It has been a while since my last weekend cooking post. Today I want to tell you a bit about Lebkuchen (gingerbread). As it happens I live in THE German gingerbread city. “Nürnberger Lebkuchen” are very well known, they are exported into many countrie, and the term is a protected designation of origin. We have a lot of Lebkuchen bakeries and factories in town. There are small family owned bakeries that have existed for centuries as well as big companies that produce Lebkuchen as part of their very large product line.

Lebkuchen come in a large variety, different sizes and can cost from only a few cents to a few Euros a piece. They either have no frosting at all, a sugar frosting or they come covered with chocolate. At the bottom they either have a wafer or  they are also covered with chocolate. There are the “regular” Lebkuchen and the very high quality “Elisen-Lebkuchen” which are made with either very little or completely without flour. They can contain ginger, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, honey, marzipan, aniseed, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, coriander, all spice, cloves, candied orange and lemon peel and much more. The oldest written Lebkuchen recipe is from the 15th century and is stored at the Germanic National Museum in Nürnberg.

You can go on a Nuremberg gingerbread tour where you learn a lot more about those delicious little “cakes”.

If you would like to try out some Nürnberg Lebkuchen yourself, you can order them online in various shops. I was surprised at the prices that American online shops charge for them, though. You will be better off ordering directly in Germany, even considering the postage charges. Probably the most well-known shop shipping worldwide is Lebkuchen Schmidt. My company buys from them for Christmas treats, so you can trust me that their products are lovely. And they have nice tins, too. For kids the Janosch-Truhe is a lovely container to store some treasures in after eating all the Lebkuchen. All those tins come out every year, always a little different and some people collect them. 

My favourite Lebkuchen brand is Witte & Ray. They not only have the best regular Lebkuchen, they also have wonderful Elisenlebkuchen with a white chocolate icing that are absolutely yummy.

What are your favourite Christmas treats? Have you ever had Lebkuchen from Nürnberg, and if you have, did you like them?

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

Images from wikipedia. Gingerbread stall by Schlurcher

Did you notice that cool new button? I got that one from Caite at a lovely shore breeze. Her niece made it and I love it.

As you all probably know by now I am the new owner of a slow cooker and am pretty enthusiastic about it. The other day my mom gave me cooking apples from a relative’s garden and I was looking around for ideas what to do with them. I found this recipe for apple butter in the crock pot. USA-kulinarisch, by the way, is a great site for people in Germany, who are looking for information about US food. It gives you tips on where to order it online, how to convert measurements, how you can substitute products that you can’t find, offers recipes etc.

I am sure you all know apple butter, but I didn’t. I had never heard of it and only a search on the net revealed that it actually IS known in Germany under the name “Apfelkraut” (ugly name, that!). It seems to be more popular, however, in the Netherlands and Belgium.

From the pictures I found on the net apple butter is normally smooth, but mine turned out quite chunky. I suppose I could have used a blender afterwards, but I like chunky, so I left it that way.

 

 

 

 

 

Apple butter in the crock pot

Ingredients:

• 1.5kg apples, peeled, cores removed and cut into slices
• 400g sugar
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp allspice
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• 1 pinch of salt
• 200ml apple juice or cider

Fill the crock pot with apples. Mix spices with sugar, add to the apples and mix thoroughly, add apple juice. Cook on “low” for about ten hours. If the apple butter is a bit too liquid , cook a little longer on “high”.

Enjoy!

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

Image from flickr user stetted, frame N Rowe Janitz 

In my last weekend cooking post I already told you about Annik’s divine cakes and gave you the recipe for a super easy cake made from puff pastry.

Today I finally MADE something myself from the book and it turned out rather fantastic.

It is called “Sweet potato cheesecake” and takes a bit of time, but it is worth it.

 

Sweet potato cheesecake

Ingredients:

For the bottom: 

• 120g wholemeal butter cookies (the regular wheat flour kind looks like the one on the picture on the right)
• 70g walnuts, chopped roughly
• 80g sugar
• 1 tsp molasses
• 60g liquid butter

For the filling:

• 400g sweet potatoes
• 1 tsp salt
• 255g sugar
• 700g cream cheese, the fatty kind
• 200g Mascarpone
• 1 tbsp molasses
• 1 tiny pinch of ground vanilla
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 pinch of salt
• 4 eggs
• 2 tbsp corn starch

For the coating:

• 300g sour cream
• 50g sugar
• 1 pinch ground vanilla

For the icing (I left that away):

• 70g caramel candy
• 2 tbsp cream

0. I started with making a pot of coffee to keep me awake. As you know I am not a passionate baker.

1. For the bottom grind the cookies finely or crumble them up in a freezer bag. Roast the walnuts in a pan without any oil or fat.

2. Mix cookie crumbs, nuts, sugar and molasses and add the liquid butter. Stir until everything is humid. Spread evenly on the bottom of the round baking pan and press down firmly.

3. For the filling peel and cut the sweet potatoes into cubes. Boil them in a pot with water and a bit of salt and 1 tbsp of sugar until soft.

4. Drain the water and mash potatoes. Use 300g of the mashed sweet potatoes. Eat the rest, it is yummy! Heat up the oven to 130C.

5. Mix cream cheese and mascarpone in a bowl with your hand mixer at medium speed. Add sweet potatoes, 240g sugar, molasses, vanilla, cinnamon and salt. Then add the eggs and at the end corn starch. Once you add the eggs only mix until homogenous. Otherwise the batter will be too airy, would rise too much and then collapse again.

6. Spread cream cheese mixture evenly on the bottom of the cake. Bake 60 minutes at 130C. After that the cake should still move a little in the middle when you push against the edge of the pan. It will get completely firm when it cools down.

7. Before the end of the baking time, mix sour cream, vanilla and sugar until smooth. Spread on the baked cake and bake another 5 minutes. Turn oven off and let the cake sit in there for another two hours. Do not open the oven if possible! Take out and let cool down at room temperature.

8. For the caramel icing grind the candy and melt in a pot together with the cream at low heat while stirring all the time. To decorate, spread over the cake with a little spoon.

Enjoy!

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

Cookie image from wikipedia. Photo template from pugly pixel.

I found this wonderful baking book in the library the other day. As you might know I am neither a talented nor a passionate baker, but this book brought my baking spirit to (a theoretical) life. I must admit, I haven’t baked anything out of it yet, but I am planning to copy quite a few recipes. The book covers simple cakes to complicated, multi layered masterpieces and makes your mouth water.

It is called “Anniks göttliche Kuchen” (Annik’s divine cakes). Annik  Wecker is the wife of a well-known German musician and a baker who creates and produces cakes for bakeries and private customers.

As we are all pressed for time and busy with all sorts of things at home and at work I chose to introduce you to the simplest and fastest cake Annik knows. It is called “Puff pastry tarte with fruit” and looks and sounds delicious.

Puff pastry tarte with fruit

Ingredients

• 1 pack of puff pastry from the cooling rack of your grocery store (270g)
• 1 egg
• 40g grated almonds
• 500g fruit, cut into pieces or slices according to your taste
• 80g sugar

Heat the oven to 200C. Roll the pastry onto your baking tray. Cut off a 1cm wide strip all around. Whisk an egg and brush it onto the edge. Put the cut off strips on top of the edge and brush with egg as well.

Cover the pastry inside with almonds evenly and place the fruit on top. Sprinkle the sugar on top of the fruit and the edge. Bake 25-30 minutes. 

Annik says it is easy to vary, make it round or cornered or in small pieces. You can use almost any sort of fruit you like. Sometimes she sprinkles crumbled amarettini on top of the fruit (plus the sugar) or a mix of sugar and cinnamon or coconut flakes or little slices of almonds…. the possibilities are endless. 

Enjoy! 

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

I don’t know whether you have heard about this cookbook already or not. “50+ favorite bloggers – 50+ favorite recipes” is a collection of favorite recipes from bloggers that looks pretty awesome, sounds delicious and is for a good cause. 100% of the proceeds will go to the American Red Cross, and the price for the book is a real bargain.

The book costs $10 as an e-book or $10 + postage as a printed book, not much at all. When I think about all the delicious dishes that I heard about through my weekend cooking fellow bloggers I think this cookbook would be a very good investment.

You can have a look at all the pages of the book at Papercoterie, where you can also order the print edition (I am sorry to say I haven’t figured out how, though. The shop’s buying system eludes me). The e-book can be bought at a separate website called “recipes to help“ built specifically for that purpose. Recipes include for example “indoor s’mores”, “peach cobbler muffins”, “the perfect cream cheese frosting” (you might remember my cry for help some time ago), “stuffed French toast filling” and many many more.

Check it out!

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

Cookbook image from recipes to help.

Blurb:

How do you improve your family’s health and relationships, save money, and raise happier kids who get better grades and are less likely to do drugs? Family dinners! These easy strategies will get your family back to the table.

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In a nutshell:

I liked it:     Yes       No    x  So so

For people who: want to get their family around the table to eat, but are totally clueless about anything even remotely cooking related. 

---

My thoughts: 

This book is for the absolute beginners. If you have cooked for a family for some time and have something that looks somewhat like a family life then you are probably already too advanced for it.

Let’s look at some of the things this book explains:

• It describes the situation as it is in a majority of households
• It describes the advantages of family meals
• It gives tips on how to accomplish a family dinner
• It offers tips what kids of all ages can do to help in the kitchen
• It offers time saving tips
• It suggests how to organize the pantry
• It tells you how to construct a shopping list and how to shop
• It helps you to plan weekly meals
• It talks about must haves for the kitchen
• It tells you how to deal with likes and dislikes of kids of all ages
• It gives you sanity savers for yourself
• It offers a few recipes & web resources

In fact it tells you many things that the average reasonable person knows. I mean, come on, who doesn’t know that a home cooked meal around the dining table is healthier than having a TV-Dinner lounging on the couch while watching a cartoon?

The manifold advantages of a freezer? Check. How to store seasoning? Check. Reading food labels before buying is recommended? Check. Cheaper stuff is in the lowest aisle? Check. Buying in bulk when on sale? Check. Using coupons? Check. I am not saying that this book is useless. Not at all. If you are a woman who just had her first kid, who has never cooked for more people than two, who only ever defrosted her dinner in the microwave, go ahead and read this book! It is a useful resource for how to organize your kitchen and your family meals. If you are an experienced mother, but still feel you are wasting hours or a fortune in your kitchen, likewise. If those criteria don’t apply, then don’t bother!

The recipes are ok, but nothing too fantastic, the web resources might be useful now, but given the short lives of websites, the list might be outdated in six months. Both could have been left out without any regrets, I am sure.

 Product info and buy link :

Title	Dinner for Busy Moms
Author	Jeanne Muchnick
Publisher	Plain White Press
ISBN	9781936005000
I got this book from	Netgalley because I am – among others -  a busy mom
Buy link	Buy Dinner for Busy Moms

 

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

 

 

 

 

 

 Have you read this book? What did you think of it? I would love to hear other opinions.

I love making jam at home. No, I love having my bread baking machine make jam for us.

This week I got two books from the library with recipes for making jam, one of them is the one you see below (sorry, it is German).

It has so many delicious recipes in it I didn’t know where to start. So I started with what I had at home and made apricot jam with chocolate. Actually, that recipe is not even in the book, it gave the recipes for either raspberry-chocolate jam or strawberry-chocolate jam, so I adapted them a bit for my purposes.

The result is more than yummy!

Here is my recipe (only a small amount, I don’t make jam to last 5 years for a family of ten):

Apricot-chocolate jam

• 600g apricots, without stones and cut up into small cubes
• 300g jam sugar (2:1)
• a bit of lemon juice
• 100g chocolate, grated to flakes (I used less than the recipes said)

Set the chocolate aside. Make jam from the remaining ingredients as usual (I just throw everything into my bread baking machine and wait until it beeps. When it is done and gels, add the chocolate flakes and fill them into the containers, put the lid on, turn them on their heads for a few minutes. Let cool down. Enjoy!

For labels I used the wonderful round labels by Cathe Holden. I normally put them on the lid, because they cover whatever is on the lid and they fit perfectly. On her blog Just something I made Cathe shares a lot of great designs to use for your craft projects. Check her out!

A few weeks ago I asked about what crock pot to buy since I am a total newbie when it comes to slow cookers. After taking to heart everything you told me and after carefully balancing expenditure and required features I went for a British make, Morphy Richards. I ordered it in the UK since the price there was, even with postage, much better than in Germany.

It is large, oval, has three settings and a removable pot. The only thing I didn’t get was the digital thingy, but it just was not worth the added expense in my eyes.

This is my new baby:

 

And this is it in real life (and bigger):

 

First experiences:

• Inaugural dish was Beans Bourguignon (spelled wrongly, but that didn’t matter).  It was quite nice, but I think I need to know more about the amount of liquid in a dish. Somehow it was a tiny bit too much for my taste.
• The next day it was Vegetarian Crockpot Layered Dinner. Can you tell I am excited about my new baby? The family ate it and liked it but I was not at all pleased with the soy sauce taste. Somehow it didn’t work for me. Next time the soy sauce has to go.
• Then I felt I needed a timer to try out the oatmeal. Not that we couldn’t make porridge really quick after getting up, but I wanted to see what it’s like in the slow cooker. And, of course, I didn’t want to get up at 5 am to turn the thing on. As it turned out, the timer worked fine (cheapest thing in the shop, cost me €4,00) and the porridge was OK, but gooey and somewhat rubbery. Porridge made fresh at 8am on the stove is definitely better.
• Now my favourite so far…Slow cooker vegetable curry from BHG. I had to adjust the recipe quite a bit because, believe it or not, I had no curry powder, but I had kurkuma, garam masala and what not, so I just tossed a few of those Indian spices in there. The second time I added some ginger and cardamom, also fine. The tapioca I left out, this is no pantry staple over here, so it goes without saying I didn’t have it. I didn’t have green beans, so I took zucchini instead, and I didn’t use tomatoes, but tomato puree. So, in fact, this is a completely different recipe. But it worked out well.

Since I liked the curry best I went and bought The Indian Slow Cooker by Anupy Singla. That book is going to be the topic for another weekend cooking post though.

My verdict

All in all I am more than pleased with the slow cooker concept. It is time saving and practical; you can do other things all day, smell your dinner getting ready and then sit down and eat without slaving over the stove. Perfect! Thanks everybody for your advice!

 

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

 

A couple of weeks ago we went to the annual Elder Blossom Festival in one of the surrounding villages. The specialty there are deep fried elder blossoms. Not that they are anything too delicious, they taste like, um, deep fried something, but it sure is a nice and romantic idea. This is what the dish looked like:

  

At the festival the drink of choice would be either elder water or elder liquor. Elder water is quite tasty and has a certain flavour that I had never met before. At the same time it is very refreshing. It’s the perfect drink for hot days when plain water just isn’t good enough.

I had a look around for a recipe and found a very simple one. This is not for syrup that needs to be diluted later, but this is ready made to drink.

Elder water

Ingredients:

• 7 large elder blossoms
• 5 l water
• 250g sugar
• 3 untreated lemons

Boil water with sugar and pour over elder blossoms. Cut lemons into strips and add to it. Let rest over night. Pour through a very fine sieve and bring to a boil again. Fill up into bottles.

Some recipes add a little bit of vinegar. I suppose this depends on the personal taste.

 

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

Elder blossom image from flickr.  

This week I have no ideas or recipe to share, but rather have some questions. In the last months I have read quite a few posts about crock pots or slow cookers.

I must admit that I had never heard of slow cookers before and nobody else I know has one. They are not too popular or common in Germany (or maybe I just know the wrong people).

It seems a very convenient way to cook, so I decided to get one for myself. The first (and only) source – apart from some dubious sellers – is amazon. I looked around and found a rather small selection.

There are only two brands, it seems, that are worthwhile looking at, Morphy Richards and Crock Pot. Never heard of any before. Do you know them? Which brand do you have? Which do you prefer? Are there any differences at all (except maybe the price)?

Then there is the size. There are 3.5l (3.7 quarts) and 6.5l (6.87 quarts) pots available. 3.5l sounds small to me, is that big enough for a family of four? If I want to cook to freeze some on top of what is being eaten right away, do I need a 6.5l one?

I am clueless as to what to buy! Can anyone help me out and give me a few tips?

Your advice is much appreciated.

Weekend cooking is hosted by Beth Fish reads.