Bread baking rye:wheat 50-50

I'm baking pretty much once a week now. This bread is rye * wheat 50-50. This time I accidentally "over baked," which ended up making the best crust. Having a shitty oven helps to never burn the bread but actually bake properly... haha.

This time I used liquid Sauerteig (Aurora brand) instead of the dry Sauerteig. Sauerteig is sold in (big) supermarkets in the baking section :) This particular one (see below) is with Dinkel (Spelt in English) but works fine with Rye bread :)

I used a spoon of honey in the background "waldhonig" (forest honey) as opposed to sugar for the bread. When you bake it you don't really taste the honey flavor... Waldhonig on its own has a strong aroma so either people love it or hate it... but totally worth trying ;)I like it.

I also saved a spoon of this Sauerteig and going culture it for the next batch of bread :) (Keep it in a jar, add some water and rye flour) Shall see if it goes well...!

Chocolate cookies (maybe the best)

Recently I baked yummy chocolate cookies. I am usually a very humble person but these were really good. Addictive. The cookies are good right after (and maybe a day later) for its "fudge" texture [in Japanese we call it しっとり "shittori"]. They are also good when they become a bit dry (day 2 or later). The former reminded me of the Japanese cookies brand "Country Ma'am". The latter tasted like the cookies I had from Fortune and Mason (friends brought it from London once ahhhh....)

This recipe is not mine and this is the link to the original recipe :)



I would have like to just put the link, but unfortunately it's not in English so this is the rough translation of the original (with some commentary).

Chocolate cookies (yields about 40 pieces)

• 200g of dark chocolate (I used a block of Côte d'Or (Belgium brand) "Culinaire" --which in my opinion is the best chocolate for baking! I brought it in Belgium over Easter. Unfortunately they are not sold in Munich)
• 100g sugar
• 50g butter
• 2 eggs (M/L)
• 200g of all purpose flour
• 2 tbs of baking powder (must sieve)

Melt chocolate and butter (*); whisk sugar and butter together until it becomes creamy and add the (*), flour and baking powder
Put a lid/cellophane and put it in the fridge to cool (1-2 hours, but naturally can be more). Take out the dough and make small balls (c.a. 10g). Bake in pre-heated oven about 15 min (175 C). Eat hot or cold.

The cookies grow so don't put them too close to each other or make them too big :) 10g is about a tbs.

Alternation to the original recipe:
The original recipe calls for powdering the dough with powder sugar at the end before baking. They look prettier as you can see in the picture of the original recipe if you follow the link. But cookies are sweet enough (I could reduce the amount...) as it is. I also made my cookies flat cos that makes it bake faster =) even them I had to put the oven at a higher temperature than asked (200C) and baked longer (c.a. 25 min). I have a really crappy oven.

I baked with yummy Belgium chocolate- next time I would probably use one from the local supermarket so shall see if there would be any difference to the taste!

Bread experiment No.1

I haven't baked bread with my own mixed for some time, but I got inspired by a friend's boyfriend who now does not buy bread from the bakery any more but bakes once a week by himself. He also gave me a tip to make a bread notebook so I can keep track of what would be the best combo of ingredients! I decided Sundays are perfect days to do this bread experiment.

Bread experiment no.1

Rye : Wheat = 2 : 1
Flour mixture : water = 3 : 2
Temp: 220 degrees
Sauerteig extract and yeast
Left it sitting for about 10 hours (not intentionally...) before baking

Other notes:
Weather was rainy and cold
Added 30g of seeds but would add more next time.

Käsekuchen

I begin my blog with a blurb on "Käsekuchen" aka THE German cheese cake. I say THE because it happens to be my boyfriend's favorite thing ever.

Germans call it Käsekuchen, literal translation is "cheese cake", but there is no cheese in it. No cream cheese. Instead the German cheese cake uses Quark, which is kind of like a thick version of yogurt and it's also sour. It's quite a refreshing cake, not too sweet :)

time: c.a. 15 min (plus 45 min baking time)
ingredients:
filling - quark (low fat doesn't taste nice for the cake), eggs, vanilla pudding powder (or corn starch), vanilla extract (or vanilla sugar), sugar
crust - flour, egg, sugar, butter, cinnamon