Blackberry Hazelnut Layer Cake

September 14, 2019 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

The end of summer is my favourite, still sunny and warm with long golden afternoons but also a sniff of cooler air and the promise of sweater weather (which apparently is here now – we actually lit a fire in the fireplace last night!) and apple pie around the corner. The best part is all the glorious late season fruit – raspberries and peaches and plums (late summer is plum cake season, after all) and my very favourite: blackberries. Weekends in late August and early September, you will inevitably find me crouched on the side of the road or in the ditch foraging for blackberries, coming home with scratched forearms and purple-stained fingers and a bucket of shiny black fruit tasting of summer nostalgia.

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Zimtsterne {Cinnamon Stars}

January 1, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

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!…

Daring Bakers: Esterhazy Torte

January 27, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 27 Comments

IMG_8028Esterhazy Torte | Korena in the Kitchen

For the month of January Jelena from A Kingdom for a Cake invited us to start this year with a dreamy celebration cake. She challenged us to make the Esterhazy cake a.k.a the Hungarian dream. What better way to start the year than with a sweet dream?

A sweet dream? I could not agree more. The Esterhazy torte is a Hungarian pastry made of five layers of hazelnut sponge cake and hazelnut buttercream, all topped off with a gorgeous starburst of chocolate. If you like hazelnuts (or Nutella, Fererro Rocher, or Frangelico), then this is the cake for you!

Esterhazy Torte | Korena in the Kitchen

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Chocolate and Caramel Tart with Hazelnuts (Daring Bakers: Pies, Part III)

June 29, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 20 Comments

Rachael from pizzarossa was our lovely June 2013 Daring Bakers’ host and she had us whipping up delicious pies in our kitchens! Cream pies, fruit pies, chocolate pies, even crack pies! There’s nothing like pie!

As promised, the third and final installment of this month’s Daring Bakers pie challenge. I think my inner chocolate lover unconsciously saved the best for last. (Part I and Part II, for your reading pleasure.)

This tart has a buttery, crisp pastry shell, a thin layer of deeply flavoured caramel, and a thicker layer of dark and velvety smooth chocolate mousse. It is pretty decadent but so worth it. I added some ground hazelnuts to the crust and topped the finished tart with hazelnuts dipped in caramel for added drama. Not that a tart this good needs extra drama, but the fact that I lead a fairly drama-free life makes me feel the need to bring the drama sometimes – if only to dessert.

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Maple Hazelnut Blondies

May 31, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

Maple Hazelnut Blondies | Korena in the Kitchen While perusing the delicious brownie and blondie offerings from May’s Sourdough Surprises, I realized that I’d never made a blondie, let alone eaten one, and it became clear, based on the delicious recipes I was seeing, that this needed to change as soon as possible. A blondie is essentially a brownie made without chocolate, instead employing brown sugar for a caramel-toffee flavour. Imagine a square with the texture of a fudgey, chewy brownie and the taste of chocolate chip cookie dough (minus the chocolate chips) and you’ve got a blondie. And if you’re like me, you will feel compelled to make a batch as soon as you come to this realization.

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Sourdough Tortelli Piacentini

April 20, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 38 Comments

Several months ago, Jamie Oliver posted a photo on Facebook showing the most beautiful pasta I had ever seen, which immediately prompted me to start a frantic search to find out what it was called and how it was made.

The picture came from a British food TV show called Simply Italian, which of course I couldn’t watch in Canada, but I did manage to find the recipe for “wedding tortelli“. Unfortunately it didn’t give very clear instructions for how to shape the tortelli, so I turned to the Google machine and found a related pasta shape called culurgiones:

Culurgiones are also known as Sardinian ravioli and usually have a potato filling, sort of like a cross between a ravioli and a pierogi. They are formed in a manner similar to the tortelli in question, however they are more round and plump like dumplings versus the tapered, almost leaf-like shape of tortelli, which is what I was after.

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Chocolate Hazelnut Banana Bread

January 17, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 7 Comments

This Chocolate Hazelnut Banana Bread is sure to derail your New Year’s resolutions to eat less sugar and/or chocolate. I have stopped trying to make those kinds of resolutions for myself, because they never last long and I just straight up love sugar and chocolate (luckily I also love exercise, so it balances out). The collection of over-ripe frozen bananas in my freezer was approaching epic proportions, so I figured it was time for a batch of the best banana bread in the entire world ever. I’m also trying to find ways to use up the crazy amount of Nutella that I got for Christmas that doesn’t involve eating it straight out of the jar (at least I use a spoon), and the logical progression was to combine the two. …

Hazelnut Pastry and How to Make a Lattice Pie Crust

April 29, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

I have been meaning to share my favorite pie crust recipe here for a while now, but every time I’ve made it lately, I’ve been experimenting with it somehow, with varying degrees of success. For Easter I decided to experiment once more with a hazelnut pastry for strawberry rhubarb pie, and I have to share this variation on the pie crust recipe because it was so good. For the strawberry rhubarb filling, I used this recipe from Simply Recipes, which was a good starting point, but I have some changes I’d make for next time. First, less sugar – 1 cup of sugar to 4 cups of fruit was too sweet for my taste. I like a bit of tart rhubarb flavour, and this was quite sugary. Second, more fruit – probably 4 cups of rhubarb and 2 of strawberries. Third, the recipe used instant tapioca for the thickener, which gave the filling a kind of tapioca-pudding texture (little tiny gelatinous balls). Nate said he couldn’t tell, but I wasn’t loving it – not that it tasted bad, I would just prefer a smoother texture from, say, corn starch. And fourth, I would add some lemon zest along with the orange zest to the filling. So once I have all that figured out and perfected, I’ll share my recipe. In the meantime: hazelnut pastry!

This is a super easy-to-make pie crust, made in a slightly different way than usual: instead of cutting cold butter in to flour, you actually cream the room-temperature shortening/butter, then stir in the flour until the dough looks ragged. I know – I was skeptical the first time I made it too, but it was so easy to work with and turned out SO flaky and delicious that it has become my go-to pastry recipe for everything that needs a crust. The only thing it doesn’t work for is single crust pastries that are blind-baked (pre-baked) before filling (like a quiche), because the large amount of fat in the dough causes it to melt and shrink down the pie plate. But for pies that you fill before baking (especially double crust), it is fantastic. I also like that it is easily made entirely by hand – you don’t need a food processor to make good pastry!

I had a strawberry rhubarb pie a few years ago that was topped with a sort of almond struesel, which gave me the idea of adding nuts to the pastry. I like the assertive flavour of hazelnuts, and thought they would pair well with strawberry and rhubarb, so I ground some up and substituted 1/2 cup of the flour for the ground hazelnuts. When I added the water, I ended up with a slightly wetter dough, but by sprinkling it with flour and folding it several times on a floured surface, I got a dough that was just the right consistency and baked up really nicely into lots of light, flaky layers.

And lastly, I wanted to show off the gorgeous pinky-red strawberry rhubarb filling, so I went with a lattice top. It looks impressive and is actually really easy to do!
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Christmas Baking 2010 – Part II

February 10, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen Leave a Comment

Hazelnut Shortbread – triangular cookie on the left

As promised is Part I, here is the recipe for Hazelnut Shortbread. As I said previously, this cookie has a beautiful crumbly texture, great hazelnut flavour, and is not overly sweet at all. It may have been my favorite cookie this year.

Again, when baking shortbread, using real unsalted butter is a must. Because there are so few ingredients, butter really plays a starring role, and the flavour will be worth it.

The original recipe directs you to press the dough into two 8-inch cake pans and then score into wedges. I wanted to yield more, smaller cookies, so I shaped the dough into a triangular log, stuck it in the fridge until firm, cut it into slices, and sprinkled each one with raw sugar. The baking time was shorter as well, but I can’t remember exactly how long I baked them for. I would start checking for doneness after about 10 minutes.

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