My nine favorite recipes with pumpkin. Finally it is the season again for my beloved pumpkin. So let me introduce to you my favorite recipes, be it breakfast, in a cookie, a cake, cupcake or in waffles, let this orange vegetable shine. What is your favorite recipe with pumpkin?
How does a chocolate cake as base, lot of bananas, and a stracciatella cream sound to you? For good measure I also included some crunchy banana chips and an elegant chocolate drip. For this cake to look as beautiful as it tastes. My friends, let me introduce you to this banana chocolate cake! Who would like a slice?
Where is the champagne? Where are the streamers and glitter? You are invited to a nice helping of this strawberry and elderflower cake! Why, you ask? I am celebrating my third year of blogging. The first recipe that went online on my blog was this lemon tart, which I still love to make. I honestly never thought I would be blogging for three years. I have always been a person who just learns things by doing them. Instead of figuring everything out beforehand, I just give it a go and see what happens. The reason I started this blog was because I got tired of having to pass on recipes I was asked to provide to my friends and family. I also wanted to have some kind of organization so I thought a blog may come in handy. I would have never believed that I would enjoy taking pictures as much as baking. Mind you, I once was a professional pianist, I always thought my visual ability was not as good. However, I am still enjoying my blog immensely, be it baking, food photography or anything else, and for that reason I hope there are many more blog years to come. How about a slice of this delicious strawberry elderberry cake for this special occasion?
Apparently I am not the only one who loves the combination of raspberries with chocolate. For that reason I am introducing today this moist raspberry chocolate layer cake. I was surprised that I got so many reactions when I posted the entire process and end-result as an Instagram story. I am not alone in my love for a things chocolate with some tart raspberries to offset the sweetness of the chocolate.
I often take cake to work. My colleagues are some of my regular test eaters. And since I bring cake to work often, I usually can tell if a recipe stands out. That was definitely the case with this apple almond cake. Suddenly I found post-its saying “Thank you to our baking queen” or “Thanks for making my Thursday morning much sweeter.” My conclusion? This apple almond cake is a keeper, it is a keeper because no other cake has received as many post-it notes. It definitely needs to be posted on the blog. If you want apples in your coffee cake, this is the cake to choose. You have some apple in the cake dough, a lot of apple compote on the top with some nicely browned almonds plus one full apple as pretty decoration on the top. I mean, you got APPLE cake for sure with this one.
Do you also bake your own birthday cake? I definitely did this year. When I saw this delicious blueberry lemon cake on the blog Knusperstübchen (in German) I knew this was going to be my birthday cake. Especially since I hadn’t eaten any sweets in week. I wanted to indulge in this beauty. Obviously I had to tweak the recipe a bit. But when I finally digged into the first piece, there was silence. Silence for a full piece of cake, this is how good the cake was. This is a super moist blueberry lemon cake as it contains a lot of fresh blueberries. I also like the fact that so much lemon zest and lemon juice is used in both, the cake and also the cream.
Have you ever eaten anything with daisies? I hadn’t until recently. Funnily enough, daisies grow almost everywhere and don’t ask for much. But somehow nobody considers using them for cooking and baking. I find that extremely sad. We are not used to using herbs and flowers we find in nature. I recently had a conversation with somebody who was very surprised when she learned that elderflowers are not sold in stores, but that if she wanted to eat anything with elderflowers, she would need to harvest them herself. We have forgotten getting out into nature and cook up something with what we find.
Many of the herbs you find outside can be used for cooking. The same holds true for flowers. I live in Munich with more than a million inhabitants, yet even in Munich I can find wild garlic, elderflowers and daisies. I find it important that we use the flowers we find growing around us. For that reason I used daisies as decoration in this cake. The ones you see on the top are candied daisies. I also use them in the second layer of the bar. Daisies make everything look pretty and candied daisies are a perfect decoration in cakes. That’s why I also used daisies to decorate this blackberry lavender cake.
Strawberry Tiramisu Cake! If this is not a cake for Mother’s Day, I don’t know what is. I was inspired by this strawberry tiramisu from Life is full of goodies (in German), which I can highly recommend. I have had people specifically requesting that recipe for a get together, so check it out! Anyway, since the strawberry tiramisu was such a hit, I decided to make this a cake. Because, you know mother’s day? I won’t deny that this is an extremely rich and decadent cake. But with such a sweet heart on the top I believe it is worth it. Oh, and just so you know, it does not contain any raw egg or alcohol.
Update 2019: New photos and improved recipes
Happy Easter everybody! I feel it is time for a decadent strawberry chocolate cake, don’t you think? And this one is so good. It has a chocolate cake as base, with a generous cream cheese and whipping cream filling with chunks of chocolate mixed in, lots of fresh strawberries and some more cocoa thrown in, just for good measure. If you are into chocolate (who isn’t?) and if you like fresh strawberries the same way I do, this one is for you. I already published the recipe two years ago and have baked it several times since then. After some additional tweaks I felt I had to republish the recipe since it always, always receives raving reviews and was in desperate need of some fresh photos.
It is a shame that I haven’t posted that many bundt cakes on my blog yet. Seriously, I love bundt cakes, they are so German! And when we moved inside of Germany and I was holding my bundt cake form, I thought, well, it is about time to finally make another bundt cake again! So I decided to go with a fruity one, I love raspberries, so this time I wanted to make a delicious bundt cake with raspberry filling. It is made with yeast dough, filled with raspberries and then rolled up in the bundt cake. The yeast basically does most of the work, so don’t worry, you will have this cake ready in no time!
Many people are intimidated by yeast, but you really don’t have to be. Think of yeast as a living thing, which is actually is. I like to compare yeast to a woman in winter, yeast always likes it cozy and warm, not necessarily hot, but nice and warm. As long as you take care of that and your yeast is active, I promise, it is not that hard to deal with, give it a go!
Once you have the dough prepared, you will roll it out into a rectangle and smear the raspberry filling on top. Think of it as a cinnamon roll, because you do exactly the same, you smear the raspberries on, roll it up, but then you will place this roll into the bundt cake form. I find it so exciting cutting into the rather plain looking cake.
