Historical and Modern bakes
100g each flour and water with some yeast, overnight.
Put 400g of flour, 50g butter, 50g sugar in a food processor and pulse until butter is incorporated. Mix with dough, allow to rise, place in pan, rise and bake at 350 for 42 minutes.
Write post, realize you forgot salt.
Curse.
I still really like how the dough came out though
2 pound bag of confectioner’s sugar, 2/3 cup of cocoa powder, 2 sticks butter, half cup milk.
Heat to soft ball (235 degrees) and pour into a greased and lined quarter sheet pan.
Had a couple of mangoes to use, didn’t feel like baking with them (although mango cheesecake sounds interesting). skinned, diced and pureed, added a pound of yoghurt, 6 Tablespoons of sugar (recipe called for teaspoons, oops), and 3-4 shakes of cardamom.
I’ve made a recipe from the masterclass website twice now and… it didn’t come out right. The first time, I missed a temperature shift, so maybe that’s why it came out hard or maybe adding flour changes the way the sugar sets. The second time, I got the temperature right and it still set too hard. I looked over other recipes, and one suggests boiling the sugar to 230.
If you’re not familiar with candy making (like I am not), sugar goes through phase changes as you heat it. Around 230 degrees, it starts to “set” when you cool it off (this is called “soft ball” – the sugar will hold a ball shape, but is soft), going from a very loose set to harder sets at temperatures around 265. There another phase shift at 265 to the crack phase. I’ve heated sugar that hot once when I made lollipops.
Anyway.
I decided to heat the recipe to 230 and I added a tablespoon of ground licorice root to the flour which you add after heating, and no extract or food coloring.
Came out fine, I love the taste. I may try heating a little above 230 next time, since it’s a bit softer than I like. I started cutting in squares.
After a while, I decided that was too much work and went with strips.
It was still pretty sticky, so I threw it in a bag with confectioner’s sugar, and that helped a lot.
Mix:
and allow to sit overnight. Then add:
Mix and knead until dough is a little rough but otherwise well mixed. Rise for an hour, roll out flat, roll the dough into a loaf sized cylinder, place in a loaf pan. Rise for an hour again, bake for 42 minutes at 350.
Start off with a 9″ cast iron pan.
Mix in the bottom of the pan. Peel and cut pears and place in the skillet. The recipe calls for 6 small halves, I went with 2 pears cut into 8ths.
Make the batter next
I used self raising flour, and substituted 1 tablespoon of vinegar for 1 of milk.
Mix the flour and spices. Cream the butter and sugar. Recipe calls for room temperature butter, which is the standard for all recipes in that book. I prefer cold butter and extended creaming, but I went along this time. Add the egg, mix, add the milk, mix, add half the dry ingredients, mix, add molasses, mix, add the rest of the dry ingredients. Pour batter over the pears and bake for an hour at 325.
Tester came out clean, so I flipped it and… underdone.
It tastes fine, but I’d do one thing differently. The skillet was a bit big, so 9″ cake pan would be my choice. Overall a good recipe, though.
After making crumb cake this weekend, I wondered where the whole idea of streusel came from and how old it was. The wiki entry for streusel doesn’t really help with history, but it does talk about soboro-ppang – a Korean streusel bread with peanut butter in the streusel (?). Of course there’s a recipe. Looks OK.
Next step, I was searching through google books. What I do when I’m trying to track down the history of something is I search on the term (streusel, streusel cake, crumb cake), find the oldest reference on the front page then set the end date for my search to that and keep going until I don’t see any more entries.
I found a 19th century German book (Briefe aus und nach Grafenort) where someone was going on about different cakes and they mentioned “streuselkuchen” and the reply is, “oh, you were in Wroclaw?” (in Silesia). Huh… guess Streusel is Silesian.
The wiki entry on streuselkuchen suggests you can make a puff pastry with streusel topping. It’s called prasselkuchen and it’s as easy to make as you think. The linked recipe suggests a tart jam or lemon glaze to help cut all the sweetness. It’s also probably as messy and delicious as you think. Add that to my list of things to bake.
Well, if you search for Silesian cake, you can find some good recipes (this one looks like it was google translated from Spanish) and some good looking but different recipes (which calls for pudding mix only sold in Germany and may end up on my list as well).
I also, searching for Silesian cake, found the four pounds of flour website, the (retired) blog of Sarah Lohman, author of “eight flavors” – a very good book. She made a recipe for Silesian cheescake, which lead me to Henriette Davidis who wrote Practical Cookery which seems to be a rather well known German cookery book (Silesian Cheesecake is recipe 86 in section S) and several other books outlining a system of teaching cookery from tween to adult.
Schiller’s German national cookery for English kitchens (1873) is the first reference to streusel I can find (at least the kind you put on a cake). On a side note, the West Bend Cook Book (copyright 1902-1915) has a recipe for Crumb Cake (p. 260) that is almost the same as the Crumb Cake recipe I made (1/2 cup less flour, 1 less egg, 1 teaspoon less baking powder).
I searched for Crumb Cake, and once you go before 1875, crumb cake means pancakes made with bread crumbs (p. 193).
I think I went deep enough in that rabbit hole.
Before I go on, I want to be clear that the cake was well received.
But, there was one thing I think I’d change about the recipe… maybe two.
One thing I wouldn’t really change, but maybe I would is to use cake flour. I’ve made coffeecake with AP flour and cake flour and both are good, but cake flour is better.
The other items is the recipe calls for mixing the dry ingredients (including a LOT of baking powder) with butter and reserving a cup for the crumb. From an ease of creation view, that wins. The problem is that the baking powder in the crumb won’t react, giving the topping a slight bitter taste. I thought about how I’d “fix” that and… it would be a lot of work. So maybe the convenience and speed of creation is worth it. I’m not sure.
Recipe follows:
Dice the butter and blend in with the rest of the ingredients. Once fully incorporated, reserve 1 cup.
Add to reserved cup of crumb.
Add to the remainder of the dry mixture and mix until incorporated.
Spread batter in a 13″x9″ pan and cover with reserved crumb. Bake 45 minutes at 400.
Attempted hard dough bread again, and it worked out this time. I comment on what I think worked here
Here’s a cut piece showing the crumb, which looks as it should
Not really anything exciting, but Mollie did take a bowl and eat pretty much all of it, even if I DID use mushroom sauce.
Pre-heat over to 350. Boil water, cook noodles. While noodles are cooking, brown meat. When noodles are done, strain and put back in pot, put pot somewhere cool. Add sauce to meat, mix, put on top of noodles. Mix again, move to 2 quart casserole dish. Cover with slices of provolone and place in oven covered with tin foil. Bake 30 minutes, remove tin foil and bake 10 more minutes.
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