Celeriac - the underrated vegetable

Celeriac is one of my favorite vegetables. I love it's flavor and versatility. I like it in soups and sauces, as puree and - most of all - breaded.

                                            It's so easy to do, yet absolutely delicious. 

Peel and cut the celeriac in slices about 1 cm in thickness. Steam them for about 8 minutes or until soft, but not too tender. Coat with breadcrumbs by dipping it in flour, then eggs and spices*, then breadcrumbs. For a thicker crust repeat the egg and breadcrumb bit once more. Then fry in some vegetable oil until golden brown.      Enjoy!

Today we had it with potatoes, carrots, leek and cheese sauce.        

* I use a BBQ salt or a mix of salt, paprika powder, chili, coriander seed, caraway seed, nutmeg, pepper, fennel, onion and garlic powder.

SchOreo Cake

Hmmm... the house smells lovely, I wish you could smell it - or even have a slice of this cake. Delicious!

I made up the recipe for this fabulous looking and yummy tasting cake with Oreo Biscuits. I used ingredients I had in the house and found it was fun to make it all up, going through the cupboards, thinking about what might go together well and then just mix it all in.

Afterwards I googled recipes for cakes with Oreo biscuits and was surprised to find that there were hundreds already. Anyway, I still love doing the cake my way. It's easy to make and absolutely luscious, with crunchy bits of biscuits and a magnificent flavor.


So here's my SchOreo cake recipe:

4 eggs and a pinch of salt
120 g brown sugar
50 g soft brown sugar
1 Vanilla sugar
250g margarine
2 tbsp rum
¾ cup Bailey's
250 g plain flour
1 baking powder
3 tbsp cocoa powder
½ tsp cinnamon
100 g dark chocolate
1 paket (154 g) of Oreo biscuits

Beat the eggs until frothy. Add the sugar and stir in well. Add soft margarine, then rum and Bailey's and stir until well blended. Mix flour with cocoa and cinnamon and add it to your dough. Chop up the chocolate and stir it all in. Chop up the Oreo biscuits and add 70 g. Mix well.

Put the dough in a greased small springform baking tin and put the Oreo biscuit crumbles on top. Slightly press them in.

Bake at 180°C in a preheated oven for about 70 minutes.

Enjoy!



Und noch mal auf deutsch:

In einer grossen Schüssel die Eier mit einer Prise Salz schaumig rühren, den Zucker zugeben und unterrühren. Die Margarine in einer seperaten Schüssel schaumig rühren, dann die Eiermasse unterrühren. Rum und Baileys zugeben und noch mal rühren. Mehl, Backpulver, Kakao und Zimt mischen und unterrühren. Schokolade dazu. Oreo zerbröseln/zerhacken und ca. 70 g zugeben. Rühren.

Teig in eine gefettete kleine Springform geben, die restlichen Oreo Kekse auf dem Kuchen verteilen und leicht in den Teig drücken.

Bei 180°C im vorgeheizten Ofen ca. 70 Minuten backen.

Oat Biscuits

These are John's favorite oat biscuits:

And this is how you make them:

Preheat your oven to 180° C.

Put
75g (3 oz) self raising flour

75g (3 oz) porridge oats
75g (3 oz) sugar  in a bowl and mix well.

Melt
75g (3 oz) salted butter (or butter + a pinch of salt)
1 tablespoon golden syrup
1 tablespoon milk in a saucepan over low heat.  Add the premixed dry ingredients and mix until well combined. Spoon 15 - 20 heaps onto a baking tray lined with baking parchment. 

Bake for 10 to 15 minutes or until golden brown. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before removing from tray.

All very quick, very simple & very delicious. Enjoy.

Laugenbrezel - Bavarian Pretzels

I made Laugenbrezel "Pretzels" this week and it was a big success. They tasted exactly like they should do when you have them at a beer festival in Bavaria.

I made up a recipe by throwing 3 different ones together to make it work the way I wanted. Here's what I did and how I did it:

Bavarian Pretzels:

Ingredients:
500 g plain flower
1 ½ tsp fast action bread yeast
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
50 g butter (+ some butter or margarine for the baking tray)
150 ml water
100 ml milk

You’ll also need
500 ml sodium hydroxyde solution (4%)
and coarse salt.

You can order sodium hydroxide via your local pharmacy. They might even make the solution for you. Let them know that you want to use it in food, it has to be clean. I got some natrium hydroxid pearls at the pharmacy and make up my own solution. It’s a bottle full of caustic soda in pearls. This is not the soda you use for normal baking, this stuff is normally used for clearing blocked drains and stripping furniture. So be very careful with it.

4 % means 4 g of natrium hydroxid in  96 g of water. Use cold water! It will get hot. (20 g natrium hydroxid in 480 g water)

So let's get started...

Butter your oven tray (thick!) and preheat the oven to 180 ° C. Don’t use Aluminium foil or baking paper, the sodium hydroxide solution will destroy that.

Mix the flour, yeast, salt and sugar. Add the butter (in little flakes) and slowly add the mix of water and milk while kneading. Knead until you get smooth dry dough. Do not add additional water, just keep kneading, you’ll get there.
I let the bread maker do all the kneading for me. I set it for pizza dough, but take it out earlier as you do not want the dough to rise yet.

Divide in 6 equal lumps which you then roll into 50 cm long stings, which are a bit thicker in the middle and narrower at the ends. Then form a pretzel!

Let the pretzels rest for 15 Minutes.

Put on disposable gloves and goggles. (I’m not kidding. Do not touch the solution with bare hands!) Make up your solution or open the bottle of ready made sodium hydroxide solution and pour the acquired amount into a glass or china bowl (no metal!). Now dip the pretzels into the sodium hydroxide solution. Only for a moment, not longer than 5 seconds and place them on your baking tray.

You can use a sieve and pour the solution into a glass bottle for reuse, but make sure you do label the bottle and keep it out of children's reach.

Take off your goggles and gloves. Take a sharp knife and make a cut at the thick middle bit of each pretzel. Drizzle some coarse grind salt over the pretzels and put them in the oven for 15 – 20 Minutes at 180 ° C fan assisted top and bottom heat.

Have them still warm with some thinly sliced Emmenthaler cheese with salt and freshly ground black pepper sprinkled on top and some chilled German beer. 
Prost!

UPDATE: cover your worktop with lots of paper

Fränkische Feuerspatzen

To celebrate Pancake Day we've been making the Franconian version of a doughnut.



500 g plain flour
10 - 15 g yeast (according to the amount of flour and the instructions on the sachet)
1/4 l milk
60 g sugar
60 g butter
4 eggs
a pinch of salt
a splash of rum

Allow dough to rise,
then deepfry spoonfuls in hot oil.



Oh, and some icing sugar.
A quick & easy version of doughnuts, very tasty!

Traditional doughnuts are called Krapfen. In some areas they are called Berliner and in Berlin they are called Pfannkuchen, which means pancakes in the rest of Germany.

Franconian Krapfen are filled with rosehip puree. Delicious!

Credit Crunch

Rezept für Choco Crossies
Recipe for homemade Credit Crunch

200 g Milk Chocolate (or mix milk chocolate and dark chocolate)
25 g Butter
10 g Vanilla Sugar & a tiny pinch of salt
100 g Cornflakes



Melt the chocolate*, add butter, salt and vanilla sugar and stir until sugar is dissolved. Add Cornflakes and mix by using a spatula until all cornflakes are completely covered in chocolate. Try to get all the nice chocolate from the sides of the pan onto the cornflakes.
Put the mass in small heaps on some tin foil and let it cool down.

Enjoy!

*I prefer melting chocolate in a saucepan on the stove.
Break or chop the chocolate into small pieces. Put 2/3 in a sauce pan and slowly heat. It will take time to dissolve, do not give it too much heat, but a lot of patience. As the chocolate will start to melt, stir with a spatula. Usually you can take it off the stove when it is mostly melted, add the rest of the chocolate and keep stirring. This will help to prevent overheating.

For melting chocolate I don’t like using the microwave, as I cannot really see what’s going on and feel the chocolate melting. If you do use a microwave make sure the chocolate does not get too hot. You will need to stop the microwave very often to stir the chocolate to ensure that it heats evenly.

Of course you can put the chocolate chunks in a heatproof bowl within a gently simmering saucepan of water. But you have to be very careful when stirring as you should not allow any water to get in contact with your chocolate!