German Archives - Jenny is baking

Simple Sour Cream Cake

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?

13/09/2024

German Hazelnut Crescents with 5 Ingredients

You may have had enough from cookies, but I don’t care, I decided to blog a last-minute recipe: German hazelnut crescents with five ingredients. This recipe was passed down to me by a lovely lady in Munich. Just as these Heidesand cookies and this Dresdner Eierschecke are recipes from readers, this one has a funny backstory. The German platform Nebenan.de works like a community platform, I got curious when I saw that somebody was asking whether German bakeries in the vicinity sold homemade cookies. I learned that his mother had requested homemade cookies during the season. Since she had recently moved to a nursery home, she couldn’t make them herself anymore. He didn’t dare to make some, so I inquired. One thing let to another and after all I managed to bake these crescents according to his mother’s recipe. Yes, of course she got a batch right away.

19/12/2023

Chocolate Nougat Sticks

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…

24/11/2023

Vegan Gingerbread Hearts with Jam Filling

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!

17/11/2023

Germany’s Answer to Apple Pie: German Apple Cake

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.

15/09/2023

Classic Apple Strudel

When I showed you in my stories on Instagram how I made this strudel, so many of you asked for the recipe and how I did it, so this is it! A classic apple strudel with some streusel or crumbs. I know that strudel dough can be intimidating, it was also for me, but like with everything, practice makes perfect. My first strudel looked very different, it had a lot of thick parts and I had so many wholes in it. But one of the good things of strudel is that the main event is the filling anyway, so even if your dough is not perfect, it does not matter that much because the dough is so thin and only is there to hold together the fruit filling or whatever you are going with.

04/11/2022

Snow White Cake with Strawberries

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…

21/05/2021

German Tree Cake with Dulce de Leche

Baumkuchen mit Karamell aus Südamerika namens dulce de leche

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.

01/12/2020

Pfeffernüsse or German Spice Cookies from Grandma

Have you ever heard of Pfeffernüsse aka German spice cookies? I live in the south of Germany in the city Munich. Once I asked in a bakery whether they sold any and they look at me as if as were from Mars. So I checked, since there are so many German dialects, maybe they use another word in Bavaria, but no, I quickly learned that they are also called Pfeffernüsse here. However, they seem to be more common in the north of Germany, the Dutch and Danish also have similar versions. The handwritten recipe book from my grandma contains about ten different recipes. Many of her recipes contain peppermint extract and this one is closer to gingerbread or German Lebkuchen. Pfeffernüsse literally translates as “pepper nuts”, probably they are called “nuts” because they are the size of walnuts. At least the ones I grew up with are rather small.

27/11/2020

Bavarian Zwetschgendatschi or German Plum Cake

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. For more recipes with plums, check this article.

07/08/2020

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