Strawberry Cuteness

As a child, I went to school with two girls who were sisters (one of which incidentally shared my name, something I’ve never encountered again), and whose mother was intent on delivering their every fantasy and protecting them from every evil. To her, that meant that the girls wore lacey white socks and mary-janes with a tiny heel (a heel, imagine my envy dismay) and had access to all the girly toys a girl in the eighties could want: barbies, my little pony, every single hello kitty accessory ever dreamt of, care bears (get to the point already!) and the smelliest bestest of them all: strawberry shortcake. She (strawberry) was cool, because she smelled of strawberries and basically had no real back story as far as I remember expect for being cute and pink, and well, smelly.

In french however, this particular character was called charlotte aux fraises (hum, don’t even think that I would waste my time colouring things on the internet ahem-cough-cough) , which is a completely different dessert and my mentioning it serves no other purpose than showing of my mad language skillz and popculture chops.

So, strawberry shortcake has until today, been something I’ve always wondered about the reality of. And after today, i’m even more confused, to tell you the truth. The shortcakes were really very good, quick to make and the strawberries and greek yoghurt I piled on top worked really well, but… I totally don’t get what the difference is between a shortcake and a scone. The ingredients, you see, were pretty much the same that I use for making scones (recipe here), and aside from the fact that the shortcakes didn’t rise as much as I expected, they tasted just as delicious as those scones do. But they’re shortcakes. Is there another difference besides the fact, that they are served with whipped and not clotted cream, and with fresh strawberries instead of jam? What gives people? Can someone explain?

Delicious, albeit puzzling Strawberry Shortcakes

From Cynthia Barcomi’s Kochbuch für Feste

prep time: 10 min total, baking time: 10-12 min
Mixing bowl, baking sheet

280 g flour
1 Tbsp sugar
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
75 g of cold butter, cut in pieces
180 g cold cream*

Preheat your oven to 225°C. Stir together the dry ingredients in your mixing bowl. Add the cut-up butter and work it in with your fingertips until the mixture ressembles coarse crumbs (you could also put this togther in a mixing machine fitted with a steelblade). Add the cold cream and mix until just combined. Don’t overwork the dough, otherwise it will be all tough (and won’t rise properly ahem).

Pat the dough down on a floured surface and cut circles (or flowers or hearts or any cute shape you want) with a glass or cookie cutter.** Put your pretty shapes on a baking sheet with baking paper and bake for 10-12 min or until golden.

To serve, slice the shortcakes in half and fill with whipped cream and slightly sugared strawberries.

Edited to add: I’ve just realised that Cynthia has posted this exact recipe on her website! go check hers out, they are way more pretty!

* The recipe called for a tsp of salt, but because I like to use salted butter in my baking, I omitted it entirely.

**Try and use up as much dough as possible the first time, reworked dough doesn’t look as pretty and won’t rise as much.

too late for Halloween …

Today marked the day of our oldest child’s first Hallowe’en party. It also marked what must be the fifth pumpking we’ve eaten in as many weeks. It also marks the day of the American elections, but that is so totally beside the point here, that I’ll just move on and back to Halowe’en.

My son’s halloween party. A party for which (so we heard YESTERDAY) there would be a costume required. Preferably a scary one. And possibly the bringing of some sort of celebratory food. Now. I am not saying this to blame our daycare, but these types of things are not exactly music to the ear of the working (outside the house, I got the pc-memo) parent (HINT; tell me maybe a week before?).
BUT: as luck would have it, early in the week is generally a good time to ask me for baked goods. In fact, I had just managed to do something about my near constant craving for cinnamon rolls* and had ended up with waaaay too many (which I otherwise totally wouldn’t have shared if I hadn’t have had to be the perfect mum bringing baked goods to daycare), and — luck was on my side again — because I had made those rolls not with a straight up cinnamon filing, nono, but instead with PUMPKIN. Due to the pumpkin abundance and my feeling that I will never find, nor make cinnamon rols as good as these. But the pumpkin, is what now gives me a beautifully easy segue back to halloween and then back to the recipe at hand. Bear with me.

I know exactly, why those last minute notes from school/daycare send me in a tizzy. It’s because growing up, my siblings and I often were the kids with no lunch money on a field trip, more often than not no snack for the break**, and definitely always the ones with the non-matching-non-mended-totally-not-cute socks. Meaning, I know what it’s like to be the kid who’s parents weren’t always prepared (and I have to add, lest my parents choose not to speak to me again, that this is the ONLY thing I would ever jokingly reproach them of. If ever. That, and the early curfew perhaps…).

Fast forward a few years later, and guess which parent I am? The one who isn’t always prepared. They get snacks for their day, but they are sensible snacks, no juice boxes and prepackaged cheese bits, and no nutella. Just boring stuff. Oh, and their socks are all way too small and non-matchey. But yesterday, as I was told there was a party, we should bring food and have a costume for the child. I felt super confident thanks to the delicious rolls (buns?) I had made; but there was a measure of discomfort there somewhere which I wasn’t able to pinpoint until…
11pm, deep into the last episodes of season 1 of Mad Men (are you watching? you should watch!), when I suddenly sat up and realised that we didn’t have a costume. And all I could think of was that he wanted to be a dog, because dogs are scary. And figuring out how to make that costme happen at 11pm was not an option. So we chose an easy out a perfectly acceptable solution combining mummy’s tshirt and daddy’s designs skills . The ‘blood stains’ are courtesy of jello and fruit punch.

The pumpkin rolls however, were no cop out, those were truly good and I shall now, after this long-winded story, leave you with the recipe.

Pumpkin rolls

Adapted from epicurious

prep time: 15min, rising time: 2h total, baking time 35 min
mixing bowl, dough hooks, rolling pin, 1 big square baking pans or 2-3 round small ones

for the Dough

1/2 cup warm water
5 teaspoons of active dry yeast
1/2 cup granulated sugar
5 cups all-purpose flour plus additional for dusting (I used something like cups)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 cup warm milk
2 large eggs at room temperature
1/2 cup (115 g) butter, softened and cut up in chunks

for the Filling

400 g pumpkin puree (I made mine by steaming the pumpkin until tender and then leaving it to drain in a sieve)
1/2 cup (115 g) of butter
1/2 cup of brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
a dash of grated nutmeg
1 cup of chopped walnuts (expendable)

Mix the yeast into the warm water and add a pinch of sugar. Let rest until bubbles form at the surface (don’t go off to another room with a phonecall for 10 min. bad idea.).

Stir together all the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl, and in a smaller one whisk together the milk and the eggs. By now, your yeast mixture should be bubbly. Add the liquid ingredients to the flour and beat until all is combined Add the softened butter and mix on medium speed until the dough comes together, about 4 minutes. It will stil be fairly sticky. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size (about 1h).

In the meantime, make the filling by simply mixing together all the ingredients save for the nuts in a large bowl.

When the dough is doubled in size, punch it down and roll it out wth a rolling pin to a 40cm square. Spread the filling evenly and sprinkle with the nuts. Roll up the dough away from you and pinch the seams to close it. You will now have a giant doughy log. Cut it in 2 cm thick slices and arrange them in you baking pan(s). At this point, you can either freeze or refrigerate the individual rolls until further use or let them rise again right away. If you choose to freeze/refrigerate them, let them rise again after defrost until doubled in size.
Bake them in an oven preheated to 190° until golden, for about 30 min.

I chose not to ice them, because until I can find the recipe for these particular cinnamon buns, i will not take any icing. It’s a thing I have. You can of course ice them at your own discretion.

*or buns? I never know how to tell them apart!
** to my (working) parents defense, it wasn’t lunch, school only went ’til 1 om in Germany, so you would eat lunch at home).

A good soup

I was going to get all economic-crisis-y on you with this particular recipe, but then I realised that the only reason to post this recipe is because it’s damn good.

Let me take a few steps back to explain what this is all about:

The soup shown here is made from turnip greens — something you wouldn’t normally think of using in that way, since it’s what one would generally consider waste or would feed to rabbits (if you had one); but growing up, we often had a soup made with the greens from radishes, and it was one of my favourites. Also, with the whole economic crises thing, I was thinking waste-not-want-not kind of food — though I have sometimes bought radishes just for the purpose of making the soup, discarding the actual radishes in the process (humhum, waste not what?!).

Anyway this weekend was the first time I made this soup with this particular ingredient and I am happy to report that it was equally as delicious as my memory of it with radish greens. The flavor is really delicate, nutty, and somewhat green close in taste to watercress soup. Plus I find the color really refreshing and spring-like. So, go get yourselves some turnips w greens or some radished and give this a try!

P.S. I don’t plan to throw out the turnip tops, though, because I really like them steamed, or in a soup, or with chickpeas and raz-el-hanout in a couscous…

Turnip Green Soup

Prep Time: 5 min cooking time: 15 min
1 medium sized saucepan / stockpot, blender

1 bunch of turnip leaves (about 4 cups), washed
4 medium sized potatoes
1 bay leaf
about 4 cups water
salt and pepper, to taste

Peel and roughly chop the potatoes.
Put them in a saucepan together with the bayleave. Cover with cold water (2 cups should be enough),bring to a boil and cook on medium heat until just tender (about 10 min).
While the potatoes are cooking, wash the turnip greens in a lot of water. Add them, still wet, in to the saucepan with the now softened potatoes and leave the greens to wilt and slightly cook (5 more min).
Take the saucepan of the heat and thoroughly blend the whole thing together, making sure that there are no remaining chunks or stringy bits. You can add more water to adjust the consisteny, I ended up using about 4 cups. Season with salt an pepper and serve with toasted bread and creme fraiche.