The Munchies Blog

When I tried out the recipe for a chocolate and pear cake in Linda Collister’s “Backen mit Schokolade” (the English original is Chocolate Baking) last Christmas, I realised that a good recipe is more than just a recipe for good food. A good recipe is one that you can follow without constantly reading ahead — one that takes the planning/scheduling overhead away from you. Bad recipes tell you to do things in an order that doesn’t make sense. Or they cheat by calling for things like “4 large eggs, separated” — instead of telling you to separate the eggs at a time in the recipe “flow” where it makes sense.

The chocolate and pear cake is really nice, but the recipe… well, isn’t. I haven’t managed to optimise it yet, but I’ll post it here with the modifications I made today.

Recipe: Chocolate and Pear Cake

Base:

• 180 g all-purpose flour
• 110 g cold butter, diced
• 30 g brown sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 2-4 Tbsp ice water

Sieve flour into a bowl, add the butter. Work with your fingertips (much easier than fighting with the food processor) until crumbs form. Add sugar, egg yolk and water. Now the recipe says to use a knife with a rounded tip to make the mixture into a dough. It also says to start with 1 Tbsp ice water and add a bit more if the dough stays too dry. Well, this kind of dough always stays too dry when I do it. That doesn’t really matter though. Just mix things a bit more and try to get a bit larger crumbs.

Make a ball out of the dough (well, if you can get the crumbs to stick together, that is), wrap in foil and refrigerate for some 20 minutes.

Get rid of all the stuff hiding out in the oven. Put a baking tray on the oven floor. The oven needs to be preheated to 200°C — do it now or, if you want to save energy, wait a bit with that. Find a springform, about 23 cm in diameter.

Filling:

• 125 g bittersweet chocolate, broken into pieces
• 125 g butter
• 90 g brown sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 125 g ground almonds
• 2-3 drops almond essence (I guess a little splash of Amaretto would work just as well)
• pinch of salt
• 2 ripe, medium-sized pears (preferably Williams Christ)

Put an ovenproof bowl in a saucepan with water. Put chocolate into bowl. Heat (not boil) the water so that the chocolate melts.

Meanwhile, separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites together with the salt (hint from one of my aunts: much easier if you also add a Tbsp cold water) until soft peaks form. Set aside. (My reason for doing that now is that I only have one bowl that I can use together with the food processor. After setting aside the egg white stuff, I can clean and reuse that bowl.)

Check that nothing bad is happening with the chocolate. And if you haven’t started to preheat the oven yet, better do it now. Take the dough out of the fridge and put it into the springform. Flatten it out and stretch it a bit so that it covers the bottom and goes up at the sides, about 2-3 cm high. Now it’s probably time to take the chocolate off the stove.

Whisk the butter (which should be fairly soft — either put it in the microwave for a very (!) short time, or reuse the chocolate saucepan), add the sugar. The recipe says that this should become thick and creamy. Well, doesn’t happen when I do it. Just ignore the recipe and gradually whisk in the egg yolks. Stir in the chocolate, then add the almonds and the almond essence or amaretto. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Pour the filling onto the base and make the surface look pretty.

Peel the pears, cut them in half and get rid of all the stuff you wouldn’t want to eat (if the pears are ripe enough, a teaspoon can be very helpful for this task). Slice thinly, but don’t cut all the way through — the slices should stay connected at the top (look at the picture, that makes things much clearer). Spread out onto the filling in a decorative way.

Set the springform onto the hot baking tray and bake for 15 minutes (still at 200°C). After that time, turn down the heat to 180°C and bake for some 10 more minutes — until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Carefully get rid of the side part of the springform. Serve the cake warm or cold. The recipe suggests to serve it with crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream. Whipped cream also works well (and I’m a bit sceptical about the crème fraîche).

According to the recipe, the cake tastes even better the next day (even though it won’t look as pretty).

Note: It’s important to use ripe pears. Or to equip people with knives.

This is my mum’s meatball recipe.

400g of minced meat (I only use beef).
0.75 dl rolled oats.
1-2 tablespoons potato flour.
1.5 dl water (I tend to use 50/50 milk and cream instead :) ).
1 egg.
1 teaspoon salt.
1 small onion.
Black pepper, all spice and a bit of stock powder.

Chop the onion into small pieces and fry them slightly while allowing the liquid and the rolled oats to stand in a bowl.
Mix it all together until it’s a good mixture, and fairly sticky. It’s important to make sure that there’s no lumps of rolled oats, but it tends to get bad if you overwork the mixture as well.
Once the mixture is finished, put cold water on a cutting board and roll small balls. The water keeps the mixture from sticking to the cutting board (and your hands).
Once you think you’ve got enough meatballs, start frying the first pan on medium heat while rolling more balls.

Somehow it feels like Katrin is trying to get the title “the great munchies hunter” ;) A while ago, she sent in a picture of “Les Munchies”, a sandwich place in Bath, UK. When she was in Bochum the last time, she brought me a package of Munchies made by Nestlé, which she apparently found lurking around in a shop at Bristol airport (well, the Munchies were lurking, I wouldn’t know about Katrin as I wasn’t there).

They taste like, hm, well, I guess like it’s to be expected. Cheapish chocolate with caramel and a tiny biscuit. Something that probably wants to be a Twix when it grows up. Not too horrible altogether, but I don’t think I’d buy it. But thanks anyway :)
A fun thing I read somewhere on the Internet is that apparently, the message on the package side changes (in case it’s not obvious from the picture, the message on mine read “devour me” before I opened the package).

Last week, I signed up for DFssgF 1, the German version of Euro Blogging by Post. I’d already given up hope that my parcel would arrive today — and then the doorbell rang and a neighbor delivered a parcel for me :) I was at home all day, so I guess the parcel delivery guy got scared away by all the scaffolding around the house and didn’t even try to deliver it directly.

Anyways, back to the parcel. Unfortunately, all I know about the sender is that he’s someone called Jens, and that he’s from Bonn. I had kindof expected to find the link to the sender’s blog inside the parcel… There’s one thing I can guess about Jens though: he seems to like Korean food.

At least, that’s what I got: a weird mixture of probably even weirder Korean food. Me, who’s definitely sceptical about Asian food! Oh well, that’s a chance to try out something new, I guess ;) And Andreas is quite happy.

The contents are (on the picture, clockwise starting from top left):

• Roasted Seasoned Laver.
• A can of Sweet Cinnamon Punch (on the side of the can, it says “Expired Date Prints On The Bottom”)
• Two tinfoil-wrapped, erm, rice rolls wrapped in seaweed? Or something? Seriously, I don’t have a clue about this stuff.
• A bowl of instant noodles. Without a single word I understand on the packaging (well, except for “bowl noodles”). And a picture that promises something like chilli peppers and something red as the flavor. Hmmm. I guess I’ll give this one to Andreas and watch from a safe distance…
• A very pink package with miniature chocolate-filled cookies. They’re nice. And all gone already :)
• A package with, hm, chocolate-covered cookie sticks, or something. The ingredient list says “wheat flour, sugar”. No mention of chocolate. They look good too, though.

Well, thanks a lot Jens! I think you would have made me even happier by sending me at least some instructions on what to do with the food though… Additional thanks go to Rosa for organising the whole thing and to Svenja for mentioning DFssgF in her blog.

For a round-up of DFssgF 1, go here.

Oh, and one more thing: I’ve been told that this blog entry doesn’t sound too enthusiastic. I’m sorry — I managed to catch a bad cold and find it fairly difficult to write cheerful things while my head feels like it’s wrapped in several layers of wool… I’m definitely happy about the parcel!

And another update: the sender is this Jens.

I just signed up for DFssgF 1 (”Deutsche Foodblogger schicken sich gegenseitig Fresspakete”), a German version of Euro Blogging by Post. That means that in a few days I’ll get the address of a fellow German foodblogger — and then I’ll have to come up with a few nice things to put into a parcel and send off to him/her. Of course, I will get a similar parcel in return. Whee, food surprises ;)