The Munchies Blog

The other day, I discovered a new chocolate brand in a shop in Bochum: shokomonk (German website, but they have an English leaflet in the download section).

Shokomonk makes chocolate bars (50g each) in quite a lot of nice varieties: white chocolate crisp, coconut, raspberry, poppyseeds, or blueberry; milk chocolate with caramel, peanuts, walnuts, or small waffle pieces; dark chocoloate with jalapeños, orange, ginger, latte macchiato or peppermint.

So far, Andreas and I have tried the white chocolate with blueberries (delicious, but too sweet for Andreas’s taste) and the milk chocolate with caramel (both of us didn’t really like it). But I like the concept and I’m quite sure I’m going to try some more of their chocolate bars :)

I think it was in one of my baking books that I first read about the concept of a pound cake: Use the weight of the eggs to measure out equal amounts of butter, sugar and flour. Back in the old days, when people had proper kitchen scales and so on, the eggs were simply used instead of the usual metal weights. In German, this batter is sometimes also called “Eischwerteig” — with “Ei” meaning egg, “schwer” heavy and “Teig” batter or dough.

The cookbook said that nowadays, use of rising agents like baking powder allowed for “better” proportions of ingredients, or something. I was still fairly curious, and seeing a recipe on Fool for Food (in German) convinced me to give it a try. Claudia (and I) used some amaretto for flavoring the cake. Well, I really like it (very moist and much nicer than my usual “I feel like baking” cakes), but I guess one shouldn’t be scared of greasy food…

Almond Pound Cake

• some eggs — 4 seems to be usual; I used 3, at room temperature
• butter, at room temperature
• sugar
• flour
• about 40ml of amaretto (could be more, I think)
• pinch of salt (which I forgot)

Weigh the eggs (still in their shells), measure out the same amount of butter, sugar and flour. Apparently it’s really important that all ingredients have the same temperature.

And now everything depends on the order the ingredients are added — and it’s very important to beat them properly.
Beat butter and sugar with a balloon whisk for 3-4 minutes. Yes, this is hard work in the beginning.

Beat in one egg at a time, always stir until it’s completely mixed in.

Add the amaretto and stir it in completely.

Fold in the flour. No more stirring afterwards.

Pour in greased(!) cake tin and let rest for 45 minutes. Bake in pre-heated oven at about 150°C/300°F for about 45 minutes (Claudia’s recipe says 180°C, but our convection oven seems to need lower temperatures).

In case you haven’t greased the cake tin: get someone to use brute force to get the cake out of the tin… (Not fun, this part.)

If you insist on decorating things: mix some icing sugar with a splash of amaretto. Cover cake with mixture. Sprinkle over some almond slivers.

A while ago, I’d seen a recipe for cannelloni with tomato sauce and spinach (beware, it’s in German) on Chili und Ciabatta. It looked so good that I immediately decided to try it out some day. Well, “some day” turned into today. This dish is very nice, even though it’s maybe a bit too much in the current weather (it’s some 25°C here at the moment). I basically didn’t change anything compared to the original recipe, but I’ll still post a translation.

Cannelloni with Tomato Sauce and Spinach

For the sauce:

• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 large onion (we used three smallish ones), chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic (that’s a guess; Petra doesn’t say how much garlic she used, and we didn’t have any)
• about 1.2 kg canned tomatoes
• 1 tsp dried rosemary (original recipe: 2 fresh rosemary twigs)
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 Tbsp tomato concentrate
• salt and pepper

For the filling:

• 500g frozen spinach leaves
• 150g feta cheese, in small pieces
• 150g ricotta or quark
• about 50g grated Parmesan cheese
• 2 Tbsp fresh mint leaves, chopped (I cheated and used 1 tsp good quality peppermint tea)
• 2 eggs
• 2 Tbsp lightly roasted pine nuts
• salt and pepper

And:

• 16-20 cannellonis (don’t pre-boil them)
• ca 200g Mozzarella cheese (we only had 125g)

Put the spinach somewhere where it won’t take too long to defrost. Roast the pine nuts. Get someone else to grate the Parmesan cheese.

Heat the olive oil in a saucepan. Fry the onion and garlic on medium heat until soft. Stir in tomatoes, herbs and tomato concentrate. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and let simmer for some 25-30 minutes; the sauce is supposed to thicken (which it didn’t do much in our case — but it was fairly thick to start with). Add salt and pepper to taste. Don’t forget to remove the rosemary (if using fresh twigs) and the bay leaves.

Pre-heat oven to 200°C (that’s 390°F — but for our convection oven, 180°C/355°F was hot enough). Mix hopefully more or less defrosted, roughly chopped spinach with the feta cheese, Parmesan cheese, ricotta, eggs, salt and pepper. Use a tiny teaspoon or a knife to fill the cannellonis with the mixture. Don’t expect your hands to stay clean.

Pour some of the tomato sauce into a shallow baking dish. Spread out the cannelloni (squeezing a bit to make all of them fit doesn’t hurt them either) in the dish. Cover with remaining tomato sauce and the sliced Mozzarella cheese. Maybe sprinkle some grated Parmesan on top.

Bake for about 30-40 minutes. The pasta should be soft enough to be edible, the cheese should be a nice light brown (see the picture). I found that with the oven pre-heated to 200°C and turned down to 180°C when putting the dish into the oven, the cheese was brown after some ten minutes, so I covered the dish with tin foil for the rest of the time.

Supposedly serves four, but in this weather they’d have to be quite hungry, I guess…