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 :)

Peak Dupevitza During The Hot Days

It is hot! I know, it is summer and it is supposed to be hot, but for us, Sofia residents, accustomed to a bit colder mountain climate, temperatures above 30C feel HOT, HOT, HOT.

We were really tempted this week to go to the higher mountains, like Pirin or Rila, but we also felt like picking some wild raspberries, so in the end we chose the low mountain of Lulin and climbed peak Dupevitza.

I remember a climb of Dupevitza on a hot summer day a couple of years ago, when I really struggled in the hot humid air. This year I've been trying to increase my cardio-vascular capacity (which is unfortunately innately much below average) and so, apart from my daily walks (4-5 km), I also jog from time to time, usually once or twice a week. Maybe it's the jogging or maybe I just had a better day, but although it was one of the hottest days of the year, the climb to the peak felt like almost no effort at all. I really hope it's the jogging and not just a fluke.

Hike info:

Destination: round trail to peak Dupevitza

Mountain: Lulin

Total length: 10 km

Elevation gain: 320 m

Total duration (plus picnic and berry eating and picking): 3 and a half hours

Average difficulty: 3 / 10 

Me-made items, worn on this hike:

Husband: boxershorts

I: lingerie, Love Notion's Tunic, Love Notion's leggings

:On Dobrinova skala peak

:All Saints Chapel. We had our picnic at the picnic area nearby

:The Monastery of Gorna Banya

:As we still had quite a few handfuls of wild strawberries, I made another tart today, with cake base and divine custard filling with whipped cream. The aroma of these strawberries is unbelievable!

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).

Snow in April and Other Incidents

Last night I made my first Pavlova. Or rather, I started making my first Pavlova, following strictly the recipe in this excellent Russian culinary site.
For the meringues I used 4 egg whites, 180 g sugar + 10 g vanilla sugar + 1 vanilla, 3 tsp corn farina, 1 tsp white vinegar and 1/2 tsp lemon juice. The whites looked perfectly beaten, I distributed them into two circles, as described in the recipe and placed them in the warm oven at 100C.

And the baking began. Two hours later the meringues were still semi-liquid in the center, so I continued baking them and checking them and increasing the temperature of the oven to 120C and still baking them until it was midnight. I was mad and exhausted, so I turned off the oven and left them there to cool.

In the morning the meringues were still sticking to the baking paper, soft inside, but I removed them somehow and assembled the cake.
For the cream I used 200 ml French heavy whipping cream with 2 tbsp of vanilla powdered sugar and 250 g sour cream with 4 tbsp of white sugar.

I was too frustrated with this cake to bother much with the decoration, so I just scattered a few handfuls of fresh strawberries between the two layers and on top. A few hours ago I was certain that this is not only my first but also my last Pavlova, but now, that I've tasted it, I might have reconsidered :))

And a few pictures from our balcony of the snow we had yesterday (it's snowing big fat snowflakes as I write this post). The temperatures are close to but still above zero and the ground is already warm, so the snow cover is only temporary, but still - we want our spring back!

The cold and the snow precipitation is not comparable to that in other European countries like Austria or Moldova, but we had to take out the winter hats, sweaters and coats.

Looking forward to normal warm April days ...

Bistritza

Yesterday we spent the day on Vitosha, picnicking on a clearing above the village of Bistritza. The place we chose is at the foot of the mountain and probably one of the most beautiful fields I've ever seen, covered with purple and yellow flowers. We walked around, played badminton and bow shooting. While the boys, being hunters by nature, practiced with the bow, my daughter and I came upon a wild strawberry "plantation" and gathered a cup of strawberries, which we all ate as a dessert :)

While driving up the mountain, we saw clouds of smoke high in the mountain. We later read in the news that there was a fire in a section of the pine wood in the forest reserve of Bistritza. Two choppers carrying water from the Pancharevo lake flew all the time, trying to quench the fire. According to latest news, the fire-fighting is still going on, the place is high above in the mountain and very difficult to reach. There is no official statement yet as for the source of the fire, but the fact that it happened at noon on a Sunday makes me suspect human error. Vitosha mountain is the greatest treasure of our city and it pains me that a lot of people do not appreciate and protect it, but use it and pollute it irresponsibly.