Blueberry Cream Cake

The idea for this cake was inspired by the traditional German Kirsch-Schmand-Blechkuchen - layer cake with a cream filling, made with pudding and sour cream. I don't think I had ever met such a combination and I was very curious to try it. In the original recipe the fruit is cherries, usually from cans, but I used the blueberries that i picked on Mechit specifically with this cake in mind.

Instead of a butter cake layer, I chose to make a biscuit cheesecake base out of cracker biscuits and butter. My cream layer is custard, mixed with sour cream and the last layer is blueberries (no idea how much, all that I had managed to collect) and one packet of tortenguss - German fruit glaze, which I ordered from amazon.de.

Ingredients: 

Biscuit layer:

• 200 g cracker biscuits
• 100 g melted butter 

Cream layer:

• 2 eggs
• 100 g sugar
• 50 g flour
• 400 g milk
• 150 g sour cream  

Berry layer:

• blueberries
• 1 pack red tortenguss 
• 50 g sugar
• 220 g water 

Preparation:

This cake is made without baking, but you still have to cook the custard and the tortenguss. First prepare the biscuit layer - grind the biscuits, mix them with the butter, spread the buttery crumbs on the bottom of a cake form and press. Leave in the fridge for at least half an hour to cool and harden a little.

Meanwhile cook the custard - beat the eggs with the sugar, add the flour, stir, add the milk gradually, while stirring with a whisk. Bring to boil on a hot plate, while stirring constantly, until the custard is cooked. Leave to cool completely, covering the top with a stretch foil to avoid the formation of a crust.

Once the custard has cooled to room temperature, stir in the sour cream until smooth and homogeneous.

Spread the cream on top of the biscuit layer and leave in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Place the berries on top of the cream layer. Cook the red glaze according to the instructions. Cover the berries with the glaze and leave the cake in the fridge overnight.

The resulting cake is very light, creamy, with a fresh fruity taste, ideal with the morning coffee.

Easy Stollen

Stollen is a traditional German Christmas cake, which husband loves dearly. I had tried making it before, but found it too time-consuming and the result - underwhelming. However, last December we came upon a simplified recipe, which we liked very much and I've probably made already a dozen of these.

With every attempt I've moved slightly away from the original, so probably my version is now hardly a stollen, but who cares - it is delicious, we love it and I'd like to have it on the blog, so that I wouldn't loose the recipe.

Ingredients:

• 250 g flour
• 7 g fresh yeast
• 70 g warm milk
• 50 g melted butter
• 30 g sugar
  
• 1 egg
• 200 g dried fruit
• 25 g rum
• a pinch of salt and spices (cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, star anise)
  

Preparation:

Put all the dry fruit in a bowl, add the rum, cover and let them sit for a few hours, preferably over night,  so that the fruit can soak up the rum.

Warm the milk and add the fresh yeast and the sugar in it. Melt the butter. Add the milk with the activated yeast, the melted butter, the egg and the spices and mix. Knead the dough until elastic and leave it to rest for a couple of hours in a warm space. In winter I put it covered in my oven with the light on.

Once the dough has doubled its size, it is time to add the dry fruit, which has soaked up the rum. Mix and knead thoroughly and leave to rest for another hour or two.

Spread the dough on a surface and flatten it into a rectangle. Fold one third of the rectangle, then fold the second third on top and press, giving the dough the traditional stollen form. I used to bake the stollen in free form on a baking tin, but lately I prefer to put it in a rectangular cake form and bake it like that. I know, it is not as per tradition, but it is easier to cut in slices.

 

Leave the stollen to rest for a final half an hour, preheat the oven at 180 C and bake until ready, for about 40 min.

Once the stollen is out of the oven, you can brush it with melted butter and cover it with powdered sugar. That is the traditional way and we do it sometimes, but frankly, I prefer it without the added sugar and usually skip the last step. 

Around Christmas I used to put candied orange and lemon peel and other Christmasy goodies in the dough, but lately it is only dried fruit of various sorts, these here are raisins, plums, dates and cranberries, a favourite combination of mine, which combines sweetness, sourness and flavour.

Salty Cheesecake

I had been planning this cheese cake for New Year's Eve, but we kept eating one of the products or another, while I procrastinated with the preparation. 

I finally made it and it turned out to be an excellent appetizer, especially in combination with white wine. However, because I didn't want it too heavy, I reduced the butter and skipped the walnuts, so it came out more crumbly than it should be. It was completely fine and super delicious, but if I don't want it in crumbs, next time I should add more butter or nuts, to join the biscuits.

Ingredients:

• One pack (200 g) crackers
• 10 g butter (should be at least 50 g or 100 g walnuts)  
• 100 g cream cheese
• 200 g cottage cheese
• 200 g sour cream
• 2 teaspoons of chopped dill

Preparation:

Crumble the crackers in the chopper. Mix them with the butter and compact the biscuit layer in a cake form. Mix the cheeses and sour cream, add the dill and distribute evenly on top of the biscuit layer, Serve cold with white wine and enjoy!

The snowdrops in the garden behind our building are already in bloom. Can't wait for spring to be here already!

Strawberry Cake with Crumbs

This recipe and these photos have been waiting publication for over a month and I'm finally finding a couple of minutes to upload and write down the recipe.

I've already made this cake repeatedly, only a couple of days ago I tried a new version with chocolate chips in it - the best according to my taste, and it is recently one of the preferred cakes in our family.

What makes it so unique is the perfect combination of fresh fruit, sponge cake and buttery crumbs on top, but I should add, that it also works with frozen fruit - not as juicy, but still quite good.

Ingredients:

For the sponge cake:

• 2 eggs
• 100 g sugar
• 80 g vegetable (sunflower) oil
• 120 g milk
• 200 g flour
• 10 g baking powder

For the crumbs: 

• 30 g butter
• 2 table spoons flour
• 2 table spoons sugar

Preparation:

Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the oil and milk, mix. Sift and add the four with the baking powder and a pinch of salt. I also add vanilla.

Pour the batter into your baking dish. Half the strawberries and arrange on top. 

To prepare the crumbs, grate the cold butter and mix it with the flour and the sugar, until you get buttery crumbs. Spread them on top of the cake.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for approx. 20 min. Serve with tea or coffee, best in the morning with your Duolingo lessons :)

These can also be made into muffins, if you don't mind the additional work :)

Blueberry Cake

I didn't plan to blog about this cake that I made yesterday afternoon, but it turned out so, so delicious, that I want the recipe in my recipe book, that is my blog.

I found the recipe somewhere on FB before Christmas, wrote it down on a small flying piece of paper, made it once in the form of muffins and forgot about it. The muffins were OK, but nothing special. Yesterday I came upon the piece of paper among my German notebooks and decided to make the recipe again, but this time as a cake. I'm not sure what I made different, but the resulting cake is super soft and moist, very aromatic and just a tad sour from the blueberries. I'm definitely making this again and I mean to try it with sour cherries too (as I have them in my freezer right now :).

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 180 g sugar
• 40 sunflower oil + 40 g melted butter
• 220 g flour
• 130 g milk
• 10 g vanilla sugar, pinch of salt
  
• 7 g baking powder + baking soda
• 140 g frozen blueberries
  

Preparation:

Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the oil and melted butter, incorporate in the eggs mixture. Add the milk, incorporate. Add the flour with the baking powder, baking soda, salt and vanilla sugar. Gently mix. Finally add the frozen berries. I did not let them soften this time, just added them directly from the freezer. Pour the batter into a baking form and bake in a preheated oven at 190C until golden. 

Serve cold with coffee or tea and enjoy!

Honey Biscuits

A recipe with sourdough discard I tried today and liked. It is a variation of a recipe I read in a cooking blog, which I adapted to my products. It yielded 30 small size biscuits, which go just perfect with my coffee and Duolingo lessons :)

I've experimented with adding sourdough discard into various muffins and cakes and the results are not always satisfying - what we are actually adding is basically flour and water in equal proportions and, dependent on the quantity of the added sourdough, it might change the taste of the final product, not always in a positive way. But these came out so delicious, that my husband called them fentanyl in the form of a cookie :) 

Ingredients:

• 70 g discard sourdough
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp honey
• 100 g sugar
• 8 g (one pack) vanilla sugar
• 
  1 tsp cinnamon
• 40 g vegetable oil
• 250 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• pinch of salt
  

Preparation: 

Mix the sourdough with the egg and the oil. Add the honey, sugar and spices into the mixture. Finally add the sifted flour with the baking powder and knead into dough. Place the dough in the fridge for 30 min to rest. 

After 30  min, turn on the oven at 180C. Take the dough out of the fridge, cover a baking tin with baking paper and prepare the cookies, taking small pieces of the dough, forming them into smooth balls and slightly pressing them with your palm to flatten them. Bake for 15 min.

Serve with coffee or milk and enjoy.

Tyrolean Tart

Husband and I hiked yesterday on Lulin mountain, a repeat of our last year's hike mid July in the hope to find again some ripe raspberries for half a dozen jars of wild raspberry jam. Alas, summer is evidently late this year and the raspberries were at least two weeks аваъ from riping. However, the wild strawberries were still fairly abundant - another evidence that the seasonal fruits are late this year, as other years we've seen ripe strawberries on Dupevitza as early as June 10th.

Anyway, instead of raspberries, we gathered some strawberries and in the evening I made my first Tyrolean tart. I liked it a lot and I am putting down the recipe in my blog, as I know I'll be willing to repeat it, and soon.

The biscuit crust:

• 100 g butter
• 1 egg
• 50 g sugar
• 220 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
  

Beat the egg with the sugar. Add the melted, but not hot butter. Add the flour with the baking powder and mix into a soft dough. I don't have a tart form, so I used my spring cake form, covering the bottom and forming a border along the walls of the form, high enough for the filling of the tart. I pricked the thus formed biscuit layer with a fork and placed it in a preheated oven to bake for 25 min at 180C.

The cream filling:

• 350 ml milk
• 2 egg yolks
• 50 g sugar
• 2 tbsp flour
• vanilla
• 10 g butter 
  

Stir the egg yolks with the sugar, add the vanilla, the flour and a small amount of the milk and stir, until homogeneous. Add the rest of the milk and cook over the hot plate at medium heat until the cream thickens and begins to boil. Set aside to cool down to room temperature. Cover with cling form to avoid a crust being formed.

The fruit layer

Here any fruit and any syrup goes. I used the wild strawberries and I prepared a syrup out of home-made strawberry jam, diluted in 150 ml water. This made my syrup somewhat murky, so next time I'll use something else for the jelly. To thicken it, I added 5 g of gelatin, prepared according to the instructions on the pack. 

Finally I assembled the tart and placed it in the fridge overnight. The resulting dessert is delicious crispy crust with sweet creamy filling and divinely aromatic wild berries with a very delicate sour tinge. Definitely recommend this recipe and will be making it soon with other berries (wild raspberries :), hopefully).

My Favourite Muffins

In the days before Christmas we got a package we had ordered on AliExpress, containing 500 muffin liners. And that's how it all started :)))

I began experimenting with a simple vanilla muffin recipe, trying to perfect it to make exactly 12 puffy and delicious muffins. 

After several iterations, I found this to be the final (so far) perfect proportion of ingredients:

• 180 g flour
• 200 g sugar
• 2 eggs
• 100 g yogurt
• 80 g milk
• 40 g sunflower oil
•  pinch of salt
• 5 g baking powder + 2 g baking soda
  

To the above I might add vanilla, chocolate drops, cocoa, lemon zest, grated chocolate, raisins, nuts, etc.

Preparation: Mix and stir the wet ingredients. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and stir. Distribute in 12 muffin forms and bake in a preheated oven at 200C for approx. 20 min, until a toothpick test shows the muffins are done.

 I've made these entirely chocolate flavoured, adding 25 g cocoa to the mixture

I tried them with lemon zest, lemon flavour and lemon icing

I tried them marbled

and even with pears in a cake form. And they tasted perfect with coffee every time!