Christmas baking

[and suddenly, a damp day in early December smells heavenly of cinnamon, sugar, chocolate, and almonds]

Come first Advent, it is baking time, traditionally speaking, in large parts of Germany. The recipes are manifold, with regional, and even local, specialities, and more widely spread commercial options such as gingerbread and Stollen. Both of these have their place, but we were after the biscuits we ate when growing up, when on the 24th December you would find a decorated paper plate with ten different varieties under the Christmas tree to sustain you through the present-opening, or after a cold day zooming down snowy hills on sledges. They need jam, chocolate, almonds, sugar dusting, be crumbly and buttery, or crunchy and caramelly, or chewy-nutty, and one recipe is just not enough.
In the end we settled on Kletskoppen (a Dutch recipe), traditional Zimtsterne, my favourite Togobissen, Spitzbuben (a classic), and a new discovery, Kolasnittar (slightly chewy caramel shortbread, from the Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson).

The ingredients, ready to go

A large list, you might think, but actually the majority of recipes is fairly simple, and quick to put together. Kletskoppen were the most volatile when it comes to dough consistency, and the icing in the Zimtsterne can be tricky to get right, but the most time-consuming element is the actual cutting, baking and decorating.

First we made the doughs that need resting and chilling, and the biscuits that need baking for longest. The ones that need the most attention (Kletskoppen) were relegated to the end to make sure the process is not interrupted. It is always good to have a battle plan!

In the back, the ground almonds for the Zimtsterne.
In the front, Togobissen. 

The finished dough for Zimtsterne. The almonds were a bit chunkier than usual, but it makes for an interesting texture. In the beaker, the icing for the cinnamon stars. It gets baked and forms a fluffy crust. The Togobissen are ready for their two hour chilling period. 

The Kolasnittar experiment, baking. Easily put together,
even with the golden syrup gluing itself to everything

Cinnamon stars (we had no star shapes,
so technically they are moons) being iced

One more finished lump of dough for chilling
(the white Spitzbuben), and starting on the Kletskoppen.

Kletskoppen dough in its initial form. The consistency is key, to help them melt into their lacy shape. 

Assembly line for Togobissen. Roll, cut, arrange, bake. 

Jamming - cover one biscuit in jam, add another on top. Then wait patiently.

Kletskoppen. They start off small. 

Then they melt into thin, delicious, lacy goodness.

Togobissen, Spitzbuben, Kolasnittar, Zimtsterne, Kletskoppen

Togobissen
275g plain flour
120g butter, in pieces
120g icing sugar
25g cocoa powder (I use Green & Blacks organic)
2 egg yolk (as we needed egg whites for the cinnamon stars), or 1 egg
a dash of vanilla essence, or a teaspoon of vanilla sugar
Raspberry jam or any other flavour you fancy
Chocolate, dark, melted to paint the top
Nuts, or coffee beans, to decorate

Mix all ingredients together into a ball of dough (I had to use a tiny bit of milk to make it stick together, but be patient, and avoid excess liquid). Let it rest for 2 hours in the cold. However, I found that it was easier to roll after it had warmed up a bit again. Roll out to a thickness of 3-5 mm, cut into desired shapes. Bake for 10 minutes at 150 degrees C. Let cool. Slightly heat jam, distribute evenly on top of biscuit, cover with second biscuit. Let cool. Cover with melted chocolate and decoration of your choice.


Spitzbuben
I made a third of a recipe as it was a spur of the moment thing.
150g plain four
100g butter, in pieces
55g icing sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla sugar
Raspberry jam works well, and strawberry. Not a big fan of apricot or cherry - it needs to be quite tart, and stand up on its own

Mix all ingredients together quickly, chill. Cut into desired shapes, and make sure to have some with a hole in the top biscuit, so the jam shows nicely against the pale dough. Take care when baking these, as they can catch easily. 10 minutes max at 170 degrees C. Chill, glue together with jam, and sprinkle with icing sugar for that snowflake look.


The Swedish recipe - Kolasnittar (slightly chewy caramel shortbread, nomen est indeed omen) 
This recipe was also introduced in the Guardian newspaper (hence the link), but I actually used the proper recipe book to bake this one, very satisfying! Throw together butter, sugar and syrup, add the dry ingredients. Form two sausages, and really make sure to keep lots of space between them on the baking tray. Mine spread from two centimetres to at least 10cm. When chilled, cut into slices. Mine were possibly a bit thin, they keep breaking in the middle, and then I have to eat the damaged ones. It is tough.


Kletskoppen
250g soft butter
320g dark soft sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
200g plain flour
250g chopped almonds
pinch of salt
(milk)

Cream butter and sugar with cinnamon, then sieve in the flour and add the almonds. Combine to a dough soft enough to handle easily - add some milk if it is too dry. Form into sausages approx. 2cm in diameter, and cut these into disks. Put biscuit disks on a baking tray lines with baking parchment with PLENTY of space between; they will flatten out considerably into rounds of c. 4-5cm diameter.
Pre-heat oven well to 200°, and bake for 7-8 mins until thin and lacy.


Cinnamon Stars (or moons, or rounds....)
400g almonds, skin on - grind finely
2 egg whites
375g icing sugar
juice of 1/2 lemon
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp bicarb of soda

Beat egg whites with icing sugar and lemon juice until slightly foamy; reserve a cup of the mix for icing. Put almonds, spices and raising agent into a bowl, add the egg white mix slowly until the dough is firm and not sticky any more (if it is too wet add some plain flour). Roll out to 1cm thickness and cut out shapes; paint shapes with icing on the top. Bake carefully at 140° for 25 minutes - the underside should be dry enough to come off the baking parchment easily, but the icing should not brown.

Schwäbische Laugenbrezel (bless you)

[taste of home on a dreary Sunday morning]

This morning I woke up with a terribly sore throat and a hankering for salty carbs. Instead of reaching for the crisp packet, I decided to yank myself upright and make Brezeln, as close to the German original as possible. Which is, grantedly, not very close.

I used this recipe from a German site as the basis, but always have to make a few modifications. Strong white flour instead (?) of type 450, unless by some miracle it happens to be the same grade (am sure Google could tell me, but life is too short, especially on an empty stomach), and dried yeast instead of fresh yeast. The dried yeast is always a gamble - I grew up with only fresh yeast at my disposal, so can never quite get the dried stuff right. However, finding fresh yeast in the UK is difficult. Off the top of my head, the only place I know that stocks yeast reliably is a small Polish corner shop on West Oxford.

However, the recipe details the best way to get the Brezeln brown without importing the apparently highly volatile liquid Natronlauge that is usually used.

My preferred way to make Brezeln is also to keep them quite tiny, as they puff up during their bath.

I also let the yeast dough rest in a ball first before shaping the Brezeln, and then quickly shape and dump into water, otherwise they get massive and lose their crispness - but that is just a personal preference.

So, make yeast dough with 500 g strong white flour, 15 g of dried yeast awoken in some lukewarm milk, 250 ml milk in total, 50 g butter, some crumbled Maldon salt and rest for 20 minutes. Preheat oven. Cut dough into bits, and shape as demonstrated:

Make a snake that has eaten a cow. Two thin ends, fat middle, but not too fat. 

Loop up and cross once.

Cross again. 

Fold down, and press on lightly.

Natron or bicarbonate of soda. Can be used for pretty much anything in the kitchen,
including boiling Brezeln to turn them tasty brown. 

Ready to be boiled for 30 seconds. 

While shaping, boil a litre of water with 3tbs of Natron (bicarbonate of soda). Boil the Brezeln for 30 seconds max, otherwise they get doughy, put on non-stick tray, cut a slash into the fat bit, sprinkle with Maldon salt.

In the pot, remove with slotted spoon. 

15 mini-Brezeln for breakfast. Boom!

20 minutes in the oven will turn little ones brown, make them crunchy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.

Obviously the shape is not as perfect as the German big cousin, nor are they as glossy. But in flavour, they are definitely winning, cause I slaved over a hot stove to make them.

Peanut butter and chocolate ice creams

[heart attack in a bowl]

After not buying Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream last weekend, I finally caved and made my own. There is only so much time you can reasonably spend thinking about dessert, after all. I have made both chocolate and peanut butter ice creams in the past, but of course did not bother to write down the recipe. Could not remember which exact ingredients, or how much of them. Recipes online all suggested making a custard with eggs, and I really am not a fan of egg in my ice cream. Mostly because I have never made a good egg custard....

In the end, I decided to use an amended version of a trusty mousse recipe, and hope it would not go weird during the freezing process. Enter the Nigella Instant Chocolate Mousse, which is my favourite emergency party food, and it is egg-free. Everybody loves it. As as an aside, have also made it with milk chocolate (not that good, but acceptable) and white chocolate (absolutely amazing) in the past.

I had a lengthy internal debate about mixing chocolate and peanut butter together, but then was unsure about the onslaught of flavours. Went with separate ice cream batches in the end. Using marshmallow as the sugar meant that the cooling process would be a bit tricky. Too warm, and the ice cream machine would have to work very hard to chill it to a reasonable temperature. Too cold, and the ice cream machine would have trouble churning, as the mousse gets quite solid (especially after a few hours in the fridge). After melting the ingredients in two pots (half the cream, marshmallows and some vanilla essence, plus chocolate, in one pot; the other half plus smooth peanut butter in the other), and stereo stirring for about 15 minutes at low temperature to avoid burning, I left them to cool at room temperature for about half an hour. Two sessions in the churner, done.

In the cupcake moulds

My main issue with ice creams is that they get quite difficult to portion out straight out of the freezer, so I used silicone cupcake moulds to freeze them in what I thought were individual portions (half the size would have been sufficient...).

The result is creamy, smooth, rich and sooooo good, but best eaten in small quantities!

Too much of a good thing!

Recipe based on Nigella's Mousse
600 ml double cream (would use single cream next time), half in each pot
150 g giant marshmallows (no small marshmallows to hand), half in each pot
220 g of dark chocolate
150 g of smooth peanut butter (this is a rough estimate - about half a 340 g jar, depending on how peanutty you feel on the day)
splash of vanilla essence
I left out the butter and water, as was not sure what effect that would have on frozen goods...

The pros and cons of chicken keeping

[the moment when you struggle to come up with anything seriously negative]

Yes, I have been brainwashed. Used to read blogs by chicken-fanciers, thinking surely chickens are not that great. They are after all mostly beak and claw, a bit ugly, messy and noisy (there you go, some cons for you). But they are also so much more than that.
Ours are not pets - they have their large run in the garden, and in the winter, they get full access to the whole garden to fertilize and loosen the soil, and to get rid of creepy crawlies, but they live in their space, and and we in ours. They can be handled, provided you can catch them, but they are disinclined to sit on your lap. The only time they like being close to humans is if you have a spade or fork in your hand, and are doing some vigorous digging. Sitting on the spade, sticking their heads through the fork tines, always ready to catch any worm or bug that gets dug up. Scratching on the earth heaps afterwards is apparently the best thing ever.

Now to the list. In favour of chicken-keeping

- Egg, egg, egg, egg, EGG, EGG, EGG, egg, egg (more anon). Nothing compares to home-laid eggs. They are a rich orange colour, creamy, flavourful, and of course, oh so fresh. I can no longer eat poached or fried eggs in cafés, as they tend to be an abomination by comparison.

- No pests in the garden to eat your vegetables. Our chickens have done a great job over the winter to remove all bugs, slugs, ants and critters that might eat veggies in the summer. We have no need for artificial pest-removers, keeping our garden nicely organic.
- Well fertilised and tilthed earth. Eats, poos, scratches - good soil for the following season.
- Low-maintenance to look after. Feed them regularly and check they are ok, clean them out, and that is pretty much it.
- Guilt-free leftovers. They are not particularly picky eaters (I mean, they love slugs), so they get leftover fruit and veg, peels, apple cores, any odds and ends, a bit of rice or pasta on occasion, cheese and yoghurt scrapings, cottage cheese, watermelon rinds to finish off, what is left after making tomato passata etc. And then they turn it into eggs!
- A definite health benefit through destressing by watching chickens go about their business, contentedly plocking to themselves, taking dust baths, pecking at random things.
- Immense enjoyment from looking after some rather strange creatures. After all, they are basically dinosaurs. Ours get a lot of exercise, as they always run towards us when we go into the garden (which is frequently), in the hope of grain or fruity treats. It is quite a sight to have feathery cannonballs charging towards you beak-first. Their claws look scary, too. Hardy the cat shows a lot of respect, with good reason! However, I was most surprised to find out that their feet are actually very soft and gentle. They feel more like hands, in fact, when they grip on to your fingers. Freaky.... but kind of cute as well.
They may not have brains as such (once brain cell does not count, and it is not always actively used), but they have personalities and preferences. They play rugby with bits of cheese, hop for food that is tied over their heads, and twice per day do things together. Joint drinking or grooming sessions are a lovely display. A flock of chickens doing the same thing together, in harmony for a short period of time, before going back to pecking order and flock mentality. Some are bolshy, some are more timid. Pickwick is a haughty little madam, Johnny is a matron. Sid is a beauty and knows it, proudly strutting around with her head and vibrant comb held high. Pock is the crazy old grandmother. If she was a person, she would wear huge glasses, lipstick and red dyed hair, cackling madly on her front porch with a glass of gin in her hand.

Pock, the Dame Edna Everage of chickens

Plink plink I flutter my non-existent eyelashes at you. Sid at her best angle.

Pickwick clearly disapproves. She is also a bit unwell, the poor thing, but is hiding it well. 

Johnny makes sure everybody goes to bed on time. Also looks slightly short-sighted with her comb-over. 

Cons of chicken keeping
- THE NOISE. Specifically, THE NOISE early in the morning. In the summer, they start shouting at 430am. Egg, egg, egg, egg, EGG, EGG, EGG, egg, egg. On repeat. In the autumn and winter, it is more like 530am, 615am or 630am. There is no rule or regularity. No way to tune out the shouting. No earplugs are strong enough. Strangely, no complaints from the neighbours yet... and really, I meant to get up that early anyway.
I call it my chicken alarm clock. Now make your own!

https://soundcloud.com/nat-merry/chicken-oclock

Hedgerow Raid

[Do you know anything better than FREE food? Nope, me neither.]

More jams, this time made from FREE fruit! The hedgerows at the moment are full of it, you just need to take a receptacle of some sort and get foraging.

Last week I made some  rosehip jam for the first time (as well as some elderberry, of which more later).

The recipes I foundfor rosehip jam on the internet variously said to de-seed the hips or to just strain or sieve them; I went for the easy option and a sieve, which is how I ended up not with jelly but with a creamy puree with much of the fruit pulp still in.

This week's production is from a pound and a half of blackberries which took me half an hour to pick, and a kilogram of elderberries which took me no time at all to snip off the tree (though some help from passing friends to reach the berry clusters on the higher branches....).

 

Blackberry must be the easiest jam in the world to make - put into pot, add jam sugar, boil, put into jars, DONE.  

Elderberries require a bit more work - unfortunately, since this may just be my favourite jam EVER, so I tend to make at least a couple of batches each late summer. It is amazing on bread with quark (which you can find at most Sainsbury's and Tesco's and Co-op these days; very good news indeed!). 

Anyway, elderberry jam, the process. First the berries need to be removed from the stalks - a fork is the best tool for this. Don't be worries about any green berries or bits of stalks or even small critters that remain in the berries at this stage - they'll all float to the top when you wash the berries, and you can simply remove them with a slotted spoon.

Washing the elderberries.

Then you need to boil the berries to make them soft enough to get at the juice. Add a couple of cups of water to the berries, and boil for a good 30 minutes or so, until they squish easily. Then put them through a sieve - I use a quirl, which is a German kitchen tool I have struggled to find in the UK, but which is incredibly useful for exactly this kind of work (and which I used on the rosehips, too, incidentally).

A quirl.

You can also mash them up with a potato masher and then use a cheesecloth to strain, but then you'll lose out on all the lovely pulp, and will also most likely end up with bright purple hands since squeezing the cheesecloth seems to be the only way to really get at the juice.

Whichever method you chose, you then measure your juice and add the required amount of jam sugar (I had pretty much exactly 1000ml) - though for this batch I wanted to go low-sugar if not completely sugar-free, so I used Tate+Lyle pectin with only 100g of sugar, and made up the rest of the sweetness with honey. (And the next batch is going to be sweetened with elderflower cordial, how ingenious is that?)

Add the jam sugar or pectin and sweeteners and lemon juice to the elderberry juice, and boil. Use a LARGE pot, the jam mixture has a tendency to boil up really high, so danger of a huge mess if it boils over (not that that has ever happened to me...)

Make the usual gelling test, and then fill into jars as normal (see here for the German trick which requires no sterilisation). Quick trip to Co-op or Tesco or Sainsbury's for a pot of quark, and breakfast for the next couple of months is SORTED.

Breakfast scones

[best of both worlds, oh-so scrumptious!]

When it comes to breakfast, two worlds collide at the Cotswold Collective. The continental section prefers sweet breakfasts, the British contingency is in favour of savoury flavours.
Meet the Breakfast Scone that bridges the inter-European gap. Born of a sudden whim, and the availability of some foraged cooking apples on a Saturday morning, it is golden-hued, crusty on the outside, and crumbly-moist on the inside. Hidden in the carby goodness are small chunks of apple and CHORIZO, the addition of which makes almost every meal superior.

I used a basic scone recipe, and finely chopped the apple and chorizo by hand to avoid excess moisture. The reason they are quite flat is that I did not want them to be raw in the middle, or have soggy bottoms from the apple.
Starting with some sieved flour, bicarb and cream of tartar, plus Maldon salt flakes (as we have no self-raising flour in the house), and the basic scone procedure of making breadcrumb-like flakes with butter, the chorizo and apple mixture went in next. Whirling it around in the bowl to coat the pieces evenly in flour, and ensure adequate distribution in the dough was done in a matter of seconds, followed by a steady flow of milk to bring it all together into a smooth, wet, but not sticky dough ball. I have finally also found the right amount of working the dough - just enough to make it hold its shape without losing the light texture. Then a radical departure from scone lore by forming a thick sausage, and cutting it into 1.5 cm wheels. The reason being as per description above.
In the oven for 20 minutes at 180 degrees, and breakfast peace was achieved.

Recipe:
225 g plain flour
1 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
pinch of Maldon salt
50 g Lurpak light (it works surprisingly well)
1 thumbsized chunk of chorizo, finely chopped
1 cooking apple, chopped finely by hand (the chorizo-apple mixture was about a handful together)
110ml of milk (or more or less, depending on the state of the dough), plus some milk for glazing

Summer on a plate

[moment when all the hard work in the garden becomes totally worth it]

Two years ago, I purchased a pasta machine. I used it lots, then last year, kind of forgot about it. Now that the summer is finally happening, and the garden is yielding all kinds of yummy treats, it was the ideal moment to dust off the flour, and make pasta again. I find home-made pasta a lot lighter and smoother, so it is much more suitable for summery pasta dishes (rather than say, Bolognese sauce, which is more of a hearty winter dish, and is better eaten with ordinary purchased pasta).

After a glut of peas, we are now expecting a glut of courgettes, perpetual spinach, chard, kale and tomatoes. Sadly, the tomatoes are not yet ready due to lacking sunshine, but the green stuff is definitely go.

To celebrate the first courgette, a plate of smooth, pale yellow, silky pasta was in order. The basic recipe is very easy - I tend to use 100g flour and one egg, then scale upwards. A smidgeon of water to bring it all together, wrap it up in the fridge, and done. Not having made pasta in a while, I was concerned about the slightly crumbly texture, but of course it eventually comes together nicely when you come to roll it out. Our own eggs give it a lovely golden colour, but I had to use two eggs for each 100g, as the Cotswolds Sid and Johnny lay quite dainty eggs.

 

The dough, rolled out manually in parcels first, then put through the machine, was firm yet eventually almost translucent. I go through all the settings on the pasta machine, as it seems that extra rolling makes the dough even smoother, and the pasta just that extra bit better. It is also easier with two people, as the pasta sheets can get quite long, and cumbersome to manoeuvre.

Hanging the pasta on an emergency rack (cooling rack, technically) to dry makes it less fiddly to deal with when you reach the boiling stage. As it is so delicate, it has a tendency to stick to everything that is somewhat warm and damp. Usually, my hands are pretty cold, and hence ideal for making pasta, but on that day, due to the weather, even my ice fingers were too warm, and there was a definite danger of creating pasta lumps instead of tagiatelle.

And if you are concerned about the amount of time it takes to make pasta from scratch - it is all clawed back during the cooking process. On your plate in 2 minutes, provided you remembered to have the sauce ready in time!

The lovely courgette and pea veg combination was accompanied by a herb garden pesto of our own invention - the real star of the dish. It is amazing what is edible in your garden, including leaves and flowers! This version included
marigold flowers
nasturtium flowers and leaves
borage flowers and leaves
sorrel
perpetual spinach
pea shoots
rocket
thyme and oregano
olive oil
salt & pepper
parmesan cheese



The sorrel gives it a lemony flavour, borage is very much like cucumber, the nasturtium and rocket add pepper, marigolds are sweetish-peppery with a lovely dash of colour and all other leaves are a solid base for green loveliness.

Best pesto ever. Even without pine nuts.

Jamming

<fruit+sugar=omnomnom>

I happened to be at the Wednesday market around 4pm this week when they had started getting rid of the leftover fruit and veg at dumping prices, and thus managed to get hold of four punnets of strawberries for a mere quid. That could mean only one thing - JAM.
(Well, it could also have meant strawberry gin, but as I have mentioned before, I am less alcohol- and more sugar-oriented than some of the contributors on this blog.)
Making jam is so simple that I really cannot understand why more people don't make their own, especially since it means you can cater to your own preferences when it comes to sugar content, size of fruit pieces, or additional flavourings you may want to add.


In any case, 20 minutes of hulling later I had 1.5kg of strawbs ready to go.

I am at the moment, for various health reasons, trying to avoid sugar, especially refined sugar, and since I LOVE jam, especially my own homemade one, this  this has been somewhat tough at breakfast. On a recent visit to Germany however I bought some low-sugar gelling agent, designed to be used with only 350g of sugar per 1kg of fruit, or even without any sugar, so that you can easily substitute fructose or sweetener. Sweetener alone tends to leave a bit of a bad taste, so I decided to use half fructose, half sweetener.

 My favourite jam EVER is strawberry with stem ginger, so that's what the first 1kg batch was going to be. 

I also like my jam as smooth as possible, none of that real big fruit pieces malarkey for me, so I pureed the strawberries with the stem ginger before cooking the jam.

And because I was feeling adventurous, I added some balsamic vinegar and some ground black pepper to the second, smaller batch. And because I had then run out of strawberries but had still half a packet of gelling agent left, I used up an elderly jar of Morello cherries, spiced up with Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum.

The gelling agent worked a total treat in any combination of fruit sugar and sweetener - I use a pre-chilled saucer from the freezer for my gelling tests, and the jam set in less than a minute on the cold saucer. 

I use my mum's (and apparently every German housewife's) trick for sterilising the jars by simply filling them as much as possible and then turning them upside down for a few minutes, so that the boiling jam heats up the entire jar and sterilises it automatically - simples! 

Result of an hour's work, from left to right: three jars of Strawberry and Stem Ginger, one of Morello Cherry and Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum, and two (well, one and three quarters) of Strawberry, Aceto Balsamico and Black Pepper, which I am really looking forward to trying with cheese.