Strawberry, Cherry, Cream and Custard flan.

I keep coming to Erlangen with the intention of moving out of my old room, but as soon as I arrive I get drunk and am then too hungover to go and get some packing cases and move my stuff out. This time the drunkenness was predictable: my housemates had organized a big garden party with 40 crates of beer, three large punch bowls and a chili-con-carne so large that it could only be stirred by a length of 2" by 1" wood.

After several hours of partying, I decided it would be a good idea to bake a cake, so I went to the market to buy the ingredients at 5am, thinking that this would allow me a nice lie in. When I woke up I found that I had acquired a punnet of strawberries, a bag of cherries and half a watermelon. This evening I finally got round to baking a cake with the ingredients.

Strawberry, Cherry, Cream and Custard flan

(There is no real need to buy the ingredients while drunk, but it won't hurt).

Base: Shortcrust Pastry, about 5mm thick. Find a suitable recipe and make enough to fill the base of your container. Bake at 200 deg. Celsius until done.

First Layer: Custard, I used Bird's custard powder, which thickens nicely when cooled. Pour the custard on the base, and place in the fridge.

Second Layer: Strawberries and cherries. It is OK if they sink into the custard, but they don't have to.

Top Layer: Whipped cream. I used just enough to cover the top of the fruit.

This recipe is rather vague, but is based on the hope that anything involving strawberries, cherries, cream and custard is going to taste good, even if it ends up as a collapsed mush in your fridge. By some miracle, my flan had a good shape at the end, and was swiftly devoured by my flatmates, who were admittedly quite hungry.

Gletzenbrod

I was looking through photos of a Party in the kitchen in Erlangen, and saw a recipe for a christmas fruit bread in the background. I baked this bread for christmas, but then lost the recipe. The resolution was just good enough to figure out the words, so I decided to bake one. The recipe came from my flatmate Martin's mum who lives in Zwiesl. The name should actually be written "Kletzenbrot", meaning "dried pear bread", but in Zwiesel the pronunciation is more like "Gletzenbrod". It is most nutricious and tastes even better when buttered.

This recipe involves soaking things overnight!

Ingredients

For the dough:

500g flour,
150g sugar,
1 packet of yeast.

For the fruit:
500g dried pears
500g dried plums
A few dried figs
Some nuts
Raisins/sultanas
Candied fruit peel
Cinnamon
Cloves

This list is quite flexible, but the dried pears must be included. A rule of thumb is to make sure you have more fruity stuff than dough.

Procedure

1/ Soak the dried pears in sugar water overnight. Don't throw the water away until the very end!

2/ Get a good night's sleep.

3/ Get out of bed, then make the dough using the flour, sugar, yeast and pear water. The dough should be firm and give the impression that it could hold a bread-like form in the near future. Leave to stand and ferment a little.

4/ Chop up the dried fruit and nuts etc. In the meantime the dough should have risen slightly. If it hasn't, convince yourself that it has.

5/ Set the oven to 200 degrees Celcius.

6/ Knead the fruity stuff and spices into the dough. Make two (or more, or less if you wish) loaves on a baking tray, coat with pear water and bake until done (about an hour, but it never hurts to look before).

7/ Tip the pear water away.

Here are some alternative recipes for Kletzenbrote (in German).

Quick Lemon Cheesecake (second iteration)

This one was much better than the first one. The really good thing is that the recipe now has completely untransferable units. How much does a packet of Leibniz biscuits weigh? Don't ask me. How large is a tub of whipping cream, or a tube of Milchmaedchen condensed milk? No idea. Thus lives on the spirit of the recipe from my mum that required "one tin of condensed milk". In England tins of condensed milk only came in one size, and were all made by the same company (Carnation). In Germany Leibniz biscuits are a standard which can be reproduced by walking into your nearest shop, which is guaranteed to have a biscuit selection consisting of pretty much nothing else: Leibniz, Leibniz with chocolate, wholemeal Leibniz, own-brand Leibniz, own-brand Leibniz with chocolate etc

So here is the "Schnell schnell schnell lemon cheesecake".

Ingredients

For the base: 1 packet of "Vollkorn Leibniz" biscuits.
100g butter.
Brown sugar.

For the topping: 2 tubes of "Milchmaedchen" sweetened condensed milk.
2 tubs of whipping cream.
Juice of 4 lemons.
Some kind of fruit.

Instructions

Crush the biscuits, work in the butter and add brown sugar until it tastes sweet enough. Tip it into a container and squash it down. Mix the cream, condensed milk and lemon juice together, and tip onto the base. Cool for 2 hours, then put the fruit on the top and serve.

Quick Lemon Cheesecake (first iteration)

Disclaimer: I haven't tried eating this yet. This creation is lurking in my fridge. If this should happen to be the last ever post of this blog, I would recommend that you don't follow this recipe.

Ingredients:

1 Packet of hobnobs. You can also use digestives, but I ate the packet I brought along from Hamburg specially.

100g butter.

50g brown sugar.

1 tin of condensed milk.

250ml whipping cream.

2 lemons.

Notes for people residing in Germany:

1/ Hobnobs aren't easy to get your hands on. Handelshof sell Hobbits, which are basically the same. If you are in Hamburg, then the English bookshop in Stresemannstrasse is the place to go for biscuits.

2/ Germans don't seem to make a distinction between "evaporated milk" and "condensed milk". The standard stuff you can buy which is labelled Kondensmilch (Germans put it in their coffee) is what the English call evaporated milk. What we need is condensed milk, which is much sweeter. If you mix sugar into the evaporated milk until it becomes sickly sweet then you get condensed milk.

Instructions:

Crush the biscuits, mix with the butter and brown sugar. Tip this mixture into a flat dish, and press it down.

Mix together the cream, condensed milk and the juice of the lemons. Tip this on top of the biscuit mix.

Put the dish in the fridge and wait for 2 hours.

That's it!

Rhubarb Cake

My mood this weekend was improved by no end thanks to a rhubarb cake. I baked this cake using this recipe, which is in german. I went for the options of "Muerbeteig", which translates to shortcrust pastry according to my dictionary and "Streusel" which translates apparantly as streusel. I guess you pronouce it as "stroosel" and not like the german "shtroysel" if you are in England, but I really don't have a clue.

Here we note one of my problems in life: I have problems speaking english. There are things in life which I have got to know only in Germany. These include (but are not limited to) skiing, baking cakes, making curries and paying taxes. I did try to follow an american recipe for a rhubarb cake, but just got confused by the funny ingredients. There is also something very assuring about the german use of reproducible standard units such as the gram, rather than the american "cup".

In any case the cake turned out well, but needed longer than an hour in the oven. We come now to the historic moment in this blog, where I say something nice about Germany instead of whinging about how much better things are in England. Drumroll please:

Germans make very nice cakes, and Germany is the perfect environment for baking and eating cakes.

There, that wasn't so hard, now was it?

Bara Brith

Today I made a welsh tea bread, known to the natives as Bara Brith. My mum went to university in Aberystwyth, Wales, which sort of explains this. The recipe is very easy, but you have to be remember to soak the raisins in tea overnight. I followed these instructions, but took the energy-sparing step of turning on the oven after soaking the raisins overnight. It turned out very well, with a slightly hard (but not burnt) crust and nice and moist in the centre.

Wales doesn't get much press in Germany, somehow. People here think that the whole idea is just a plot by the english to get more votes at FIFA meetings. So heres to the welsh: They have a some great scenary, good food, their own (gaelic based) language and lots of sheep. Why not pay them a visit?