Hasenfrühstück

Ever since I started learning German, I've been interested in German cuisine and in trying traditional German recipes. As Easter is not that far away, various Easter recipes and paraphernalia began popping in my feed. Among them was this carrot and apple marmalade, called "Hasenfrühstück" or Rabbit's breakfast, which is typical, it seems, for German speaking countries, to be prepared at home for Easter.

As we love making home-made jams and carrots and apples are a staple in our home, especially in winter, I was quick to jump to the suggestion. 

There are plenty of variations on the recipe, as is the case of any recipe, so here are the proportions and the procedures that I chose for my carrot-apple-marmalade:

Ingredients:

• two big apples, cored and peeled, 500 g
• 700 g carrots
• 500 g sugar
• 200 g carrot and apple juice, store-bought
• juice from half-lemon
• half-teaspoon of apple pectin
  

Preparation:

Cut the apples and carrots into pieces (but better grate or chop in the chopper), cover with the juice of half a lemon, add 500 g sugar and 200 g juice (best would be fresh orange juice). Stir, heat up, turn the plate off and leave the mixture to stew and soften. Once the carrots and apples are soft enough, blend with an immersion blender. Even better, if the carrots and apples were grated in advance - we skipped that step, but experience showed that it the effort was recommendable.

As I was not sure, whether the pectin in the apples would be enough to thicken the marmalade, I added half a teaspoon of apple pectin. Alternatively, you might want to boil the jam a bit longer, until you get the desired texture.

Once the marmalade is ready, pour it hot into clean glass containers, close them tight and turn them over, until they cool. Store them in a cool and dark place.

Serve the marmalade with croissants or bagels and coffee and enjoy :) 

The taste is definitely carroty and might not be for everyone, but we liked it - it is fresh and different. Next year I would add more sour taste, to neutralize the sweetness - freshly squeezed orange juice instead of the carrot-apple juice and more freshly squeezed lemon juice - in hindsight I would have added the entire lemon squeeze - apples, carrots and citrus go really well together!

Sugarless Apple Muffins

Last year, on a whim, I decided to stop eating sugar. I love sweets and although I am certainly not overweight and have no health problems, related to sugar consumption, I thought it would be a beneficial experiment health-wise and I was also curious if I could do it. Initially it was only for a day, then a week and now it has been more than six months. 

I'm not religious about not eating sugar and my restrictions apply only to processed sugar, by which I mean that I eat a lot of fruits and dried fruits; it's not a carbohydrate restricting diet, just an abstinence from packed sugar as much as possible.

Even before summer last year, I rarely ate store-bought sweets, my morning coffee was accompanied mostly by home-made desserts. Lately I've been experimenting with my own recipes, replacing sugar with dried fruits. I should mention, that I am not a proponent of artificial sweeteners and I believe in reducing the craving and need for sweet taste by reducing the consumption of sweet taste. I can confirm, that my receptors for sweet have actually changed during these months and I can taste sweetness much more acutely.

I came up with these apple muffins last week and this is my second batch, husband polished most of the first one himself, and he hasn't been on my sugar-free regime, so it should be a testament, that they are delicious enough :)

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 40 g sunflower oil
• 100 g yogurt / sour cream
• 150 g / average apple chopped
• 100 g dried fruits (25 g of each raisins, cranberries, dates, plums)
• 120 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• pinch of salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove

Preparation:

Beat slightly the egg, add the yogurt and vegetable oil, mix. Add the dried fruits (cut the dates and plums into small pieces) and the apple, chopped into small pieces. Finally mix in the flour with baking powder, pinch of salt and spices.

Distribute the batter into 12 muffin forms and bake in a preheated oven at 180 C for approx. 25 min. Serve with hot coffee or tea.

Apfelstrudel

March is my month of Austrian cuisine. So far I've tried two traditional Austrian dishes - Spätzle and Apfelstrudel. The Spätzle was fairly easy and came out well, but the apple strudel will take some practice. I made it today with a lot of help from my husband, who peeled and sliced the apples, after we binge-watched half a dozen of videos on strudel recipes. In the end we chose this recipe by My German Recipes.

I think, as a first try with this tricky dough, my apple strudel came out fairly decent, but not perfect. The dough was too much for one strudel and next time I will try to make the strudel with half of the dough. The legends that you have to be able to read your newspaper through the stretched dough have their reason - the thinner it is, the crispier and tastier the strudel is. 

Another note - I followed the recipe and my apples were slightly sour and tart, I also added the juice of half a lemon, as the recipe calls, and as a result the filling is not sweet enough. Next time I will omit the lemon juice, it would be better if the filling is sweeter. Of course, may be the problem is that we didn't have any vanilla sauce or ice cream and served it with chilled white wine for desert, a sweeter addition could have made a difference.

Here are the ingredients I used:

For the dough:

• 400 g flour
• 150 ml lukewarm water
• 1 egg
• 1 pinch of salt
• 3 tbsp sunflower oil
  

For the filling:

• 800 g peeled and chopped apples
• 140 g sugar
• 50 g bread crumbs
• 70 g butter
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• cinnamon
• confectioners sugar
  

I baked the strudel at 190C for 1 hour, until golden. I also made a small bun, filled with pear jam, from the cuttings of the dough.

I am not perfectly happy with my first strudel, but making it was definitely fun and I will try it again. And of course, if all of the attempts at the perfect dough fail, one can always use filo pastry :)

Apple Pancakes

Apple pancakes - these are the latest addition to our family cuisine and they are really SO GOOD!

Quite a surprising little recipe by Fatto in Casa da Benedetta - an Italian cook I follow and truly appreciate. I've made this recipe already a couple of times and adjusted it to, well, my taste - for there is no such thing as "our taste" - everybody likes things just a little bit differently than the next person, I've found out, having been cooking for a family of four for quite some time now :)

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 30 g sugar
• 50 g milk
  
• 20 g sunflower oil
• 100 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• 5 g cinnamon powder
• 1 average apple, chopped
  

Preparation:

Mix all the products but the apple into a smooth batter. I forgot the cinnamon this time, but it is better with it, as it gives these pancakes a bit of an apple pie taste. Peel, if you like, and cut the apple into small pieces. I do not peel the apples, just wash them thoroughly, and then cut them in the chopper. Add the chopped apple to the batter. Heat a pan and bake the pancakes one by one, at medium heat (for my hot plate it is 6 out of 9) for about 2 min each side.

The above ingredients produce 5-6 pancakes (dependent on their size)

You can eat them as they are or serve with honey, jam or maple syrup. They are really delicious with a cup of latte.  

My Latest Apple Cake

I came upon this apple cake recipe somewhat by chance last week and today is the third time I'm baking it - it's SO good (half of it is already eaten!). My initial idea was to make a cake, using the handful of walnuts and raisins I had in the fridge. I mixed a recipe of eggs, milk, oil and flour and added the walnuts and raisins, but the batter seemed a little runny. So, I cored two apples, cut them in the chopper and added them to the batter. The apple cake turned very juicy, aromatic and sweet.

Here are the ingredients - I definitely want to preserve this recipe:
Products:

• 2 eggs
• 180 g sugar
• 120 g milk
• 60 g sunflower oil
• 200 g flour
• 10 g baking powder
• 10 g mixed spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, black pepper - I grind these together and make the mix myself)
• 300 g (two average sized) chopped apples
• 50 g walnuts 
• 50 g raisins

Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the oil and the milk. Mix the flour with the baking powder and the spices and add to the wet ingredients. Stir in the walnuts, raisins and apples. Pour the batter into a well greased baking form and put in a preheated oven at 180C. Bake until the toothpick test indicates it's ready. Serve with tea, coffee or milk and enjoy :)

First Snow

Following last week's sunny weekend we began the new week with our first snow in the city - two days of heavy snowing made Sofia a winter fairy tale land again.

And what's better in winter than the smell of roasted apples with brown sugar, rum and cinnamon :)

I've got a new FO - a free shawl pattern named Shells & Tide by Veronika Jobe. It's written for worsted weight yarn, but I made my interpretation in light fingering weight 100% wool - a scarf rather than a wrap. The unblocked scarf is 150 x 35 cm and I'm currently blocking it to 200 x 47 cm.

Another Apple Pie

I've started baking again this autumn and as I experiment with recipes and then forget them and often lose the pieces of paper I've written them on, I'm returning to blogging about baking. Here's the recipe I tried today - an apple pie, again:

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 cups flour
• 1 pack (10 g) baking powder
• 4 tbsp oil
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 cup cranberries, soaked in 2 tbsp rum
• 1/4 cup walnuts
• 1 big apple, peeled  and cut into small pieces
• 1 big pear, cut into small pieces

Preparation: Beat the eggs with the sugar, add the oil, flour with baking powder and cinnamon and stir. Add the cranberries, walnuts and pieces of fruit and pour the batter into a baking dish, greased with butter. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C until ready.

Serve with coffee, milk or juice.

Hooligan Pear Cake

The inspiration for this amazingly juicy and tasty cake came from this publication in one of my favourite Bulgarian cooking blogs. Yesterday I made it with apples and today - with pears and I can recommend both - turns out pears too go well with cinnamon and vanilla.

Ingredients: 

• 3 pears / apples
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup flour
• 50 g butter
• 5 g baking powder
• cinnamon, vanilla

Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the butter (melted) and the flour with the baking powder. Pour the batter in a greased baking dish (26 cm), spread the cut fruit on top and sprinkle with cinnamon, vanilla and sugar. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C.

Why hooligan - the author called it that because you cut the fruit into irregular forms and just throw the pieces on top without much order or symmetry concerns :)
A picture of yesterday's apple cake before baking.

Double Layer Apple Cake

Lately I've been baking cakes almost daily, mostly with apples. Usually the apples, when sliced, not grated, being heavier than the batter, fall to the bottom of the cake. So, I've been wondering what if ...
What if I baked half the batter and then added the apples and the upper half?! Would the bottom be overdone? And today I came upon this pumpkin pie recipe, that uses the double layer method. So the question was settled, I had to try a double layer apple cake.

For the filling I used the above kilogram of apples, peeled, sliced and stewed in their own juice with 100 g sugar.
For the cake batter:

• 2 eggs
• 180 g sugar
• 50 g oil
• 250 g yogurt + 5 g baking soda
• 300 g flour + 10 g baking powder 
• cinnamon, vanilla

Preheat the oven at 180C. Pour half of the batter in the cooking dish (mine is 28 cm in diameter). Bake for half an hour. Then take the dish out of the oven, spread the stewed apples, distribute the remaining batter on top of the apples and return the dish in the oven for another 30-40 min. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

The only shortcoming of this cake - it's too delicious and is gone too quickly :)))