Gingerbread Doughnuts

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Kristina

My personal Christmas-Countdown officially began yesterday. I was trying to hold myself back for about two weeks now, but this weekend all major Christmas markets in Vienna opened and now there’s no stopping my Christmas obsession anymore. I’ll head to a Christmas market later today for a hot punch, maybe some roasted chestnuts and sugared almonds. Mhmmmm. I literally cannot wait. I’ve already picked out one of my Christmas-jumpers to wear.
The city has been preparing for these markets for a few weeks now and in the past couple of days you could already smell it in the air: the sweet scent of hot punch, roasted chestnuts, mulled wine and… Christmas.

I have a rather large list of cookies I want to (or rather have to, thanks to my mum) make, however, I decided to start slow, namely with Gingerbread Doughnuts.
I found the recipe online and I’ve been itching to try making doughnuts myself for a while anyway, so I figured – why not give it a try?

Ingredients
2 ⅔ c flour
½ c brown sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
3 1/2 Tbsp gingerbread spice blend
¾ c milk
3 Tbsp honey
1 egg
4 Tbsp butter, melted and cooled to room temperature
1 tsp vanilla
Oil for frying

Glaze

1 Tbsp milk

1 tsp vanilla

1 ¾ c powdered sugar

Sugar Coating

3 Tbsp sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

What to do
Stir together the flour, 1/2 cup sugar, baking powder, salt, and the spice blend. Make a well in the center and pour in the milk, honey, egg, butter, and vanilla. Mix until it’s well combined. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
Heat oil in a deep skillet or deep-fryer to 375°F (185°C). On a floured board, pat or roll the chilled dough out to 1/2 inch thickness. Cut out doughnuts to your preferred size. Use a smaller cutter to cut holes from center.
Fry doughnuts in hot oil until golden brown, turning once (about 1 minute per side.) Remove from oil to drain on a rack set over newspaper.
For the glaze: combine glaze ingredients in a bowl and dip the donuts in them to coat. For the sugar coating: combine sugar and cinnamon in a bowl and roll donuts to coat on all sides.

Source (I adapted and changed a few things. Mainly only because I’m really lazy and didn’t have much time.)

Rhubarb – Curd Cheese Cake

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Kristina

I’ve already told you about my obsession with rhubarb. I love it so much. I obviously also really love curd cheese, so here’s another recipe. Super quick and easy and yummy.
Let’s get started, shall we?

Ingredients
170g butter (unsalted)
170g sugar
a pinch of salt
1 packet of vanilla sugar
lemon zest of 1 lemon
5 eggs
250g curd cheese (20%)
2 tbsp sour cream
60g raisins
a bit of rum
250g all purpose flour
1 packet of baking powder (this seemed a bit much to me so I added baking powder by touch)
60g fine sugar

butter for the baking form

500g rhubarb
100g sugar

What to do

Pre-heat the oven to 175°C.
Put raisins in the rum and let them soak for a while.

Cream together Butter, sugar, salt, vanilla sugar, lemon zest and egg yolks. Add curd cheese, sour cream, raisins, flour and baking powder. Whisk the egg whites and fine sugar until stiff, then carefully fold into the batter. Pour the batter in a greased baking form.

Wash, peel and cut the rhubarb in small pieces. Then cook it with a bit of water and the sugar for a short time. Put the rhubarb on the batter and then bake for 30minutes.

Gebackene Apfelspalten

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Kristina

Baked Applerings:

I’m on a roll here with recipes of typical Viennese/Austrian desserts. I hope I don’t bore you all too much, but these recipes are all just so easy and so tasty.
This recipe for example is something I grew up with. It’s something my great grandmother used to make for me often (she also baked elderflowers, which smell great but taste… like not much to be honest). Anyways, it’s also something I regularly ate at school for lunch, but never really made myself – until last night. I was pleasantly suprised by how easy, quick and well these turned out!

Ingredients:
3-4 eggs
120g flour
1/4l milk
ca. 6 apples
some rum and lemon juice
a pinch of salt
some butter for the pan

Additional you might want to get some ice cream (vanilla usually, but I’ve also had it with cinnamon, walnut or pistacchio ice cream), or cinnamon sugar. I also reccomend you drink a glass of milk with it.

What to do:
Mix the eggs, flour, salt and milk until you have a smooth batter. I haven’t posted a recipe for Palatschinken (typical Austrian pancakes) yet, but this batter should be a bit thicker than that one as it has to stick to the apples.

Peel the apples and remove the core. Cut into rings and let them soak in the rum-lemon juice mixture. Dip them in the batter and bake until golden brown.

Serve with powder sugar or cinnamon sugar, top off with ice cream of your choice. That’s it.