As traditional by now, I'm posting the yearly recipe for some seasonal bakery shenanigans. This year's recipe is a special one for me - and it comes with a bit of backstory.

When I was a child, we'd visit my paternal grandmother for the seasonal holidays - Easter and Christmas. She lived not too far away, but too far for just a casual visit; in a small house that was rather simple and old-fashioned. I remember the very small toilet, which had no sink; you had to go into the kitchen to wash your hands, where there was a small sink, and I also remember the water being quite, quite cold.

My grandmother always served us food, all home-cooked and home-made from scratch, and very different from what my mum made. She came from Czechoslovakia, and that did show in her cooking and baking. She'd also serve us cake for coffee, and there was always whipped cream, and hot chocolate for the children. (True to her geographical roots, by the way, the coffee was very, very strong to a German's taste.) She took a lot of pride in her cooking and baking - and the baking, oh, the baking, there were some glorious things that are firmly connected to childhood birthday and holiday memories. One of them was a special kind of layered cake she'd make on my request - it was my firm favourite, and it was called "Schnittchen". Another happy memory was of her Christmas cookies, which we'd get to take home after our visit: several large tins, filled with a variety of cookies, all lovingly hand-made. There were a few staples that you'd always find, each and every year, and then some varieties that might be there or might not. Those cookies were part of Christmas for me just like the tree, and the visit, and the other things that make the festivity what it is.

Years go on, though, and people get older, and she eventually suffered a stroke and could not live at home on her own anymore - she moved into an old people's home, and that stroke also set an end to her baking and cooking. So... I took over.

Unfortunately, the fact that she took a lot of pride in her kitchen skills came with a downside: She would not share recipes. If asked, she'd say "oh you take this and that and a few eggs and then you make the dough and then you bake it" - and refuse to give you proper amounts, or ingredients, or descriptions. So I never knew how she made the Schnittchen, or the many different cookies she'd bake. I remembered the staples, though, and some of the special ones. So I tried to re-create all the ones that were important to me, with mixed success. Some, I'm sure, have a very different dough from what she used, but for me, the fillings are the important bit, and the fact that there are cookies coated with chocolate and filled with praliné, and ones also chocolate-coated and filled with redcurrant jelly, and Vanillekipferl, and then there's walnut baisers. I also remember that she'd make apples and pears that had a sugar glaze, but I never recreated these - they were mostly sweet, my parents didn't much care for that variety, and so they got relegated to memory only status, not resurrected.

For years now, I've made these important-to-me varieties. Then, after my gran died, some of her recipe collection fell into my hands... and I actually found a cookie recipe that she had used, with her notations on the journal cutout with the recipe. It was one of my favourites among the not-there-every-time cookies, and it's called Nougatmützchen (little praliné hats). When I made these and then ate the first one, it was like a time travel back - and a very, very emotional moment ensued.

Making those is a three-step process, it involves a lot of praliné and chocolate, it is rather messy... and, if you ask me, totally worth it even if you don't have the deep historical connection to these cookies that I have. Also, because my gran's refusal taught me that sharing your recipes is important, it's also the recipe I'll share with you this year.

Nougatmützchen:

Cookie basis:

150 g flour
3 g baking powder
50 g sugar
1 pack vanilla sugar
1 pack rum aroma
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons milk
50 g butter

praliné mix:
400 g praliné (This is the German "Nougat" or "Nuß-Nougat", a soft concoction from hazelnuts and cocoa or chocolate. If you've never heard about this before, you can find more info here.)
100 g almond splinters (I usually take almond flakes and cut them smaller with a knife)
c 50-80 g of crushed cookies

plus milk chocolate to cover (c 200-250 g)

Make a pastry dough from the dough ingredients; let the dough sit in the cool for a while to rest, then roll out (about 2 mm of thickness) and cut out circles; the original recipe suggests 4 cm diameter, mine are a bit smaller. Bake in a pre-heated fan oven for 8 minutes at 175° C.

The original recipe now tells you to crush one third of the finished cookies into fine crumbs. I prefer to bake some of the bits that are left over between the circles that I cut out, because I'm lazy that way. I also use more of the similar leftover bits (you know that stage when your dough leftover bits are not really worth rolling out again? perfect for this) from the other cookie dough.

Warm the praliné and stir it until smooth, then mix in the cookie crumbs plus the almonds.



Now comes the messy bit, part one: each of the round cookies should get a mound of the praliné mass on top. It helps if the mass is not too warm.



Let them sit in a cool place until the praliné has firmed up; melt up the chocolate. This is messy bit, part two: Cover the tops with chocolate. I do this by grasping each cookie with two fingers, dipping it into the molten choc, then use a third finger or one of my second hand to turn them right side up again, then set it onto a rack to firm.



I get about 80-100 cookies out of this, depending on how thin I roll out the dough.

And that's your seasonal recipe for 2019. Let me know if you made it - and how you liked it!

The other seasonal recipes that I blogged in the past are:

• Linzer Plätzchen
• Lemon Lozenges
• Chocolate-Coffee-Nut Spheroids
• Schokogongs (Chocolate THINGS) and how to make the praliné for filling them
• Marzipan-stuffed dates
• Gingerbread, without flour (Nuremberg type)
• Basic cookie dough (or five types of cookies from one batch of dough)
• Vanillekipferl (vanilla crescents)
• Spitzbuben (jam-filled cookies)

Easter is coming up. That festival of eating eggs (lots of eggs!), both chocolate and chicken-produced. When everybody is happy about spring finally being in full spring, and winter being over.

So, in preparation, here's two things:

Openculture writes about killer rabbits in medieval manuscripts. Yes, the Monty Python Killer Bunny is not completely made up - there are Evil Rabbits of Megadoom abounding in manuscripts…

The second thing? It's in case you would like to make some weird, relatively quick-to-make confection that can be eaten at Easter. Or at any other point in the year, actually - it's just my excuse to post this now. I call it "Inflated Figs" and it works like this:

Buy cream, dark chocolate (a good, yummy kind, not the cheapest, please), and soft dried figs. You'll also need a pot and a piping bag with either a filling nozzle or a slim nozzle with a small opening.

Put some cream into a pot and gently heat; add an equal-weight amount of dark chocolate and stir until completely mixed. You should have a thickish brown sauce-like ganache as a result. Spoon your ganache into the piping bag. Insert the nozzle into a fig and press the warm ganache into the fig until it inflates. Repeat until running out of figs, ganache, or both. Place in the fridge to cool, and it's probably best to also store these in the fridge for as long as they will last - if, in case you are like me and love both figs and chocolate, might not be very long.

If you have ganache left over, you can whip it up, put small mounds on it on top of cookies, and serve that as a dessert in its own right, by the way. Or use it to glaze a cake... in case you need an excuse for some cake-baking!

Maybe, just maybe, I shouldn't have read that stuff about procrasti-baking.

Though usually, I don't procrasti-bake, I procrasti-cook - doing something vaguely lunch-related which takes a longer time than I should actually use for cooking. At least for everyday normal lunch cooking. Sometimes, though, both things coincide. Like for this:



It's a Strudel, but not a classic one with Strudelteig, but with yeast dough. This special kind of dough contains boiled mashed potatoes, so it's not a normal one either. The recipe I found was for an apple filling, but I decided to make a version with a savoury filling:



That's minced meat, onion, pumpkin, and some olives, seasoned with rosemary, sage, thyme, and oregano. And though I botched and added too little salt to the dough, and though the filling was a little too sparse, the dough itself? It is awesome.

The mashed potatoes turn the thing into a wonderful silky-smooth something. Rolled out thinly, and then left to rise again for a sufficient amount of time (I think it needed a good hour or so), it bakes into a wonderfully fluffy thing. I will definitely make this again!

And in case you want to try it, too, here's the recipe for the dough (for the Germans, here's the original recipe on Chefkoch):

350 g flour
20 g yeast
60 ml milk (lukewarm)
250 g potatoes
2 medium eggs (I used 2 large eggs for double the amount of dough)
75 g butter

for the sweet variation: about 50 g sugar and 8 g vanilla sugar plus a pinch of salt; for the savoury version: salt to taste

Boil the potatoes and press them to mash while still hot (you can do that the day before).
Put the flour in a bowl and make a little hollow in the middle; crumble the yeast in there, add the milk and about a teaspoon of sugar, stir in some of the flour to make a (still liquid) dough and let it rise.

Melt the butter and let it cool down again. Add mashed potatoes, molten butter, salt, sugar for the sweet version and knead into a smooth dough.

Roll the dough out thinly (I use a large floured teatowel for this, which is also helpful in rolling up the thing and transferring it to the baking sheet) and spread with filling of your choice. A thin spread of jam will do a very nice job; you can of course turn this into a classic Apfelstrudel by adding apples, or fill it with some Quark concoction.

Roll your filled dough up and let it sit in a warm place to rise for at least half an hour. Bake at 180°C (fan oven) for 35-40 minutes. Enjoy (possibly with the addition of some vanilla sauce, or custard, or a bechamel sauce for a savoury version).

I like it best when hot, and it will heat up very nicely again in the microwave.

It's the time of year that the oven sees lots of action - this year, it's extra exciting as the new oven seems to have quite different ideas about temperatures than the old one had. Things turn out slightly... differently than I'm used to, with baking times for the cookies being significantly longer now. Seems like the old one tended to run a bit hot in the temperature range that is needed for cookies!

So, anyway, for your delight this year: Spitzbuben. These are a rather new addition to our assortment of Weihnachtsplätzchen, though they are a firm staple in German Xmas baking traditions, more or less all over Germany, though they do come under different names. Apart from Spitzbuben (which would be rascals or rogues), they can be called Linzer Augen, Linzer Plätzchen, or Hildabrötchen (literally: Hilda bread rolls). In the town where I grew up, something similar, only larger than a Plätzchen, was sold in the bakery close to my school under the moniker "Pfauenauge" (peacock's eye, the one on the tail feather). Why those names? I have no clue at all. I can tell you, though, that these things are... delicious.

It's a pastry dough, stuck together with red currant jelly, and traditionally  their shape is small and round with a peep-hole in the top layer, so you can see the jelly. Like this, for instance:



You might notice that there is both red and yellow stuff filling these. The yellow is apricot jam, because I happen to like that a lot as well.

So here you go, the recipe:

200 g butter
200 g flour
100 g powdered sugar
100 g almonds, peeled and ground fine
2 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla sugar

Beat the soft butter together with the sugar until fluffy, then beat in egg yolks. Mix in the remaining ingredients; the resulting dough is very soft and sticky and will need cooling for minimum of one hour.

Roll the dough to a thickness of about 2 mm, and cut out cookies. If you want to do the traditional German thing, they are circles, half of them with a hole in the middle (here you can get special cookie cutters with integrated hole-cutting-thing and even with a stamper to throw out the cookie, and of course with different shapes for the holes).

Bake in a fan oven for about 8-10 min at 160°C. After the cookies have cooled, spread jam on the complete circles and cover with the circles with a hole. The traditional stuff for this is, as stated above, red currant jelly (not jam!).

Makes about 70 cookies, so it's enough to try out both kinds of filling!

The other seasonal recipes that I blogged in the past are:

• Linzer Plätzchen
• Lemon Lozenges
• Chocolate-Coffee-Nut Spheroids
• Schokogongs (Chocolate THINGS) and how to make the praliné for filling them
• Marzipan-stuffed dates
• Gingerbread, without flour (Nuremberg type)
• Basic cookie dough (or five types of cookies from one batch of dough)
• Vanillekipferl (vanilla crescents)

A friend is pondering making tiles for gingerbread houses - so I think a recipe is in order. This is a classical one for gingerbread houses, based on flour (as opposed to Elisenlebkuchen, which are based on nuts and contain little or no flour at all).

But if you are going to build things with it, Elisenlebkuchen are not the best suited... so here you go, a flour-based recipe for Lebkuchenteig. (In contrast to the other recipes I'm posting on this blog, I have not made this myself. I have baked similar gingerbread for houses some years ago, though, and they are all pretty similar, and - if you use butter and nice honey and a good spice mix, all delicious.)

400 g honey
150 g butter
200 g sugar
2 eggs
10 g gingerbread spice mix (vary to taste)
1 pinch salt
800 g flour
4 level teaspoons baking powder
20 g cocoa

Melt honey and butter in a pot, add sugar and stir until sugar has dissolved. Set to cool, then stir eggs and spices into the mass. Mix flour, baking powder and cocoa powder and mix into the honey mass, first with a spoon, then knead the rest of the dry ingredients in. Let the dough sit for about one hour.

On a floured work surface, roll dough into a sheet of about 1 cm thickness. Cut into desired shapes for the house (or use cookie cutters to cut out cookies).

Bake for 10-15 minutes at 175°C. Let the pieces cool completely before gluing them into the house; best to let them sit over night and glue them the next day.

(Translated from a Chefkoch.de recipe)

There's a few things I love, but am not really good at. One of them? Pancakes.

I like pancakes. I like them a lot. My gran always made them in her old, enameled pans, and they always turned out perfectly, not a single scrambled one. Me? Well. Mine had a tendency to stick to the bottom of the pan, getting all scrambled and ugly in the process - and driving me near crazy.

But I think now I've cracked the secret of baking pancakes... which is:

Turn the heat on high enough. (On our stove, that means 6 out of 9 in the setting. 5 is right out. Yes, really, the one works, the other... doesn't. I have not tried 7, but it might result in too-dark undersides of the pancake.) Have a bit of fat in the pan, though it's not necessary to have the whole pancake-thing swim in it. Make the batter rather liquid, and don't pour too much at once. And then be patient for long enough.

The batter goes into the heated pan, and then I tilt the pan so there's no heap in the middle, but the thing gets a more or less even thickness. And then the next bit of the secret is to wait long enough for the top to solidify slightly and for the bottom to become done and slightly crusty - then it will become unstuck all by itself. All that remains to do is gently unstick the edges all around, then flip it to give it a little bit of quality baking time on the other side.

I finally figured this out, and I'm really happy about it. Proper pancakes! No more impromptu pan cleaning while making food! No half-done scrambled thingies! (Well, they still were nice to eat, but not, you know, pancakes.) So... achievement unlocked. Now I can go to the next stage: find the perfect recipe...

It's time again to clear out some of the tabs that have accumulated. (Especially since I am trying to clear them all, eventually, as I'm going to switch over to another browser. Firefox is just not what it used to be; I've had nasty issues with typing lags and other long load-times and lags, and it's getting on my nerves. So currently being tested: Opera. Any browser advice is taken gladly.)

There's been a new study on alcohol consumption, and it looks like there are no health benefits that outweigh the potential downsides after all. I really liked the note of caution at the end of the text, though - where a Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk (I wasn't aware this subject even existed!) very rightly states that there is also no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention. After all, getting a fix in some way or other is a very human (and a very ancient) thing...

Speaking of ancient, if you like bananas, you might be interested in this history of the domesticated banana on Sapiens.

Let's stay with the topic of domestication - honey bees are endangered, among other things, by the varroa mite. Torben Schiffer wrote an interesting article (German and English) about this problem, stating that quite a bit of it is home-made and due to the methods of modern bee-keeping.

An article at Quartz makes a case for puns as the most elevated display of wit. Much to my delight, as I'm a total sucker for puns - the more groan-worthy, the better.

And to round things off, something from Australia in an article in German: Researchers have found out that cotton can be recycled (or upcycled) into a replacement for human cartilage.