Today I am introducing German chocolate nougat sticks. One time a colleague brought these to work, of course I had to ask her for the recipe. And once I read through it, it sounded familiar. So I consulted the old cookbook from the 80s from the company Dr. Oetker and alas, the recipe was found there as well! By now Dr. Oetker has published the recipe online as well. These chocolate nougat sticks are such a treat. Bonus point, the cookie dough does not need to chill. You can pipe the dough right away. Continue Reading…
Today we are making vegan gingerbread hearts with jam filling. If you so desire, you can also make them vegan, you only need to swap out the butter for vegan butter as the dough naturally does not contain any eggs. You may find this gingerbread surprising as it contains jam and chocolate. I can assure you, this is a very German recipe. In fact, every year these gingerbread hearts are sold as of October. I always thought it was impossible to make them at home. But one time when I was eating a store-bought heart, I thought, let’s see how they are actually made and consulted the Internet. To my surprise they are much easier to make than originally thought. You make gingerbread dough (check), you cut out hearts with a cookie cutter, then you place a bit of jam on one heart and seal it with another heart on top. You bake them and dunk them in chocolate. That’s it!
Today I am going to introduce Germany’s answer to apple pie: German apple cake. It consists of a double pie crust, lots of apple filling and is then glazed. Compared to American apple pie, it looks rather plain. It doesn’t have any decorations, but believe me, this doesn’t mean that it tastes any less! This year we went apple picking already and so I decided to make this good old German apple cake. Sometimes you just crave the classics, so today you get this very traditional German apple cake.
We finally need another German recipe on the blog, for that reason you will get the typical Snow White Cake aka Donauwelle. But I am serving this classic with a twist, you will get it with strawberries instead of cherries. This cake contains a marbled cake base (another super German recipe) into which you press some cherries (normally), followed by a layer of German buttercream and topped off with a chocolate layer. Beside the Black Forest Cake this Snow White Cake is super German for me. But since I was not in the mood for canned cherries, I decided to use a lot of fresh strawberries, so my buttercream contains chunks of strawberry. The chocolate layer also has some strawberries tucked inside. Because why not? Continue Reading…
Today I am introducing you to a German treat with a Latin American twist: tree cake with the caramel dulce de leche. You may wonder why it is called tree cake. All the layers are supposed to represent the rings you see when you cut through the stem of a tree. If you buy this cake at a fair, the layers are not shown horizontally, but vertically. This makes it look even more like the real tree rings and hence the name. However, since you need a special construction with the cake roating on it to bake layer after layer, I decided to go for a simple version you can prepare with your oven at home.

These German vanilla crescents are prepared with real vanilla to give them maximum flavor. This is a classic Christmas cookie very popular in the German-speaking countries. So we are going to add vanilla not only in the dough, but also in the dusting. They are called vanilla crescents for a reason.

Finally it is plum time! For that reason you get Bavarian Zwetschgendatschi or plum cake today. Since I have been living in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, for more than a year, I need to introduce some local traditions and one of them definitely is Zwetschgendatschi. There are a lots of fights about what is the most classic version of this iconic dish. You can either prepare it with yeast dough or a pie crust, you may wish to only serve it with plums for them to shine. I, however, am a huge fan of crumbs or streusel and therefore decided to go with the crumb version. If you don’t want to wait for the yeast dough to rise, you can also make this plum tart, which I like just the same.
I asked you on Instagram and you all agreed, you wanted to get the recipe for ths cheesecake with apricots and crumbs. So here goes. I decided to make my favorite cheesecake with a pie crust (this is a very German thing to do) and fill it with lots of apricots (two layers) and sprinkle with some crumbs. Yes, I love crumbs on about anything. If you are not that much into crumbs, you can just leave them out, no problem.
It was the end of November, we were living as poor university students at that point in Dresden, in the east of Germany. We had no clue what to do. Everybody around us seemed to be busy decorating the apartment with wood handcraft from the close Ore mountains. Nutcrackers, smoking manikins, “Schwippbögen”, these are usually showing the nativity, were unwrapped and placed throughout the apartment. We simply couldn’t afford German wood handcraft from the region and therefore only had bare walls to show. Our Christmas decorations? Nil, nada, inexistent. What to do if you can barely make ends meet? My solution was simple: gingerbread or German Lebkuchen. Gingerbread is perfect if you want to use it as decoration. Regardless if you wish to use it for a gingerbread house (or even village?), to decorate your Christmas tree with, or to make an advent calendar. Gingerbread was my solution to our Christmas decoration.
These German nut triangles are one of my favorite desserts from Germany. I just learned recently that you supposedly only serve them during Christmas season in some regions of Germany. However, I remember seeing them everywhere all year round, every bakery had them at least where we lived. Even the school kiosk offered them all the time and I happily ate them day in and day out.