Confession: these white chocolate cranberry almond biscotti were in fact part of my Christmas baking. I make them every year for holiday gift-giving, and they are by far the crowd favourite. I personally only bake them at Christmas, but there’s no reason they can’t be made at any other time of the year. For example, Valentine’s Day. Because homemade biscotti is a sure-fire way to say “I love you”.
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I woke up this first morning of 2017 to a pretty dusting of snow outside, which reminded me of these snowy white meringue-topped Zimtsterne cookies that I promised to post about before the New Year… oops. That strep throat I mentioned in my last post has hung on through two rounds of antibiotics and also morphed into laryngitis and a fun nighttime cough, rendering me unable to speak above a whisper and totally unmotivated to do anything but binge watch Gilmore Girls on Netflix. But sickness aside, these cookies are worth knowing about, so here they are!
Zimtsterne are a traditional German Christmas cookie made of meringue and ground nuts, usually almonds and sometimes hazelnuts, cut into star shapes and topped with more meringue. This particular recipe comes from Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss (which I got for Christmas after having lusted after it for months!). The literal translation of Zimtsterne is “cinnamon stars”, but a more accurate one would be “finickiest cookies in the universe” because – well – they are: the dough is sticky and soft and challenging to work with, you have to cut out hundreds* of individual cookies and frost each of them by hand, and then you have to dry the cookies overnight before finally baking them while keeping the meringue on top from browning. I managed to come up with a few techniques to make things a little easier, which I will share below, because while these cookies are certainly a project, they are also worth it: nutty, chewy, not too sweet, lightly spiced, and easy to eat by the handful if you’re not careful. Definitive proof that the Germans know their Christmas cookies!…
I got all proactive and made September’s Daring Kitchen challenge recipe – an almond and walnut cake called “hrapocusa” – at the beginning of the month, and then of course didn’t get my act together to post about it on time. Like, at ALL. Sigh. ANYWAY. Back in September, Jason of Daily Candor challenged us to make this regional specialty of the tiny town of Dol on the Dalmatian island of Brac. The torta hrapocusa is a two-layer cake primarily composed of nuts, with a bottom layer of orange and cherry liqueur-scented almond sponge cake and a sugared walnut topping that is meant to resemble the rocky shores of the island. This is certainly a unique cake and one that I never would have come across without the Daring Kitchen!
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Canada turns 147 years old today! If you are looking for a way to celebrate, may I suggest you make these salad rolls with candied salmon, which I posted about over on the SeaChange Seafoods blog. They are perfect to take to a picnic or barbeque, and can stand as either an appetizer or a side dish or a full meal, which is how Nate and I usually eat them.
And while you’re here, may I also suggest that you make this cherry almond Dutch baby: it is TO DIE FOR. I made it for breakfast a few days ago and I’m still thinking about it. It tastes like a cross between a cherry clafoutis and a cherry-almond danish, ie: really, really amazing. The only changes I made were to add a bit of vanilla bean paste to the batter and to bake it in a slightly smaller (nine inch) cast iron skillet. So good!
The March 2014 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Rebecca of BakeNQuilt. She challenged us to learn to make classic nougat and to make it our own with our choice of flavors and add-ins.
Nougat is not something I’d ever contemplated making before this month – the only real experience I’ve ever had eating it is inside a Toblerone bar, so I wasn’t exactly sure what I was in for. Nougat is, in our host Rebecca’s words, “an aerated candy made from sugar, honey, egg whites, and nuts”, which can range in texture from “chewy, soft, and tender to hard and brittle”. It’s a mostly European confection (nougat torrone is the Italian kind), although it seems similar to divinity or divinity fudge in the Southern US, and if you’ve ever eaten a Mars or Snickers bar, you’ve had the watered-down industrial production version. When soft and chewy, traditional nougat is sort of like gourmet marshmallow for grown-ups. When hard and brittle, it’s rock-solid enough to break a tooth on but still very satisfying when chiseled into small bits to savor (and it would be so good mixed into chocolate, à la Toblerone!).
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