Another Chocolate Cake Recipe - Always for the Win

Another chocolate cake recipe in less than one month? It seems so...Blame the cold weather of the last week and the early mornings, when I am looking for a companion for my strong Turkish coffee. As I also started to clean up the kitchen of the things that are usually forbidden during the Pesach holidays - coming up in less than one month in a chametz-clean kitchen near you, I decided to finally use some of the things that were in my pantry for a longer time. Add a pinch of creativity and this delicious chocolate cake was born, that even my big one, usually very critical towards everything I do - teenage years may last longer than expected - noticed that it is really something special.

Ingredients

2/3 cup grated almonds

1/2 cup grated coconut

1 1/3 cup white flour

7 gr. baking powder

1/2 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup brown cocoa dissolved in warm water

2 tablespoons honey

50 pistachio grated, for the decoration

Directions

Heat the oven at 250C, at least 10 minutes before starting the baking. Smear vegetable margarine on the oan before adding the ingredients.

In a bowl, add the ingredients, one by one, and mix well after each of it and bring it to bake in the oven.

Ten minutes into the oven, add the pistachio. Another idea would be to add the pistachio directly to the ingredients, which make it into a nice crunchy interior. 

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Baking time: 45 minutes

To be served with a warm cuppa or a hot chocolate or coffee. Even after three days, the interior was moist, because I kept the cake outside, at the room temperature, instead of storing it in the fridge. It serves around 25 moderate sizes of delicious pieces of cake. 

Bon Appétit!

Cornbread Muffins instead of Bread

When I am out of bread in the house, I don't worry, as I always have in my pantry enough ingredients to create fast savory substitutes which might be much better than any other baking product I can find on the market. 

I've tried the zucchini and savory muffins recently, but this time I wanted to learn better how to use the cornflour which is an ingredient I hardly use more than once the year, if ever. 

The following improvised recipe was easy to prepare and bake and delicious enough to disappear in less than half a day. 

Ingredients

250 gr. cornflour

2 cups white flour

8 gr. baking powder

2 medium eggs

1/2 teaspoon of sea salt

500 gr. butter milk

1 tablespoon Osem consomme

150 gr. black sesame for decoration

Directions

Warm the oven at 250C, at least 15 minutes before you are ready. In a muffin iron, add 12 colourful muffin sheets.

Mix the ingredients well, until you have a compact paste. Pour it into the muffin papers. In the end, spread the black sesame seeds.

Bake it in the oven for 45 minutes.

I served it with yellow cheese, ricotta and spicy black olives. It is a perfect afternoon and breakfast snack, or some take away travel goodies.

Preparation time: 15 minutes

Baking time: 45 minutes

Serves: 12

Bon Appétit!

Cheese puff pastry in the morning

Germany doesn't have a tradition of salty puff pastry, and once in a while I miss having some oily pastry with rich white or yellow cheese. Although I still fight hard with what I call my 'baking inferiority complex' - meaning that I simply don't trust my baking skills, I am trying to overcome this issue. Sometimes, my hunger for something crunchy and salty in the morning is strong enough to win me over all my issue. A couple of days ago, I tried my hand in preparing some cheese puff pastry as early as 7 o'clock in the morning. It was not only easy, but with 90% successful results. The time spent preparing was of maximum 20 minutes, with a minimum money investment and delicious results.

For a batch of 10 puff pastry I needed one ready made puff pastry - the German supermarkets like REWE do have plenty of them and very good quality too, sometimes for less than 2 EUR. For the filling, I used Philadelphia olive cheese, but you can practically use any possible variant of cheese, from Gouda to Parmesan or goat cheese (yum). For beautiful effects and in the memory of the golden Middle Eastern burekas, I also needed some white sesame seeds to sprinkle on the cover. One teaspoon of olive oil for the cover is also recommended for an amplified golden cover impression.

Cut the dough in various shapes: square, triangle etc. Add the cheese filling in thee middle and roll the dough or close it over it. 

Warm the oven at 250C and place each figure of puff pastry on a parchment paper. Let it bake for around 15 minutes.

The breakfast is ready! The smell of fresh dough is wrapping the house and makes the early mornings more bearable. After all, playing with puff pastry is not that difficult.

Bon Appetit!

My first kokosh cake

Kokosh cake is a queen of the Jewish cakes, but in some parts of the world - like in Berlin - impossible to find in bakeries. Because a queen...Anyway, the advantage of such a situation is that I can be so hungry for a piece of kokosh that I can try to make it my own. But the last week, I was in one of those craving days, when I was missing a lot of heimishe food and as one of my many decisions for the next months is to try at least every week something new, I took the tremendous decision to make my own kokosh. 

The Kokosh cake is made of two parts: the filling and the dough, with their specific ingredients. There are many of them, especially a lot of sugar - cheat week, here I am. 

For the filling, you need the following ingredients:

- 1/2 cup cocoa

- 1/2 cup white sugar

- 1/2 cup brown sugar

- 1/2 cup powder sugar

- 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar

- 1 tablespoon cinnamon

- 2 tablespoon vanilla extract

Mix well all the ingredients until you have a compact mix. As I will discover later, the cinnamon is not necessarily. But until it melts, imagine a kitchen wrapped in the sweet smell of sugar and the aromas of cinnamon. This process takes less than 10 minutes, but you need to do it calmly, step by step, in order to mix well all the many sugarly ingredients.

Leave the filling mixture to rest and proceed to the next step: the dough. You can start warming the oven at 250C. Take a big tray and cover it with a kitchen parchment.
For the dough you need:
- 1 tablespoon of dry yeast
- 4 cups of flour
- 1/4 cup white sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 150 gr. butter
- 3 tablespoon canola oil
In a saucepan, melt the butter - it can be done in around 10 minutes. If the cake is not supposed to be tasted by kids, you can add some drops of rum or Baccardi. It will actually help to balance the excess of sugar.
Dissolve the yeast in a glass with 1/4 warm water. Wait until it starts to bubble.

Add all the other ingredients, and mix them well.

Knit the dough as often as possible, until you have a compact dough. Some recipes recommend to add some orange juice as well, as it may help the dough to keep being fresh for a longer time - although it may not be necessarily as this cake will be eaten and disappear as fast as the storm wind. For knitting the dough, you may need another two cups of flour. After it is ready, leave the dough to rest for around 10 minutes. You can also put the dough in a ziploc bag and keep it refrigerated it over night and use it the next day. 

The amount of the dough - and filling - is enough for two separate batches of kokosh. I personally preferred the thicker dough with consistent filling. The kokosh experts say that the thinner the dough the better so...follow the ancestral knowledge, always. Therefore: roll the each piece of dough as thin as possible, eventually trying to keep a rectangle shape. Thus, the both ends will have the same size as the middle. In my case, it worked the opposite, but, hey, it was my first ever kokosh!

Time to add the filling. For a better spread, before spreading it, paint the dough with some canola oil.

You are almost done! Time to roll the dough - for me, this was my scary moment, as I was almost sure that somehow everything will broke into small pieces of dough. Would be wise if you prevent the dough to get glued on the table by adding some extra flour before you start rolling. You can also spread an egg yolk - challah style (btw, if you use enough dough, you can also make a bracha and separate challah before starting to prepare it) -  on the outside. Some add some warm water to thicken the consistency of the yolk.

The preparation time for the dough is around 45 minutes.

Before I put in the oven, I left the kokosh cake in the making a bit outside, to rest for around 10 minutes. With the oven warm at 250, it is about time to start the baking. Let it in the oven for around 20-40 minutes. Check every 10 minutes if necessary, to be sure that it will be not too burned out. 

While the dough is in the oven, get ready for the last part of the cooking process - and the less creative one: cleaning. Warning: there is a lot of cleaning and washing to be done thereafter, particularly because using cocoa and other sticky ingredients. 

Time for some tasting! The cake is done and all you need is to having a bit and try to be a good food critic. In my case, I noticed that the cinnamon can be unnecessary as it brings a bit of sourness without any particular good addition to the overall taste. I also realized that the next time I would love to bake it less. Maybe will add the orange juice, at it gives more freshness to the dough.

The two kokosh rolls serve around 20-25 pieces. 

To drink with a cup of mint tea - no, you don't need any more sugar to that - or a coffee or a glass of warm milk.

Bon Appetit!

A new homemade bread recipe on the table

True is that for too many reasons, in the last months, I did not cook or bake as much as I wanted to. Being productive in the kitchen for me means that I am completely at peace and balanced and able to focus only on the ingredients I have in the front of me and the tasty ideas tempting me in my brain. Instead, I was more focused on other non-foodie projects and some family issues that had to deal as soon as possible. But as I should also eat from time to time, little by litttle, the hunger won over the lack of interest for anything food. 

As I usually make my own bread, I wanted this time something special, and eventually looking much more like a high-end product of patisserie. After browsing a lot of recipes from books in different languages, I decided over one miking corn and white flour and relatively easy to achieve. 

First, I started by mixing for 2 minutes 100 gr. corn flour with 400 ml. warm water. Meanwhile, I dissolved 20 gr. yeast in one glass of warm water. Added 1 kg. white flour over the corn flour mixture, plus the yeast. For taste, I also added 1/4 tablespoon kitchen salt. I added the white flour little by little, while kneading it with a big wooden palette till it turns into a dough. You can also use a mixer - which does things faster, but I am still very much into hand kneading.
After the dough is ready, I let it to raise for 2 hours, covered by a clean cloth. 

After that, I kneaded it by hand again, with the hand previously wet with oil (this is a tip shared by one of my baking friends on Facebook, while I was looking for the recipe and it worked out perfectly and left my hands perfectly cleaned; as a tip, olive oil does better to the skin than any hand cream) and kneaded it again for 3-5 minutes. When necessary, add more flour, for an easier kneading.

When everything is ready, I painted the bread with the content of 2 yolks. I spread some za'atar and sesame seeds for the artistic impression.  

Baked for 40 minutes in the oven at 120C. At the end of the process, it not only looks good, but also tastes great, what I really appreciated, the crust was both delicate and with a good taste. (If you want a stronger crust, you may need to bake probably 60 minutes).

Compared to the local bread variants on the market, this corn bread is original, delicious and tempts you to eat it all at once. In terms of baking lessons learned, I was more than happy with the results, as for the first time in a long time, my dough both looked and tasted almost perfect!

Bon Appétit!

Baking forms, anyone

How could a cake look beautiful, spectacular and perfect without the help of a good baking form? And how my cakes will look good without the flawless Kaiser baking forms?

Sometimes I am amazed about how much the German industry of the cooking support was developed, but a short history of the local cooking will answer a lot of questions. The German cuisine of sweets is very rich in various baking solutions and thus you need the right utensils for succeeding your recipes. 

foto credit: Kaiser

On their website you can find the following variants of baking forms, many of them dedicated for special occasions: heart shaped, apple shaped, round and rectangular, for beginners and professionals. For each product, there were given nice names: Noblesse, Balance, Inspiration. Most are provided with a 10 years warranty and a recipe booklet. 

The company producing it is called Original Kaiser, created in 1919 by Wilhelm Ferdinand Kaiser and has been certified with DIN ISO 9001.