" [btw, all the photos on the site are now watermarked so that thieving internet bandits can't haxors my photographys]. Not much has been up, really, I've mostly just been lounging about the house reading and dreaming up all the recipes I want to make when I get back to the states in a mere 19.5 days! I've got a hankering to bake that one afternoon of chocolate chip cookies just couldn't satiate -- tasty as those cookies were... I swear, they were the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever made; even BETTER than the marble cookies I made for the RWU kiddies when I was home in March. What? I didn't post the marble cookies? Well snap, I'll get to that at the end of this post, then. 

Things with my roommate have been super on-again, off-again and I've basically just given up trying to sort it out. I smile, say hello, and otherwise just keep to myself in my room, which, if you know me well at all, only pleases me all the more because I do love me my solitude. I've been taking some time everyday to organize stuff in gleeful anticipation of packing. There's so much Germany-paperwork I want to throw out, but am afraid to part with before I'm safely landed in the U.S; nonetheless I chucked a whole bunch of useless paper today and cleaned out my suitcases of the junk they've accumulated in their little dusty corner. Boxed up my books and winter coat and sweaters to send home sometime later this week and weighed the box to make sure it did not exceed 20kg [we're at 15.5, woo!]. The interesting thing will be the sight of me and Sylvi trying to get the box to the post office, what with the damn trams still being detoured around the stop in front of the post, and the box being an awkward size for me to carry alone [which is not to say I can't lift 15.5 kilos, kids]. I think with that one box being sent everything else should fit nicely into my suitcases; I'm just hoping against hope that neither suitcase is overweight and I have to pay for it, since that was a pretty penny the first time and I'm already shelling out 65E for the box to be shipped. I might stuff a few more things into the box just to be safe, since I've still got a few kilos to go on that anyway. Ugh, if I never move large quantities of my stuff across oceans again, it'll be WAY. TOO. SOON. I know, I know, I've said that about a lot of things [trains, 8-hour flights, eating lentils...] but this time I mean it, hardcore. 

In other news I've been hunting around the interwebs for jobs; applied to a few but haven't heard back in the positive about anything yet. Mostly just clerical/administrative assistant stuff, but also a researcher position, a baker position [totally not qualified, but god wouldn't that be so awesome], and a few positions with children's programs in Providence. Also going to apply to be a sub in the Montville schools for the last few weeks of the term there if I haven't gotten anything lined up before returning home, and next week call up The Potting Shed to see if maybe they have some hours for me. I might put a listing up to be a nanny on craigslist again like I did last summer, since that was pretty successful last time around, I just screwed because I had to leave the country a month earlier than planned. Ahh, if only I lived in a world where people would just instantly want to buy my baked goods with as much zeal as I bake them, right? So that's been that and I've otherwise been kind of stuck inside since Sunday, when I jacked up my knee pretty nicely while running. It's such a nice day today, I'm like boiling with rage that I can't go for a jog, but I don't want to set myself back further than I already have. I'll do some yoga later. Also been looking at apartments, which has been going pretty well, all things considered. It'll be easier going once I'm back home and am there to take part in tending to such affairs, assuming we don't move on anything until I get back, which seems somewhat unlikely at this point; in any case, I remain for the most part unworried. And that's the news for now. I'm going to skulk off and maybe pack up a few things in my buzz of anticipation. Right after I post this recipe for you all...

I got this recipe from one of my favorite food blogs: The Crepes of Wrath. It's fabulous and a lot of fun. Also, the raw dough is to die for. Next time, I think I might mix it up and replace one set of chocolate chips with nuts, since this was kind of a crazy lot of chocolate for a girl like me, who likes her chocolate chip cookies easy on the chips. Recipe after the delicious photos.

[Preheat the oven to 375] [this recipe made like a bajillion -- aka 2 dozen -- cookies]

Ingredients:

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

1 cup [2 sticks] unsalted butter, room temp

3/4 cup packed light brown sugar

3/4 cup white sugar

2 tsp vanilla

2 large eggs, room temp

1/4 cup Dutch-processes cocoa powder, sifted [I could not find this stuff, so I used Stop&Shop cocoa powder. But next time...]

6 oz. white chocolate chips

1 chocolate bar of your choosing, chopped up [I actually used 1.5 Hershey's bars. Next time I might spring for something fancier]

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and baking soda. Then, in a larger bowl, cream the butter and sugars together until the mix is light and fluffy. Add the vanilla. Add the eggs one at a time. Add the flour mix slowly in small increments until combined. Split the dough in half, and to one half, add the cocoa powder. Add the white chocolate chips to the cocoa dough and the chocolate chunks to the vanilla dough. Using a tablespoon, or any medium-sized spoon, fill up half the spoon with one dough, and half with the other. Roll this into a ball, flatten a bit with your palm, and place on a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes.

DELICIOUS. NESS.