For last weekend, when my dad was celebrating his birthday, I made him a Donauwelle. Which, in case you are not familiar with that very German cake, is a cake baked on a sheet, with dough a bit like marble cake (light part at the bottom, dark part on top of it) with added cherries. That sheet cake, after baking, is topped off with a layer of vanilla buttercream and covered with a chocolate glaze. Because the cherries sink into the dough when baking and take the dark dough with them, it looks kind of wavy from the side - hence the name.

So. I did mention the buttercream layer, right?

Buttercream. I love buttercream. That stuff and I, we also have sort of a history... and it took me a lot of time to actually understand it. You see, there are plenty of really old buttercream recipes in my old-fashioned books, and they are basically butter, whipped together with powdered sugar, and some liqueur added.

Then, at some point, people sort of figured out that you can make it a little lighter and less calorie-dense if you add custard. So then you get recipes for buttercream with custard... which, once upon a time, was thickened with help of egg yolks.

Today, usually, most recipes call for the more modern and more convenient type of custard - the kind you make by mixing a packet of starch-based powder with added cocoa or aroma into hot milk and getting it to the boil. That gives you a fair custard, but it can also lead to a lot of trouble when you start mixing it into butter for buttercream.

Buttercream is, basically, a water-in-fat emulsion. Like all emulsions, it depends on emulgators for stability - and butter, on its own, only has a very limited amount of these. There will be a moment when you add a spoonful too much of the custard, which counts as water for these purposes - and your buttercream will break and separate into a grainy mass. Uh oh.

Now... egg yolk is an emulsifyer - and a really, really powerful one if it's raw. One egg yolk, according to Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking - The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" is enough to make several litres of mayonnaise (which is an oil-in-water emulsion). Egg yolk loses a lot of its potency when you heat it up, but it will still pull some weight.

So making an older-fashioned buttercream with egg as a thickener for the custardy part will more probably result in non-grainy buttercream even if you add quite a bit of stuff to the butter. The starch-based custard, though... it brings nothing to the marriage. Well, nothing but trouble.

It took me one long afternoon of beating buttercream to grainy horribleness, starting over with fresh butter and repeating the process of breaking it and then cursing, until I finally started to think. And at long last, I realised I was breaking down the emulsion because I added too much liquid, and that I obviously need more emulsifyer if I want to add more than just a very little bit of custard (the Donauwelle recipe I have tells you to beat almost a full litre of milk's worth of custard into 300 g of butter).

So these days, I have a secret weapon. These days, when I bake the cake to go with the buttercream, I take a little bit of one egg yolk and put it to the side. About half a teaspoon is plenty - that much, or even a full teaspoon, will not be missed in the cake and it will not be noticeable in the buttercream, except by the good behaviour of the latter. Beat up the soft butter (room temperature or a bit warmer), beat in the bit of egg yolk, and then add the custard one spoonful at a time, beating it into the butter. I usually leave a little bit of custard in the pot when I get the feeling that it's enough now, but since I add the bit of yolk, I've never had a buttercream go grainy on me again, and I have had no trouble at all with adding warm custard to cooler butter either.

So there you go. May all your buttercreams be delicious and firm and buttery, and never go grainy on you.

Here's a stack of things you might enjoy... first of all, the children's quiz show that I was filmed for in January is online for four more days, and you can watch the episode here. (It's the second question in.)

Here's an article about the hatpin in the early 20th century and its use for self-defense.

Looking for something less martial? Here's a 14th century recipe for doughnuts, courtesy of the British Library.

If you are interested in studying Experimental Archaeology, the UCD is offering a new course for a MSc in Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture. Application deadline is on June 2, so if that sounds interesting to you, you will need to be quick.

Speaking of programmes, the Nobilitas Akademie this year will be 10-12 November on Burg Hessenstein. As usual, there's a variety of different topics, all sounding quite interesting! Their programme is online, and you can register for it; if you do it soon, you'll get a bit of an early bird discount, too.

Finally, here is a blog article about a spinning technique with hand spindles that I have on my list of "things to try and figure out how to do" - rotating the spindle in the hand, but not with the hand and finger position similar to short suspended spinning, but more or less horizontally. I've seen this a good while ago for the first time and have since dabbled some with the motion (which is totally intriguing), but as I said, it's still on the list.

Hope you enjoy one or more of those!

It's finally Friday, the weekend is beckoning (and it's promising to be a nice one, with a local boardgaming event and possibly also a round of going bouldering with friends), my Windows update problems might finally be fixed, and the warp yarn for the next batch of cloth is almost finished, making the weaving of the sail cloth something bound to happen very soon.

In other news, Current Archaeology is holding a bake-off competition for archaeological baking (and even if you don't plan to participate, the thing is worth a look for the previously done stuff, which is really awesome).

More food stuff? Gillian has written about food in fiction.

If you didn't get as much nice sunny weather as we did in the last days and you are feeling melancholy about it now, Ask the Past has a cure for that. Or, well, at least suggestions. From 1303.

Brogues and Shoes has a picture series about making a leather bottle.

And finally, again on the topic of spinning and weaving, there's been a two-part column in Knitty about weaving with singles - part one and part two.

That's it for today (still too many tabs open, but it's a little better now.) Have a nice weekend, everybody!

It's raining outside, which is not nice since I need to run errands - and that means cycling... so soon now, I will be venturing out into the rain.

The cat, meanwhile, is not venturing out into the Great Big Cat Shower - of course not:


Smart cat.

In other news, I've been successful in testing material for a box for my new market/fair stall display boards (which are incredibly nice to have, since they save me a gazillion of setup and takedown time), so I can do the final design now. Which is nice - and a project for this winter.

I also made candied orange peel - which is used for quite a few traditional German Xmas baked things, such as Stollen. Which I am contemplating. (The baking, that is.) Making the candied peel wasn't such a great act as I had thought. Basically, you cut the peel (from untreated oranges, preferably organic, obviously) into small bits, boil them in water for 3 minutes, repeat that again with fresh water (this removes most of the bitterness) and drain them. Now you weigh the boiled peel. Take that amount of sugar, add enough water to make a thick syrup, and simmer the peel in the syrup for one hour.

Once they are done simmering, drain them (you can use the leftover syrup for sweetening other things) and dry them in the fan oven at 60° C for about two hours, periodically stirring them. Store in a glass with some added sugar to prevent them from sticking together.

There you go. Candied orange peel. Tastes lovely!

 

Like every year, I do the seasonal baking some weeks in advance of Xmas - because a) it would be way too much stress to try and get everything done in just a few days, and b) some of the cookies benefit from hanging out in a tin for a while. As in "for a few weeks" while.

One of the kinds that get better by sitting and doing nothing for a few weeks are Vanillekipferl (vanilla horns, more or less literally), which are an utter staple of German Xmas baking. Like most cookies, they are a shortcrust dough, and there's a gazillion recipes around. However, about all of them have one thing in common: They will tend to crumble if you try to form the dough by rolling it into small rolls to shape the typical crescent form. Which is... annoying, to put it mildly.

These days, there are workarounds: Special baking trays with the crescents, or cookie cutters. However, traditionally, these things are shaped by hand.

My method to shape them is a little less conventional, but also traditional - because the shape is what my one granny's Kipferl shape used to be.

Now, my granny (who died several years ago) was a rather, um, complicated character. Cooking and baking was very much her thing, and every year at Christmas, we would get several large tins filled with cookies of many varieties, stacked neatly by sorts. There were at least a dozen different kinds of cookies, and I loved them all - some more, some less. They were also lovingly decorated.

To this day, because the wonders inside these tin boxes made such an impression on me as a child, Xmas cookies are one of the things that makes the festivity for me. This means a large variety of cookies, in abundant quantity (because it seemed like lots and lots and lots to me, and there were lots, really) and of course with a lovely taste.

So when said Granny had a stroke and could not bake anymore. I decided that there had to be cookies, and they had to be similar to hers. However, my gran would not share her recipes - so I had to find my own basic recipes. I also found out very quickly that baking a large number of different varieties, and decorating them, takes a lot of time - so I cut down on said number (having a life and studies, and later a job, to also take care of). I couldn't find recipes for some of the kinds, and some others just didn't fit into the time slot anymore, and some I couldn't remember properly (because they might have been there some years and others in some other years), but the all-time favourites of myself, my mum and my dad stayed in.

Among these were, of course, the Vanillekipferl. Which, when my gran made them, had a very distinct shape - and one I never saw anywhere else.

It took me a while to figure out how to make that shape, but I finally succeeded. So this is how I make them these days:

Ingredients:

50 g almonds (without peel)
50 g hazelnuts
300 g flour
90 g sugar
40 g vanilla sugar (I use the stuff with real vanilla)
pinch of salt
200 g butter
2 egg yolks
powdered sugar to decorate

Make shortcrust dough out of the ingredients, let it sit in the cold for 2 hours (or longer, that doesn't hurt). Form crescents and bake for about 6 minutes at 180° C in a fan oven.

And this is how I shape them:

Form dough into rolls of about 3-4 cm diameter (I like my Kipferl small, just like I remember them). Cut rolls into slices of about 6-7 mm thickness.


Cut each round in half.

Then, using your fingers, round the upper middle of the half-round shape, and tweak the two corners a little longer. This results into something already vaguely crescent-shaped.


(The yellowish blotches are from the mascobado sugar I used this year, the black spots are the vanilla and hazelnuts.)

Now pinch the ends of the crescent even more - this will make them thinner and at the same time, the middle will get a little "nose". Like one of those children's book moons that have a nose.

My gran's Kipferl had that, so I was totally happy about them (and still am). If you don't like the nose, you can probably smooth it out... but for me, it is central to the whole shape. (Hah.)

As a last step, press the ends of the crescent inwards to get a compact shape.


And that's it. You're done shaping.

Once they are baked and have cooled off, dust them with powdered sugar, then store them in a box until ready to be eaten.

This is how mine looked in the end, this year:


Happy baking!

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

• 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)

I'm almost through the incredible link backlog - so here's the last drop for now:

If you are looking for a new way to practice your early Mesopotamian writing skills, you might want to bake some cuneiform cookies.

Here's an article about the sequence of adjectives in English - a "crazy grammar rule".

A list of sheep breeds (though there's not much information about many of them, especially not much information about the wool).

Speaking of wool, Hakai Magazine has a nice article about the importance of wool for the vikings.

Jonathan Jarrett has posted a book review about "Debunking History" by Ed Rayner and Ron Stapley.

And that finally clears my list. I hope there was something enjoyable among the links for you!

Sometimes you read something on the 'net, and then you follow a link, and then you read something else and there's another link and suddenly you go "oh. Oh. Oh wow" because you have just discovered something weird and/or awesome.

That happened to me when I stumbled across the Pittsburgh Cookie Table. In case you are just as unknowing as I was before, there's a tradition in Pittsburgh (and a few other spots, but mainly there) where you have a table with lots of cookies for special occasions, such as weddings. Wikipedia knows about this, of course - but if you really want to be smacked in the eyes with lots and lots of cookies, a picture search will do nicely.

If you are looking for recipes now, there are a few (together with more pictures) linked to on this page. A few definitely sound intriguing - though I think I'll stay mostly with my old favourites for the Christmas baking...