Kategorien
Baking With Recipe

Omas Lebkuchen – My Grandma’s Gingerbread

Lebkuchen

There are those few recipes that are so loaded with memories and childhood nostalgia that you really start to wonder if you are ready to share it with the rest of the world. For these are the recipes that truly deserve to be kept a family secret. My grandmother’s Lebkuchen is one of those rare recipes. Though I think the English term for Lebkuchen is gingerbread, it doesn’t feel right to call them that, since there isn’t actually any ginger involved. Try to think of it as the German variety. Different, but just as good.

When I grew up we lived with my grandparents, and every year in November my grandmother made Lebkuchen for St. Martin’s Day. St. Martin is a tradition here, celebrating a certain St. Martin who – as the legend goes – on a bitterly cold night met a beggar who was freezing to death and didn’t hesitate to cut his warm coat in two parts and share it with him, thus saving him from dying. To celebrate this children make colorful lanterns and go from door to door singing songs and getting sweets. It’s kind of a cute Halloween without the dressing up and blackmailing harmless people into giving you treats. Back then we lived in a suburb of Cologne, kind of like a little village, only instead of being surrounded by fields and forests we had the highway on one and another main road on the other side. The thing was that everybody knew everybody and you could cover more than half of the houses in one night.

Another fond memory and one of the few moments where I will actually get into „back in the olden days“ mood is that we used candles to light our lanterns. Today all I see is those little light bulbs swinging from side to side. Sure, using candles also meant that probably everyone remembers that one year when their lantern burnt down, but I also do believe that the charm of real candlelight totally made up for that one rather catastrophic night.

However, every year my grandmother made her Lebkuchen to give as a treat (instead of bought sweets or fruit) and I also remember people saying that this was their favorite treat to get. Unfortunately we never get St. Martin visitors here (or rather, one group of children in four years of living here), so there goes my chance of becoming equally famous. This hasn’t stopped me from getting the recipe from my aunt and making my first batch of Lebkuchen this year. My aunt told me that the recipe usually gets her about 1 1/2 baking trays, though I got exactly two trays out of it. I guess my trays are just a bit smaller. Two trays equals a lot of Lebkuchen, so I brought some to work for everyone to enjoy and still have a lot left. If you don’t plan on feeding everyone at the office, you should probably just use half the recipe and still have plenty of yummy pre-Christmas Lebkuchen to enjoy.

Omas Lebkuchen

Note: Cups here do not refer to the standard American measurement, but rather ordinary coffee or tea cups, which I guess is about the same, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

300 g sugar
500 g honey
125 g butter
1 egg
a pinch of salt
3 cups milk
1 cups strong coffee
about 1 kg flour (maybe more)
2 packages baking powder
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 tablespoons real cocoa
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons whole aniseed (as in not ground)
1 teaspoons ground cloves

Preheat the oven to 180°C (about 350° F or gas mark 6).

The main thing about this recipe is that the difficulty – if there is any – rather lies in getting all the ingredients, not in the actual making of the dough. When my aunt gave me the recipe, handwritten on a piece of paper, half of page was a list of the ingredients, followed by two sentences.

This is a simple dough, so the first sentence was something along the line of: Mix it. I would add that if you’re going for the recipe exactly as written above (not half of it) you should probably go for the biggest bowl you have. Apart from that it’s as simple as that. Mix it. You want a smooth dough, so add some flour if it appears too liquid or some milk if it appears too solid.

Then prepare the tray(s), first buttering and then spreading it with flour (because this is how we did it in the olden days). Then spread the dough on it and you’re ready to go. Bake the Lebkuchen for about 30 to 45 minutes until they’re golden brown. Get it out of the oven, let cool, cut into squares and enjoy.

Kategorien
Baking

‚Tis the Season

I want to apologize in advance for the lack of sensational food photography. It’s just that my camera sucks. It’s more than three years old and it shows. You just can’t take any good food pictures with it and I kind of gave up trying too hard. We’ve been talking about getting a kick-ass new camera (a Nikon D50 is what I have in mind), but that’s on a list together with a new couch, a MacBook, a shiny mandoline and a fancy pink KitchenAid, so there’s no way of telling when we’ll actually have one.

Anyway, I think that the season of cookie baking has officially begun, don’t you agree? Humble me, for instance, has already spiced up the air with smells of freshly baked cookies twice this month, and I’m usually not an avid cookie baker, so that has to mean something.

The godmother of all pre-Christmas cookie baking is my mother, though. For as long as I remember her cookies has been a part of the weeks before Christmas and she is the one in my family to both consult for cookie advice and to just beg for one more bag of cookies, please. She’s also the reason I have a cookie trauma, which I constantly remind her of half-jokingly.

To understand the cookie trauma you’ll need to know that my mother was the youngest of nine children, so when it was Christmas time and there were cookies to be baked, my grandmother never really cared for beauty. With nine children the quantity kind of overruled the quality. There were bits missing from cut-out cookies and other irregularities, since understandably my grandmother didn’t have the time it takes to make perfectly pretty cookies.

My mother though did. With only one child (and a low maintenance one, I’d like to add) to raise and her very own cookie trauma to tend to, she became the very Master of the Perfect Cookie. Her Zimtsterne (cinnamon stars), Vanillekipferl, Nusspangani and whatnots look perfect. This of course made her pretty unfit for enduring a child involved in the baking process. A child (even a low maintenance one) doesn’t quite get the concept of only kneading the dough until it’s done. Children tend to overknead. They also tend to sprinkle about more flour than needed. In general they tend to not respect or even grasp the Importance of Baking Perfect Cookies. They do tend to get the Importance of Eating Cookie Dough Before It’s Baked though. At least I know I did. Still do, as a matter of fact.

Can you imagine how hard it is to live up to this big role model who has been there all my life and slowly injected me with the idea that cookies have to be perfect. And pretty. And tasty. It’s not easy, I can tell you that.

So, I chose the way that worked for me, going for completely different recipes, sometimes recipes that guaranteed the unperfectness of the cookie, because unperfect was half of what the cookie was about. I still adore my mother’s cookies. There’s just no way not to. And that is why I’ll try to bring to you some of her and my favorite cookie recipes. If I can snatch some from her, that is. I will even try to take some photos, though, as I already mentioned, I cannot really promise that they’ll turn out great.

Kategorien
Baking My Sweet Tooth

Little Bees

Marzipan-Bienchen

This evening I made cupcakes for work tomorrow as a thank you for the lovely birthday gift my co-workers gave me. I made Nigella Lawson’s Carrot Cake Cupcakes and her Night and Day Cupcakes, both from „How to be a Domestic Goddess“, which was a birthday gift as well.

I had bought marzipan and yellow food color some days ago, because I wanted to make little marzipan bees for my birthday. That was back when I naively thought I’d have the time to actually bake a cake for my birthday. Since my father is an entomologist it would have been a nice surprise for him, but unfortunately I never got around to making anything remotely cake-like. For his birthday then. It’d be perfect.

Anyway, it seemed like I should use the marzipan anyway, since I was afraid I’d just forget if I didn’t and then I’d feel bad if I’d have to throw it away, so I decided to make marzipan bees to decorate one batch of the cupcakes with. It was easier then I thought but took a lot of time and patience. The result however is one of the cutest things I ever made in the kitchen.

I colored the marzipan yellow and made little oval bee bodies. Then I made the stripes and eyes with melted chocolate. I used a teaspoon to dribble the chocolate from for the stripes, but that didn’t work for the eyes, so I used a skewer instead, which – as it turned out – would have been the better choice for the stripes as well. The wings were little shredded almond pieces. I was a bit afraid of that part, but it turned out that finding good wing-sized almond pieces was actually harder than pushing the almond wings into the little marzipan bodies.

I also dribbled some more chocolate on the frosting, but that was mostly because I had so much left (bee stripes and eyes don’t really need a lot of chocolate) and I hate letting things go to waste and could think of nothing better to do with my little bowl of melted chocolate. Just eat it, you say? Well, maybe you’re right.

Needless to say I am really proud of my little bees. Too bad they’re going to be eaten. And soon.

Kategorien
Baking Kitchen Rants

Adventures With Yeast

Somehow I refuse to believe that yeast and I are not meant for each other. I always come back and try again. There’s a good relationship in there somewhere, we just haven’t found it yet. At least we respect each other, or at least I respect The Yeast. A lot. I believe yeast is a very powerful and versatile being and that once we get to know each other better we will be able to achieve a lot of culinary goals together.

For now though, there’s a lot of struggle and misunderstandings. Most of the times we make a compromise, like yesterday when I wanted to make bialys which, for those who just like me, have never heard of those things before, are kind of like bagels, only they don’t get boiled first and they don’t have a hole but are rather punched down in the middle, leaving a depression which is then sprinkled with a mixture of finely chopped onions and poppy seeds. They seem to be a pretty New Yorkish thing and since I consider myself pretty up to date with all things edible, I was a bit confused wondering why I had never heard of bialys before.

So, naturally, once I learned that bialys exist, I had to make some myself. It’s a simple yeast dough, which usually means that I spend all evening in the kitchen either tearing my hair out in despair or leaving dough traces all around. I swear there were little bits of yeast dough everywhere. I don’t know how this always happens, it just does, as Peter never tires of pointing out.

In my own defense I would like to add that I only had two recipes and they both were Americans one, meaning that I had to deal with converting all the measurements, which added to the hair-tearing-out part of this specific cooking experience.

On the plus side I’d like to say that the dough rose perfectly. I used a trick I had read somewhere and put it in the oven with the lights on. Apparently that’s a damn good place for yeast dough to rise and practically climb out of its bowl.

The next struggle came when I had to punch in that depression which is practically what makes a bialy a bialy. Yeast dough has its own will when it comes to shapes and stuff, so convincing it to please, PLEASE stay flat in the middle is not as easy as it sounds. Then came the onion mixture, then came the oven. I had the bialys in the oven for about 30 minutes until they were brown and crispy on top and then set them on the counter to cool down. Two were eaten right away and considered tasty, the rest was packed in freezer bags and then put in the freezer.

In the end, I felt like this was one more step towards a wonderful and enriching relationship. We’re not there yet, though. But I’m confident that one day we have learned so much from each other that baking with yeast will just be easy-breezy for me. That day will come. I am sure.