I love creating the perfect birthday cakes for family and friends; whether it’s making their favourite flavour or a “novelty” cake tied into their interest, it’s all great fun.  This year I attempted both for Dave’s birthday…

Our weekends often revolve around The Three Cs: comics, coffee and cake.  We all pile into the car on Sunday mornings and descend upon the two comic shops in town.  And then, gleefully clutching our purchases, we hit Costa for coffee and cake.  We all love our little ritual, especially Dave, so I decided to combine all three into his birthday cake.

I decided that a coffee and walnut cake “cup of coffee” would be fun, so baked the batter in a Pyrex bowl for the appropriate over-sized cup shape.  Once it was cooled, I split it into three layers, soaked each with some espresso syrup, filled with espresso buttercream and then covered the whole thing with some white fondant.  For some reason the fondant cracked like a bitch so I wound up having to add the gold detail to hide a truly hideous chasm.  The latte ‘art’ topping is espresso flavoured royal icing, and if you squint, it might just look like a heart.

Dave had recently written and published his first comic along with an artist friend of ours, The League of Analogues, so I thought that it would be fun to bake him an edible first edition.  After a lot of trouble I finally managed to get the front cover of the comic printed onto an icing sheet.  For variety I baked a deliciously moist chocolate cake and filled it with leftover espresso buttercream before covering with fondant and nervously applying the print.  I don’t think I wet the fondant enough as when we cut the cake the print was quite obviously sitting on top and it was supposed to bond to the fondant as though it had been painted on.  No matter, though.  It looked the part and Dave was delighted

As a finishing touch I covered the cake board with fondant and painted it to resemble a wooden table for the full coffee shop experience.  I tried to create little sugar packets but they didn’t turn out so well, so I just left well alone.

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

When I discovered that December’s Daring Bakers challenge was to make a gingerbread house, I was thrilled!  I’ve wanted to make a gingerbread house for years and I’d actually planned to make one with Lucas this year.  (Admittedly I was going to buy Lucas a kit from IKEA for insant gratification!)

After much admiring of gingerbread houses on flickr I settled on using a pattern from Ultimate Gingerbread.  I splashed out on their Pearl House pattern, purely because it looked like my dream house!  Doesn’t everyone want a house with a turret?!?  Extravagant (and completely unnecessary), I know.  I printed off the pattern pieces and then invested a happy half an hour for sticking them to card and cutting them out.

I chose to use the recipe that Y posted from Scandinavian Baking by Beatrice Ojakangas (recipe available on Y’s site). I own this book, so it was very handy to be able to take a book into the kitchen.  I did modify it ever so slightly by adding 110g of light brown sugar for sweetness as a lot of people had complained it wasn’t tasty, and I also used 2tsp of ground cloves instead of 3tsp.  The dough wasn’t quite as fragrant, but it did mean that it was more kid-friendly. Cloves are quite fierce and I wasn’t sure that Lucas would appreciate them as much as me!

Despite reports of dry, troublesome dough on the Daring Bakers forum, I had no problems with the dough.  All three batches came together easily; it was supple and easy to handle; and it smelled and tasted great.  I chose to roll out the dough between sheets of clingfilm before chilling since it was butter-rich and bound to set up like a rock!  This also sped up cutting out the pieces of the house, all eleventy million of them!

It was only when I started cutting out the pieces that I realised how huge this house was going to be!!  I’d paid scant attention to the measurements when I’d cut out all the template pieces and now it was too late to shrink it down!  I was sorely tempted to downsize but decided to persevere in the end; I could always invite people over to eat it!

The first pieces to be cut and baked were those for the main roof and porch roof.  I then made small cardboard moulds, a bit bigger than the trimmed pieces, and assembled the cap roofs, using a heck of a lot of royal icing that I had left over from the sparkling snowflake cake.  Baking the rest of the pieces took ages.  I was beginning to lose the will to live when I suddenly realised that I was done. Hooray!  I then crushed up an entire bag of Fox’s Glacier Mints and used them to create clear ‘glass’ windows in the house.  The double-baking of the main walls made me feel a lot more comfortable about constructing the house later on!!

Compared to the tedium of baking loads of small pieces, decorating hardly took any time.  I did most of it on Monday when we found ourselves snowed/iced in.

I copied shamelessly from the sample pictures provided by Ultimate Gingerbread and piped pale pink royal icing siding on to my house.  Each window had white frames piped on and an evergreen garland underneath.  Shiny silver balls were dotted on to the upper corners of the frames which looked very pretty.  Finally I piped a gorgeous wreath on the front door and left everything to dry overnight.

Construction day dawned and I procrastinated like mad.  It just seemed too difficult, despite my earlier practice with the IKEA house!  I finally sucked it up and made a batch of white royal icing.

After laying out the main walls on my board (A1 foamcore sheet!), I piped a heavy bead of royal icing all around the bottom edge and the joining sides.  Then I stood up the back wall and propped it upright, inside and out, with a can.  From there, it was easy to get the remaining walls up and stuck properly.  I only left a can against them for five minutes and then they were stuck fast.  I reinforced the seams with plenty more royal icing and then moved on to making the bay window, then the leaning turret, and finally the right extension.  I let it dry overnight before enlisting Dave’s help to get the rooves on.

After all that, it just took an hour to ice the roofs and dress the board.  I wanted to make a little cluster of Christmas trees but I ran out of green royal icing so you can just see last year’s Christmas tree, planted out in the garden by the house’s occupants.  Dessicated coconut sprinkled over a smear of royal icing makes the snow look convincing, and I finished off by piping garlands around the porch supports and using flattened Jelly Tots as a welcome mat on the porch.  (Every gingerbread house needs some sweets, right?)

I want to say a BIG thank-you to Anna and Y for this fantastic challenge!  I had loads of fun making my house and I hope everyone else did too!

Merry Christmas!

I hope that each and every one of you, my readers, has a wonderful day.  Whether you’re celebrating with friends, family, or by yourself, may it be full of joy, fun, laughter, great presents and amazing food!

This gloriously festive stollen comes from the Christmas issue of BBC Good Food Magazine ‘08.  It was the cover recipe and looked so deliciously enticing that I just had to make it.

Unlike traditional stollen, this one incorporates jewel-like dried cranberries and jade-green pistachios.  It really is worth the bother of peeling loads of fiddly little nuts as they look so wonderful dotted through the crumb and scattered over the top of the finished stollen.  The cranberries also lend a slight sharpnes to the stollen which is quite refreshing and delicious, too.

It’s a welcome addition to any Christmas table and I’m sure that after one taste it’ll become a new family tradition.  Merry Christmas!

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This sparkling snowflake cake was my contribution to the Christmas Raffle at Lucas’s pre-school.  I was asked if I knew anyone who could make cakes, and without a shred of modesty I said, “That would be me!”  So having bigged myself up, I felt that I needed to make an extra-special effort which is why this cake is completely over the top and probably wouldn’t be out of place at a wedding.

I wanted to make a cake that would look like a snow shower, with glittery snowflakes  cascading down against a background of wintry ice blue; I love the Icy Christmas look and wanted to capture it in a cake.  So after sketching out a few ideas I set to work with  snowflake cutters, flower paste and edible glitter.

What really brings this cake together is the piping work.  I’ve long been an admirer of Mich Turner’s gorgeous piping work in her book Spectacular Cakes, and I quite fancied having a go.  So I piped some woefully uneven pearls around the base of each tier—I desperately need a turn table to bring cakes up to eye level, or perhaps I should just sit on the floor—and then started piping random pearls over the sides of the stacked tiers.  To get rid of any pointy ends I flattened them with a dab of my finger. (A small bowl of water and a cloth are very handy.)  It’s a very effective technique to have in your decorating arsenal and it’s really easy, too!

A Spoonful of Sugar has just passed its sixth anniversary!  It barely seems like a any time has passed since I typed up the fifth anniversary post.  It’s been a fun year… full of new food experiences and taste sensations.  I hope you’ll all join me for year seven!

Few things make me happier than being asked to bring dessert for a party or gathering.  It’s an opportunity to pull armfuls of cookbooks off the shelf (and we all know how much I love my cookbooks, right?)  I pore over them, meeting recipes that I have somehow missed on my first read-through and re-discovering old friends.

The recipe I settled upon for last week’s Murder Mystery evening as hosted by my friend Sam, was an old lust of mine.  In the new and especially exciting days of food blogging, when everyone knew each other and Google Reader hadn’t been invented yet, my friend Alberto of Il Forno (now very, very sadly defunct) baked Pierre Herme’s Nutella Tart from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme, of course, with stunning results.  I’d had the cookbook for a few months and had been particularly pleased with the chocolate macarons, but hadn’t found an occasion to make the sexy Nutella Tart.  An evening in with a juicy murder to solve and a crowd of girlies seemed just right to try the tart for the first time.

Tart-making is probably easier if you’re (a) not in a rush and (b) not beleagured with a small child loudly demanding pudding when they haven’t eaten any of their dinner.  I opted not to make Pierre’s sweet tart dough recipe as he insisted on making a very large batch so as not to overwork the dough.  Of course you could freeze the excess for a month.  A month?  I make one or two tarts a year these days!!  So, I just bought a pack of excellent sweet pastry from the supermarket.

While your tart crust bakes, multi-task!  Use this time to toast the hazelnuts, cool ‘em, and then chop them in half.  Then flip your board over and industriously chop your chocolate finely.  Stick the butter in a separate bowl and fiddle around with some eggs.  Once that’s done, put your feet up. (If you’re lucky!)

There’s a bit of waiting around involved once the crust is fully baked.  The Nutella needs to be slathered on, but you can’t do that while the crust is hot!  And you can’t make the ganache until the Nutella is in place.  It’s a bit This Is The House That Jack Built, really.

I found the ganache to be quite difficult.  I suspect that my chocolate siezed as I ended up with a thick, plasticy mass in the bowl which only improved very slightly as I gently drizzled and stirred butter into it.  Seriously, it looked truly awful.  I poured it into the crust anyway and as I scattered hazelnuts artistically, I reflected that it wouldn’t take long to detour to Sainsburys if it all went pear-shaped.  Eleven minutes later, I opened the oven door and was greeted by a tart that looked like the picture in the book!  I love my wonky oven—it really saves the day sometimes!

While I transormed myself into the seductive Fleur Tashious, famous humanitarian actress, the tart cooled to room temperature.  There was just time for an artistic drizzle of Nutella zig-zagged over the whole thing before I had to dash.

Pierre’s Nutella Tart was a big hit.  A really, really big hit, in fact.  I served it with some extra-thick brandy cream which went beautifully with the chocolate and hazelnut decadence of the tart.  And while it was amazing at room temperature, I think I actually liked it better chilled the next morning…

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“Hope you don’t mind… but I’ve… um… volunteered you to make a cake,” my friend Caz said.

It turned out that Caz had managed to draw the short straw of organising the “Guess the weight of the cake” competition for her school PTA Christmas Fair, and feeling somewhat panicked at the idea of doing the cake herself had volunteered me for the job.  Not that I minded, of course.  Cakes and me are best friends.

Christmas always equals fruit cakes, so my favourite “simmer and stir” recipe was a given.  Christmas puddings are always popular, too, so I decided to combine the two and make a Christmas Pudding shaped Christmas Cake!  Simples!

To make the appropriate shape, I baked the cake in a 2L Pyrex bowl.  I would have loved to bake it in a pudding basin, but I don’t have one and was very shocked to discover that they cost almost £10 in Sainsburys!!  Lining the bowl was pretty tedious to say the least.  I broke out a tape measure and measured the internal height of the bowl, along the curved side if that makes sense and then cut a sheet of parchment 6 inches bigger so that it would have sufficient height in case of unexpected rising.

All you need to do next is butter the bowl, press the parchment into it and then make a series of cuts down the paper leaving an untouched circle about 2″ wide in the middle of the bowl.  I made cuts every inch or so and tucked and pressed the parchment in place.  After a lot of grumbling I ended up with a beautifully lined bowl and very buttery fingers.  I also completely forgot to take a picture of this masterpiece—sorry!

Make the cake as usual but decrease the oven temperature by 5C because glass conducts heat very well.  I took no chances and placed the filled bowl on a baking sheet before it went into the oven as I was paranoid about it shattering.  The one change I made was to leave pouring the extra brandy (or rum, in this case) over the hot cake as that would definitely have shattered the bowl.  I brushed that all over the cake once cold and fed it a similar amount of booze a couple of times before it was time to decorate.

For this cake I pre-prepared the Christmassy mouse and the holly leaves to ensure they’d be rock hard by the time I needed them.

You don’t need to buy special holly cutters, and if you do want to, I suggest buying them in the summer when there isn’t a massive rush for them!!  I had a couple from years ago, but had managed to lose the biggest cutters.  So instead I cut out ovals of modelling paste (50:50 blend of sugar paste and flower paste, strong, tastes decent and more pliable to work with) coloured a darkish green and scalloped the edges with the end of a piping tip until it looked right.  Draw in the veining with a knife and you’re done.  I dried the leaves over crumpled bits of foil to give them more shape.

The mouse was more difficult, but still relatively straightforward.  I used the same modelling paste recipe and coloured it cream.  The instructions I followed are from “The Essential Guide to Cake Decorating” but any mouse tutorial you find online would be fine.  My biggest tip here is that sugar glue is your friend.  Much better and stronger than water for sticking models together.  I am a complete convert!  After I modelled the mouse, I stuck in wire whiskers and allowed it to dry before painting.  I’ve got to say that I’m really proud of my little mouse!  I did intend to have him holding a Christmas card or carol singing sheet, but in the end I thought he was just perfect on his own.

In comparison to making the mouse and holly leaves, assembling the rest of the cake was really easy.  Apricot glaze, marzipan. Let dry. Rum, dark brown fondant. Let dry.  Glue on white splat-shaped sugar paste to make the sauce/cream on top of the pud and try your best to remove all the icing sugar that’s dripped everywhere.  Glue on blobs of black sugar paste to represent raisins.  Move to covered board and stick down with royal icing or sugar glue. Glue on holly leaves, holding each leaf in place until set.  (If necessary, stick a holly berry underneath to hold the leaf up.  The finishing touch is to roll some red sugar paste (or flower paste if you have some pre-dyed) into balls and stick them in place.  To really gild the lily, glaze the holly berries with a little piping gel.

And there you have it!  A Christmas Pudding Christmas Cake!!

Making birthday cakes for Lucas and Dave are two of the highlights of my baking year.  It’s really important to me that everyone has just the right birthday cake, whether it’s a complete surprise or an begged for cake.  I remember Mum making the birthday cakes of our dreams every year, so I happily carry on that tradition with Lucas.

Last week Lucas turned three and as he is a dinosaur-obsessed little boy, he asked for a dinosaur cake.  A few days later he said that he wanted a bouncy dinosaur cake, sending me into hysterical visions of carving a cake out of jelly and buttercreaming the whole thing!  Thankfully he eventually settled on a non-bouncy Triceratops cake.

I carved two double-chocolate pound cakes (1kg loaf, 1.5kg loaf) into the requisite shape, leaving a ledge all around the base to add grass, giving the impression that Triceratops was walking along happily.  The bulk of the detail was in the face, so I spent quite a lot of time making sure everything was symmetrical.  Little sausages of fondant glued on with buttercream were really helpful for making the face more realistic—that’s how I made the ridge above the eyes and added a bit more shape to the face.  The horns were made from cream flowerpaste that I allowed to harden before attaching.  The frill was really important to get right so I measured around the neck and cut out a strip of fondant/flowerpaste (50/50 blend) and pinched it into the right shape. After it had dried for a while I glued it in place and propped it with some wadded up kitchen paper.  The finishing touch was to pipe some tufts of grass all the way around Triceratops and randomly across the board.

Judging from Lucas’s reaction, it was a total hit!  I added the baby T-rex from his favourite bedtime book “Say Hello to the Dinosaurs” to the board and made a dinosaur nest  to complete the Cretaceous Period look.  (I love to decorate the cake board to set off the cake, it makes such a difference.)

This cake was such fun to put together and much easier than I’d anticipated!  It’s by no means perfect but I’m improving all the time and Lucas loved it which is all that really matters.  Speaking of the birthday boy, here he is in his alter ego of Batman!

Happy birthday, wee man. Mummy loves you!

When Ivonne and Lis first asked me to host August’s Daring Bakers’ challenge, I was thrilled. Then intimidated.  And then the fun megalomania kicked in.   I could choose anything!  I could be as nice or as evil as I wanted to be!  Bwahahahaha!

Ahem.

I’ve always had a long list of things that I’ve wanted to bake.  Well, things I want to eat, really—so this seemed the perfect time to knock something off that list.  But choosing something that would be appropriate for the Daring Bakers turned out to be harder than I expected.  I was quite gung-ho about strudel, but then the next challenge turned out to be strudel!  And then I thought of making a Fraisier but that particular cake cannot be chilled because of the marzipan on top.  Same problem with the amazing Triumph of Gluttony from Sicily!   I was beginning to run out of ideas—crocquembouche? No, we’d already done eclairs and general fun with choux last year—when I came across a beautifully layered cake with stripes that a zebra would be proud of.  The Dobos Torta.

Whisper-thin layers of sponge, a decadent chocolate buttercream and crisp wedges of caramel on top… this was my kind of cake!  And best of all, it fit with all the very sensible criteria for a Daring Bakers recipe, as well as being daring and thoroughly challenging.

Once I’d settled on what I wanted to make, and quickly checked with Ivonne that no one else was planning to challenge us with it, I started thinking about a co-host.  Very little thought was needed before I asked the lovely Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella if she would like to join me.  Thankfully she said yes, and the rest is (now) history.

I have loved looking at all the wonderful Dobos Torta that the very Daring Bakers have created through August.  Looking at cake upon cake while dieting probably isn’t the best idea, but it’s just been so much fun to see so many different shapes, colours and designs.  I feel like a proud mama when I see another new work of culinary art appear on the DB Forum and I am so, so pleased that everyone has taken on this cake with such gusto.  I really think that The Daring Bakers have outdone themselves this month!  Bravo to you all!

The full recipe is below, and please check out all the amazing Dobos Torta via the Daring Bakers’ blogroll.

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Lucas loves to bake.  He has a little playhouse in our garden which started life as his pretend treehouse and has now turned into his bakery.  Whenever we’re outdoors playing he disappears in there to “bake”.  Oh, what delights we’ve had!  He made me some gingerbread men the other day, but what he likes pretend baking most of all are cupcakes.  Perhaps because he loves eating cupcakes the most?

So yesterday, when he was clamouring to make a cake, I thought that he wanted to play in the garden.  But no, it turned out that he wanted to bake a cake for Daddy.  Daddy neeeeeeeds cake! To be fair, Daddy probably did need lots of cake after a survival stag weekend in Wales.  (I was very relieved that he survived the zombie apocalypse and the torrential rain.  But completely missed the earthquake.)

And what sort of cake did Daddy need? Chocolate cake, of course!  So, knowing that (a) this would be messy no matter what, and (b) that Lucas gets bored very quickly, I opted for a one-bowl Devil’s Food cake.

I’d love to say that Lucas is some sort of genius toddler who can weigh our his own ingredients and tidy up after himself, but alas… Mummy played commis chef for the morning.  Anyone else find that their toddlers are tyrants in the kitchen?

Mummy! You did that wrong!
No, mummy! Put it there!
Lucas can do it! *grabs sieve*

So, Lucas climbed up on a chair and whisked.  Then he whisked some more and said it was very hard, so we finished that together.  Then he grabbed the sieve and sieved in the dry mixture, stirring it through the sieve which, joyfully, is far less messy than shaking the sieve!   Plus, it makes a funny noise so that was fun.  And then he whisked again and said, “oh! Where did the chocolate come from?” and looked at me so suspiciously that I laughed and laughed.  And then he looked so offended… and I laughed some more.

I wish I had more pictures but between trying not to cover the kitchen in batter, making sure he didn’t fall off the chair—he decided to have a dance on the chair half-way through—and just plain having fun, I only got a couple.

Unsurprisingly, Lucas vanished when it was time to clean up.  He did do a very good job of licking the bowl and spatula clean, which is surely the best part of making a cake!

After lots of wrangling about what sort of filling Daddy’s cake should have, he settled on chocolate buttercream.  (First of all he said that Daddy couldn’t have chocolate, then he wanted to put a lion inside, and then he wanted buttercream.  “What flavour,” I asked.  Tomato.)

One Real Chocolate buttercream later, Lucas was back on his chair, armed with a spatula and lots of enthusiasm.

For Instant Enthusiasm: Just Add Chocolate.

All I did was dollop the buttercream on and let him do the spreading out.  So, it doesn’t quite reach the edges but you do get a lovely thick mass of it in the middle which is lush.  The pretty topping is all Lucas, too.  He wanted sweeties on Daddy’s cake and since that was a much better idea than tomatoes, I was quite happy to open up some of his Easter sweeties (shhh!) and let him go to town!

So, there you have it.  Lucas baked a cake!  (And Mummy cleaned the kitchen.)

Daddy was very pleased with his “I missed you / welcome home / Lucas wanted chocolate cake” cake, so in a fit of bad parenting, we ate big slices of it for lunch.  And then we ate some more for second breakfast today (it’s a Hobbit thing), and there’s still plenty for afternoon tea, too!

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“Nun, meine Kinder,” Frau Mieders said, beaming on them, “today we make the puddings for Mittagessen. And for the puddings , they are Apfelstrudel.”

The girls beamed back at her upon hearing this. Apfelstrudel was a favourite pudding with everyone at school. *

I grew up on a steady diet of school stories, loving their sheer escapism and wishing that my school was more inclusive and accepting.  By far, my favourite was The Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer—now there’s a mouthful of a name for you!  The Chalet School was a wonderful place, full of titbits of knowledge about languages as the girls had to speak English, French and German on alternate days (with Sunday being a ’speak your own’ day), and there were always thrilling adventures around every corner!

One of the most memorable aspects of the Chalet School books was the food.  Oh, how wonderful the food always sounded!  Even the names of mealtimes were different: Frühstück , Mittagssen, Abenssen.  And there were always such vast quantities of food.  When Miss Ferrars joined the Chalet School her first meal consisted of creamy soup sprinkled with herbs, followed by veal in a picquant sauce and then a huge hollow bun stuffed with jam and cream…and that was just for lunch!  Breakfast by contrast was simple with rolls, honey and fruit, all washed down with milk or milky coffee.  I think the coffee was what sealed the deal for me… I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee as a little ‘un, and it seemed so grown-up!  And the girls always, always had afternoon tea or Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cakes) which always sounded luscious!

And so it was that the Chalet School was my first introduction to apple strudel, or apfelstrudel to give it its proper name.  Making my own strudel has always been something that I’ve wanted to do, so imagine my delight when I saw that this month’s Daring Bakers’ challenge was to be strudel! The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers.

The first thing to do when making strudel is to make your dough.  Frau Mieders, the plump and jolly Domestic Science mistress in the Chalet School books, always bade her pupils gather all the necessary ingredients before beginning work.  So, in a bid to be a good Chalet girl—something that was always the “ideal” to strive towards in the books—I followed her wisdom.

In Frau Mieders eyes I undoubtedly fell at the first hurdle by using my food processor to make the strudel dough. She says on a number of occasions that “cookery is not for idle girls”!  however, the food processor is a great way to make strudel dough as it encourages long strands of gluten to form in the dough which is exactly what you want for stretching it out to paper-thinness.

Hopefully I redeemed myself by kneading by hand until all traces of stickiness were gone and the dough was incredibly elastic.  I can highly recommend hurling the dough at the unfloured worktop at least a hundred times!  Not only is it fun, it also develops the gluten further and faster than just kneading alone.

With the dough resting, it was time to gather together the filling ingredients and set to work on that.

“Peel, core and slice the apples,” the mistress said.  “Peel thinly, please and also slice thinly.” [...] And then Frau Miediers caused consternation among them by announcing that she was coming round to see how thinly they were all peeling and slicing.

Frau Miediers would be horrified at my idea of peeling apples!  I absolutely loathe doing it, so I try to get it over and done with quickly and end up with very thick peelings.  Still, it was slightly less arduous than usual as I was so excited at the prospect of strudel!

I made a couple of small tweaks to the filling recipe, which I would probably roll back for next time.  I used challah for the breadcrumbs as I’d baked one a few days previously and the rich crumbs browned awfully fast when I fried them.  Plain white bread would definitely be best, I think.  I also tripled the cinnamon called for, which made the filling mixture awfully brown.  Oh, and as I don’t particularly like walnuts, I used flaked almonds which I adore.

The dough had to be uncovered and placed on the floured cloth and first rolled out and then stretched on the backs of their hands until it was almost wafer-thin and transparent and fitted the cloth exactly.  There must be no breaks in it and this made it worse.

I made a double-batch of the strudel pastry as I was pretty sure that I’d either poke a hole through it, or it would stick fast to the sheet, and I’m really glad I did.  It was still a little sticky when I tried to roll it onto the sheet and then when I resorted to just stretching it out, holes kept appearing until it looked like aged lace.  So I tossed it away and started again with the second half.  What really made a difference was brushing the top of the dough with melted butter and also buttering the rolling pin.  It stretched out like a dream and you could definitely read through it!

“And now,” said the mistress when the apples, sugar, raisins and currants had all been placed on the pastry.  “We roll him into a long, thin sausage—this way!”  And she took two corners of the cloth in each hand and deftly rolled it up.  “Now you try it.”

The less said about the shape of some of those sausages, the better!  Some were twice the size and more of Ruey’s.  Some were thick at one end and thin at the other. Primrose Trevoase cleverly rolled her cloth in with the filling and had to undo it, find a fresh cloth for herself and stand to one side, looking rather silly, while Frau Miediers transferred the remarkable result to the new cloth.

This was the part I was dreading.  Even though I had liberally covered the sheet with flour, I could totally see everything going wrong when I rolled up the strudel.  Interestingly enough, did you know that strudel means whirlpool in old German?  The name comes from the rolling or whirling action when you finally get brave enough to just do it.

And would you believe it? Nothing went wrong!  The pastry was so incredibly thin that you could see each slice of apple ghost-like underneath the layers.  Beautiful.

The last touch was to brush them over with melted butter.  After that, each sausage must be carefully bent in the middle and put on well-greased baking sheets before being slipped into the big ovens to bake till they were golden-brown.

I can’t say that I managed to bend the strudel into quite the right shape, but it all fitted on the baking sheet which was a relief.  My only problem came during baking the strudel…

I liberally daubed the strudel with melted butter, so much so that there were a few little puddles on the baking sheet, which then started to smoke in the oven.  I’d say I was about two minutes away from a flaming strudel.  Whoops!  So after whipping the strudel out of the oven and drying it and the parchment, I bunged it back in and hoped for the best.  Which explains why my strudel is a tad over-browned.

Still, once I stopped grousing about it and actually cut a slice, I felt redeemed.  (Well, I got the third slice.  Lucas was sitting at the dining table waiting for the first slice while I was photographing the whole thing, and then Dave came downstairs for his slice, and *sigh*)  The pastry was so incredibly light and its plainness provided the perfect foil for the gorgeously soft spiced apples.  I served the first few plates Chalet School style with “a positive featherbed of whipped cream” and the remainder was eaten with some vanilla ice-cream.

I’m so pleased that I have finally fulfilled a childhood dream and made my own strudel.  It was definitely worth all the work and I’ll be making plenty more strudels in the future.  (I’m thinking that a savoury one with roasted squash and dolcelatte cheese would be awesome in the autumn….

Thanks so much, Linda and Courtney for this wonderful challenge!

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