I firmly believe that we have to enjoy the small moments. One of them is this simple eggnog coffee cake. It needs about 20 minutes to prepare and then has to be baked for almost an hour, but I believe it is so worth it. My husband ate this cake single-handedly within a few days and requested for me to make it again very soon.
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Guys, you won’t believe how many strudels I have made recently. Crazy! Have you every tried to make one from scratch? I know a lot of people are scared of making the dough. But believe me, it is much easier than it looks, really. I was not paid for this but I took an online strudel class with the Austrian Lamarche, she shared so many helpful tricks, it was amazing! One major thing to keep in mind is that strudel dough has to rest. A lot. Like several times. You first knead it for a long time, then it rests, then you work a bit on it, and it rests again. For that reason I recommend making the dough the night or day before so that you can focus on all that stretching. Below you will have ten tips for perfect strudel dough, the basic recipe, and some extra recipes.
Guys, I was fortunate enough to participate in a strudel online class by the Austrian Astrid Lamarche. I was not paid to say this, I really enjoyed that strudel class. If you want to check Astrid’s Instagram, you will be amazed as to how big she manages to stretch out strudel dough. So I got super ambitious and swore to myself, I want to get as good as she is. If she manages to only use 200 grams of flour (a typical amount for strudel) to stretch the dough over her entire dining table, I want to try that, too! And it worked, of course there still is room for improvement, but I was so happy that this is a super classic and traditional Austrian strudel. So below I am sharing the recipe with you guys.
Have you heard of Springerle cookies from Germany? Traditionally they are made with anise seed. However, I don’t really like that flavor and instead made them with orange zest and vanilla extract. If you want to do the traditional flavor, I have you covered as well. Springerle cookies are a cookie that needs to be made in advance. It takes three days until they are baked and will intesify in flavor over the course of weeks. For that reason I recommend making them already now if you want to try them for Christmas. If you believe Wikipedia, Springerle cookies were already made in the Middle Ages and served for a lot of festivities, including weddings. The cookie molds were made from pear trees and passed down from generation to generation. I found my cookie mold here in Munich at the store Holzstandl, you may also try Etsy.
Spritz cookies without any cookie press, this is what I am presenting to you today. All you will need is a piping bag with a star tip and you should be good to go. In order for it to work, there are two secrets: first the consistency of the dough can be altered by adding milk by the spoonful, and second, in order for the piping bag not to explode, we will fasten it with some scotch tape. Kindly note that you need to find the happy middle between very dense dough, which is hard to pipe and dough that is too loose so the cookies won’t hold their shape. It does require a bit of experimenting until you have the right consistency. I hope that below instructions are helpful.
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Ole from the German blog Nimmersatt has a legendary apple cake on his blog, which has been on my baking list forever. I finally have come around to making it. The recipe is from his beloved granny (actually not his real grandma, but a neighbor that took him under her wings) that sounds very much like my own grandma. Just as granny Hanna would always have a cake in the house and offer it to friends and family, so did my grandma. My grandma was a very good cook and always made something sweet. If it was somebody’s birthday, there would be so much cake and so many different pastries that the table would almost break down. She always made too much, but that is how she liked it. Usually her cakes were simple, one typical one would be a sheet cake with fruits and crumbs or peppernuts.
“Brezen” is the Bavarian word for pretzels and today I am going to introduce these to you. So far I have only bought this staple here in Munich, Germany. I was always scared of the lye bath, which is required for a true Bavarian pretzel. However, I finally decided to give it a try and have to say, wow, homemade and from scratch taste so much better than bought, even if from a nice bakery! So today I will do my best to guide you to these. Beware, even in Germany there are differences in how pretzels are made. I will explain below, I hope I can interest you in making these.
Servus! Since the Oktoberfest 2024 is around the corner, I wanted to introduce you to another classic from Bavaria, Zwetschgenknödel, which translates as plum dumpling. You will realize that during the Oktoberfest a lot of desserts and pastries are sold and super popular, another typical one is the broken-up pancake called Kaiserschmarrn, a twin of the recipe from today is made with apricots and thus would translate as apricot dumplings. So far I have only made these famous dumplings with cream cheese or sour cream, but the real deal is actually made with cooked potatoes. So far I have refrained from it as it can be pretty finicky. It tends to be rather sticky and hard to work with. But below I offer some tricks so that you can enjoy this wonderful Bavarian classic.
This is a German recipe from the south, this is a simple sour cream cake. It was passed down by a reader, I didn’t even know of its existence and had to do some research. I learned that this can be classified as a cheesecake. It is made with sour cream containing 10% fat and heavy cream. What I like about this cake is several things. Number 1 being, it does not need a waterbath. Number 2: despite the fact that it is baked at a relatively high temperature, it does not crack easily. Number 3: as it uses this mild sour cream, it is not a tangy as some other German cheesecakes, it is slightly milder in taste. So will these reasons mean that you give it a try?
You probably know that it is only my hubby and me so I thought making a full baking sheet of cake would probably be too much. I already have a plum sheet cake on here. So I figured I would make more of a coffee cake in a round form. This would probably not take as long to eat. So I got to working on it and once done, it took very little and suddenly I only saw half of the cake left. Where had it gone? My hubby looked all innocent, he claimed he had only eaten three pieces of cake. If these these pieces were very large chunks of cake I inquired. Well, this depends on how you define “chunck”. Well, well, well… I think it speaks for itself that hubby was so excited about this recipe. I loosely based it on the Recipe from Alfons Schuhbeck (in German). he is very famous, especially for this plum cake called Zwetschgendatschi, so I am happy to present this plum cake with yeast dough, lots of plums, and cinnamon crumbs.
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