I leave the chicken soup with kneidlach to my mother-in-law – a marvellous cook whose chicken soup draws superlatives from anyone who has the good fortune to taste it, whose fluffy kneidlach could potentially float up from the broth in their airy pillowiness.
But faced with a chicken soupless Passover this year, I dusted off my kneidlach making skills and took one for the team…
Plum butter – or pflaumenmus – is a German plum spread. Unlike the other jams I make, pflaumenmus is baked slowly in a low oven, which seems to intensify the flavour.
I made pflaumenmus for the first time last autumn. We hoovered up the first batch so fast, I had time to make a second one before the plum season ended.
Between Swedish meatballs, Italian spaghetti and meatballs and Algerian meatballs with chickpeas (not to mention the pork-courgette meatballs I make for banh mi) we’re pretty well covered on the meatball front.
But this year’s World Cup cook-off is an opportunity to represent Germany with these solid, trustworthy königsberger klopse from Fern’s Food.
The blackberries are ripening early this year. I gathered two big bowlfuls this morning, plenty for a delicious blackberry-apple kuchen.
This yeasted apple streusel cake is less sweet than your typical coffee cake. The cake itself is quite light and is enhanced by the crunch of the streusel topping. I’d intended to make it for an afternoon snack, but the day got away from me and I ended up serving it with dinner.
Turns out that it’s also very nice accompanied by a nip of brandy…
The apple streusel cake recipe I followed comes from the For Love of the Table blog. Continue reading
Nova asked me to make a black forest cake for her 13th birthday – which worked out neatly as Germany were playing France in the World Cup that evening. Baking is not my strong point, and I found this cake a challenge. For the cake layers, I followed a recipe from The Prawn Cocktail Years by Simon Hopkinson, but went off piste when it cake to filling and decorating. As I didn’t have a 20cm cake pan, I used one that was a little bit bigger. This was a mistake – if I make this again, I’ll opt for a smaller pan, which should make slicing the cake into three layers a whole lot easier. Continue reading
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