A few years ago (about three or four, I think) I got introduced to very yummy, very lemony things that formed part of the Christmas cookie collection a friend's mum was baking yearly.

I fell in love with those things, and thus asked for the recipe - and now it has become one of my Christmas baking staples as well. (Though it also makes a nice summer sweet, due to the lemon taste). And now, very recently, I made some more people fall in love with these things - so here, upon request, is the recipe.

Originally, it was for half the amount it is now, equalling half a normal German baking sheet (which is about 30 x 40 cm in size). Adjust the amount to your preferences and baking equipment. (Me, I prefer large batches, especially for things that keep well - and the Lemon Things will keep well. Unless they get eaten. Then they only keep one well fed for a while.)

Ingredients:
Shortcrust Dough: 500 g flour, 150 g sugar (including vanilla sugar, if desired), 250 g butter, 2 eggs, 2 level teaspoons baking powder
Filling: 250 g ground almonds, 300 g sugar, juice of 5-6 lemons, grated peel of 1-2 lemons
Glazing: juice of c. 1/2 lemon, icing sugar

Mix the ingredients for the filling; it should be a spreadable mixture, but not too liquid.
Make a shortcrust dough from the dough ingredients; contrary to the normal procedure, do not let the dough rest. (If you do not know how to make a shortcrust pastry, there are gazillions of instructions on the internet. Basically, you mix fat and flour (in this case, flour with the baking powder mixed in) together to form small crumbs, then add sugar and eggs, then knead to make smooth dough.) Divide dough in two halves; roll the first half to a sheet and place in baking sheet, covering the sides of the sheet as well. Spread the filling on this bottom dough, then roll the second half to a sheet and cover the filling with it.
Close the edges by pinching with your fingers. (You can then puncture the upper dough layer with a fork - I have also omitted this and found no great difference in the result.)

Bake for about 30 min at 170°C (convector fan oven). When cool (or at least not hot anymore), mix lemon juice and sugar together for the glaze/icing, spread on top.

I like to cut these into slim lozenges, but you could also do squares, fingers, or larger pieces and serve them as cake. I find they make a lovely addition to the Xmas cookie plate, but they are a refreshing summer confectionery as well.
Enjoy!

Blogging is an education unto itself, including learning about what is different food-wise between different countries.

I grew up with the word "nougat" meaning exactly one thing: a sweet, nutty, chocolaty smooth confection that would melt in your mouth leaving only deliciousness and a desire for more. So the first time someone gave me a piece of "nougat" as in that white stuff with the nuts in it, I was thoroughly disappointed - and a little bit confused.

So then I learned that there is more than one nougat (though the white stuff with nuts, here, is normally referred to as "Türkischer Honig" - Turkish Honey.)
These days, one can just check the Internet for a definition. And the Internet tells me there's three kinds of nougat, and mine is not the most common, but the German kind.

What it does not tell me is whether it's possible to buy that on the other side of the Big Pond, or somewhere else outside of Europe. So just in case, here's a recipe on how to make it. Please note that though it's from a reliable German cooking database, I have not tried this... here, you can buy "baking nougat" in the baking goods section in every supermarket. (Especially around this time of year, of course.)

75 g hazelnuts (or almonds without the brown skin, if you prefer, but hazelnut is more typical)
75 g icing sugar (powdered sugar)
100 g dark chocolate coating or dark chocolate
50 g butter

Roast nuts at medium temperature until golden, let cool. (You can rub the hazelnuts in a cloth after roasting to remove the dark skin.) Grind very finely in a grinder, blender or similar contraption together with the powdered sugar - it should be ground very finely.
Chop the chocolate into pieces and melt (using a water bath so it does not overheat). Mix in the butter, then mix the nut paste and the chocolate paste together to make a thick, malleable nougat. 

(If too soft, you can add more chocolate; if too hard, more butter.)

And this should give you German style nougat, should you not be able to buy it. Another quick-and-dirty solution would be to substitute with Nutella, though I am also told that Nutella tastes different in countries that are not Germany - seems they have a slightly different recipe there.

I was making marzipan-filled dates yesterday and thought that I could blog the instructions today... and then I remembered that I did exactly that last year. (To be really precise, 363 days ago.)

So instead, you get another cookie recipe... one for really delicious nougat-filled spritz cookies.

You will need 225 g of butter, 100 g powdered sugar, 1 pack (= 8 g) of vanilla sugar, 2 egg yolks, a generous pinch of cinnamon, 230 g flour, 40 g cacao, 1 teaspoon (leveled off) of baking powder, and German or Viennese style nougat for the filling.

Beat the butter until soft and creamy, and beat in powdered sugar, vanilla sugar, egg yolks and cinnamon; blend together flour, cacao and baking soda and gradually mix in the mixture. Fill into a spritz biscuits contraption and spritz it onto a baking sheet (I use silicon baking mats instead of greasing the sheets).

Bake at about 175°C for 6-7 min (hot-air fan oven). Let the cookies cool, then stick two each together with warmed nougat.

Hide well until they may be eaten.

(Thanks to Phiala's comment, I now know that the German nougat might not be as common in other countries as here. If a German says "nougat", it almost always refers to that hazelnut-or-almond-and-chocolate confection, and a recipe will be in tomorrow's blog post.)

Doc, over at Medieval Cookery, posted a nice entry titled "The Measure of a Cook".
The TL;DR: Measuring helps, and even if an experienced cook does not measure using an item, there's still some hand-eye-measuring going on. Pure "cooking from the heart", when done by a novice, can go spectacularly wrong due to lack of this built-in measuring and lack of experience of how something should look, feel or behave. And when we are talking about historical recipes, most of us, even experienced cooks, will count as novices since we just don't know how the concoction described in the text was supposed to behave and taste.

I find Doc's observations very true - measuring really does help, and it is more important if you lack experience with the kind of food you are trying to prepare. On the other hand, I have made the experience that some (novice) cooks will stick to a given recipe down to the last letter, including perfectly substitutable or omissable ingredients even if they do not like their taste at all. And that is... not so good either.

I am one of those lucky folks who got a good grounding in how cooking works back at home, when I was quite young. The first thing I learned how to cook was noodle soup - because it is so easy. You put in some stock, get it to boiling, just add noodles and wait a few minutes. I also remember, vividly, that I made some on my working mini child's play stove one day, and then forgot about it until it had cooked to noodles, no soup. (It was still edible, though.) I was sad about that - and then got told that yes, things like that just happen once in a while when you cook, and it's no big deal.

I learned that it's good to have a recipe with measurements as a guideline, but that they are not set in concrete, and it is perfectly okay to experiment a little, or to substitute ingredients if you do not have or do not like something. And that once in a while, things will not turn out quite as they should - but that those failures are just a part of life, and most times the food will still be edible if not very yummy, and in our age it's not too big a deal. (It was back in post-war times. My gran tells this story where someone found a pot of grease left by US soldiers and used it to fry a portion of potatoes in it. Unfortunately, it was non-edible grease for leather, and thus the fried potatoes were non-edible as well. That was a really, really big deal.)

When I started to cook stuff for groups while not in the safety of my home kitchen - especially out on living history ventures - I started seeing measurements even more as guidelines. I remember making dough for waffles without any measuring tools apart from counting out four eggs and adding other stuff until the consistency was about right, and the waffles turned out really well. But yes, that is only possible when you know how a given sort of dough should look, or what the right consistency for this or that is. And then you do measure with your eyes and hands and experience.

A friend who was a professional cook once told me "Augenmaß und Handgewicht verläßt die deutsche Küche nicht" (measuring by eye and weighing in the hand will not leave the German kitchen), and I say this to myself whenever I'm not going to measure - because I do not have the implements, or because I am feeling frisky. And I have some recipes that just state what the ingredients should be and how they should be treated and combined, but no amounts - because when I make that Irish Stew or that "Szegediner Gulasch", I will buy and cook an amount of potatoes, peas and carrots to fill the bellies and an amount of meat that will add flavour and interest but will not empty my pocket too much.

And today I'm feeling really lucky that I have learned this approach to cooking. Thanks, Mom. And Dad. And Gran.

Poppy seeds have a long history - there have been finds of poppy seeds from Germany dating back to about 4600-3800 BC. While opium, also derived from the poppy plant, was used only for medicinal reasons in Europe during the Middle Ages, poppy was listed in about every compendium of plants for food and medicinal use - the Capitulare Karls des Großen, the plans for the garden of St. Gallen, and so on. Poppy seed oil was not only used for food purposes, but also for mixing paints, since it dries up. (All after Körber-Grohne, Nutzpflanzen in Deutschland).

And why do I write all this? Because some years ago, we became acquainted with the family recipe of a good friend of ours - a poppy seed cake. And what a poppy seed cake! It combines all good things - poppy seeds, freshly ground and heated up with milk to release all the flavours; yeast dough; streusel topping and finally an icing of lemon juice and sugar. This cake is heavenly, and the recipe I have is just too good not to share. So here you go - a typical German-style family recipe:

Mohnrolle mit Streusel (Poppy seed cake roll with streusel)

For the dough:
Ingredients: 500 g flour, 30 g yeast, 1/5 litre milk, 60 g butter, 60 g sugar, 1 pinch of salt.
Instructions: Make yeast dough from this.

Poppy seed filling:
Ingredients: 500 g ground poppy seeds, about 1/2 l milk, about 3 tblspoons semolina, 2-4 eggs, a little bitter almond aroma, ample sugar.
Instructions: Cook a thin soup from milk and semolina, put in poppy seeds. Stir well and let it cool. When cool: mix in eggs, sugar and aroma until mass is spreadable. Sugar to very sweet taste because poppy is slightly bitter in taste. Amounts needed may vary; add in only 2 eggs at first to keep the filling from getting too liquid. Should it be too stiff, add boiling milk.

Streusel:
Ingredients: 200 g flour, 125 g butter, 125 g sugar
Instructions: Mix flour and sugar; knead in butter (cut into pieces) until streusel result.

Icing:
Ingredients: 250 g icing sugar, lemon juice
Instructions: Mix until spreadable.

How to make the cake: Roll out dough until thin. Spread poppy seed filling on it and roll cake into a roll. Place on baking sheet. Moisten roll with cold water and place streusel on top. Bake 50-60 min. at 190-200° C. When cool, ice the cake.

As you can see, it's quite... non-elaborate, and thus always reminds me of medieval recipes - "hey, anyone knows how to make this or that, so there's no need to describe it". However, here are some add-ins from me to make it a little less non-elaborate. (If you don't know how to make yeast dough, I will not describe it here. Go find out - it's totally worthwhile to acquire "make yeast dough" as a basic cooking skill!)

Ground poppy seeds are best used fresh. You can use a poppy seed grinder, which will process absolutely nothing but poppy seeds, or buy freshly ground poppy seeds - though that can prove a bit difficult.
I use about 360-400 g of sugar for the filling, and usually only 2 eggs. The icing will take the freshly pressed juice of one to two lemons.
Roll out the dough really thin; to transfer the roll to a baking sheet, roll out on a clean tea towel, spread filling on it, roll by lifting one side of the tea towel and carry the roll to the sheet on the towel, there to let it roll off. Handle very carefully, or it will burst. When spreading the filling, don't spread it all the way, but concentrate on the side where you will start rolling and leave the opposite end free - the filling will spread more while rolling.
Baking in our oven takes about 50 min at 170° C in our fan oven.

This cake is a fair bit of work - grinding the poppy, preparing all the different bits - but is totally worth it. And I will now go and have a piece of the little that is still left from the weekend...