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Monthly Archives: December 2011

Christmas Cranberry & Almond Cakes

Posted on December 24, 2011 by thesweetestbrunch

Frohe Weihnachten!

I am writing this from Germany where I am spending Christmas with my family. Here, Christmas has already started as today is Christmas Eve and that is the day where we go to church, have a special Christmas dinner and get to open the presents with which the children get to play until late at night.

We then still have Christmas Day and Boxing Day (which we call second Christmas Day in Germany) to celebrate some more with some big roast lunches usually with goose or duck. Because of all these big dinners and lunches, we don’t usually have Christmas brunch in my family but I heard that the Christmas breakfasts in the UK and US are a much bigger thing and lots of food blogs I follow suggested special Christmas muffins or rolls for the occasion. On one of the blogs, Roost, I saw a recipe for some “Upside Down Cranberry Cakes” that I liked the sound of , so I decided to try them out and suggest them for your Christmas breakfasts.

They are not too sweet which is good as there is already a lot of sweet chocolate to get through over the festive days and they are sugar and gluten free. This might please my friends Leanne, Tracey and Emma and anybody else that’s gluten intolerant.

They’re made in a muffin tray and then turned upside down so that the shiny cranberries can be seen. Add a dollop of whipped cream and a dusting of cinnamon and there you are.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Recipe based on Cranberry & Almond Upside Down Cake by Roost.

For 10 – 12 muffin sized cakes you’ll need:

  • a greased muffin tin
  • 2 1/2 cups ground almonds
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground all spice
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/2 cup sunflower oil
  • 1/2 cup honey

For the cranberry layer:

  • 2 cups fresh cranberries
  • freshly grated orange zest of 1 Orange
  • freshley grated lemon zest of 1 lemon
  • 1/4 cup honey

To serve:

  • whipped cream

Preheat oven to gas mark 4.

Mix flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon and all spice in a bowl.
In another bowl whisk the eggs, oil and honey.
Then combine the wet and dry ingredients with a fork until mixed through and set aside.

Now mix the cranberries with the citrus zests  and honey and spoon them into the  muffin tray cups. The should result in a single layer with a few extra cranberries on top in each of your 10 – if not 12 – muffin cups.

Top with the cake batter, which doesn’t have to go to the top of the muffin cups but should have an even surface.

Place the tray  in the oven for 20-25 minutes or until the tops are golden brown and cooked (tooth pick test!).

If your cakes get too brown but need to cook  a few more minutes, place some foil over the tray and continue cooking.

When the cakes are ready, let them cool down in the tray for a few minutes and then take them out, turning them upside down to finish them cooling off on a wire rack. If the middle of the cakes have risen, you may need to cut the risen dome off to make a flat surface that the cake can sit on (uspide down).

Serve with some whipped cream.

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Mulled Wine Cake

Posted on December 18, 2011 by thesweetestbrunch

Last weekend I met up with an old school friend from Germany who was visiting London for a few days. It was great to see her again and delve into some school time memories …

Talking about our old high school reminded me of all sorts of things, one of them being the cakes people used to bake each other for birthdays. “Rotwein Kuchen”, red wine cake, was always one of the most popular ones! We probably thought it was cool to have red wine cake at school although the alcohol content would probably be pretty much zero after the baking. The cake really tastes like a light, moist and slightly chocolaty loaf cake and as most German cakes, is not too sweet.

With it being Christmas time right now, I thought, why not give the cake a little make over by using mulled wine instead and it worked!

You may find yourself with a little left over mulled wine the day after your Christmas drinks. Though as mulled wine gets drunk up rather easily, it might be a better idea to set a glass aside for some baking the day after. 

For the cake you’ll need:

  • 250g butter or margerine
  • 250g caster sugar
  • 8g vanilla infused sugar (for Germans, this is 1Pk Vanille Zucker)
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp cocoa
  • 125ml cold mulled wine (or plain red wine)
  • 250g flour
  • 15g baking powder (again, for Germans, this is 1Pk)
  • 100g chocolate sprinkles or small (!) chocolate shavings
  • a little icing sugar to decorate

For the bundt cake tin:

  • butter for the cake tin
  • 2 Tbsp breadcrumbs

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees.

Butter the cake tin generously and then sprinkle the breadcrumbs evenly in the tin.

Whisk the butter with the sugars until creamy and fluffy. Now add the eggs, one at a time, whisking them in.
Add the cinnamon, cocoa and wine and mix again.

Combine the flour and baking powder and mix them in as well.
The last ingredient to go in the batter is the chocolate sprinkles/shavings, which should be folded in.

Pour the mix in the bundt tin and bake the cake in the oven for 50 minutes.

To get the cake out of the form in one piece, a generous buttering and bread crumbs are only the start, as my grandma taught me. Now that the cake is baked you need to let it cool down a little while, say 10 -15 minutes. Then I cut around the ring in the middle of the tin and also make sure that the very top of the cake is loosened a little with the knife, before I turn the tin over on a plate and cover it with a cold wet towel. I let this sit for about 10 minutes and only then lift the tin off the cake. Should it still be sticky you can leave it under the towel a bit longer (you might have to re-wet it). Hopefully you’re cake will come out in one piece and can then be dusted with some icing sugar.

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Christmas Granola

Posted on December 12, 2011 by thesweetestbrunch

It’s about 2 weeks until Christmas and as it’s still quite warm in London I can’t say that I have really got into the Christmas Spirit yet.
I therefore decided to make some Christmas Granola, which I invented as I found a German Spice mix for German Christmas Gingerbread “Lebkuchen”. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the time to make the classic Lebkuchen this year but I did want to use the spices in some way that I could feature on this blog… and homemade granola is another of my brunch favourites, so there we are!

The Spice mix I used contained Cinnamon, Cloves, Ginger, Nutmeg, Star Anise, Cardamom and Coriander seeds. I’m pretty sure you can get similar spice mixes out of Germany as well but if not, then there’s are some online recipes for “German Christmas Spice Mixes”. Having looked at a few of them, it seems that you can basically mix any of the usual “Christmas Spices” in ground form as long as you use smaller quantities of the stronger/spicier ones.

If you want an actual recipe, one option I found is a combination of 35g ground cinnamon, 9g ground cloves, 2g each of ground coriander seeds, ground ginger, ground cardamom and ground nutmeg.

The granola itself is based on one I found on one of my favourite blogs by food photographer Valerie Rizzo: Eating Brooklyn.

I particularly like this recipe as it is for toasted granola as opposed to the more common oven baked one. Toasting the oats, seeds and nuts filled my kitchen with a bit of a fire roasting smell which, combined with the Christmas spices, did make me feel a little more Christmassy… that and “Elf” being shown on TV, as I was making it!

For 10-12 servings you’ll need:

  • 3 cups oats
  • 1 cup sunflower seeds
  • ½ cup almonds
  • ½ cup cashews
  • ½ cup pecans
  • 1/3 cup dried cranberries
  • ½ cup dried apricots, chopped into small pieces
  • 1 tbsp cinnamon
  • ½ tbsp gingerbread spices (see above notes)
  • ½ cup maple syrup
  • 2 tbsp sunflower oil

Mix the oats with the sunflower seeds in one bowl.

Chop or crush the nuts into rough pieces. You can either do this by putting all the nuts in a food bag and bashing the bag with a rolling pin or by chopping them up roughly on a big chopping board with a big knife. If you do the later, keep the nuts separately as pecans and cashews are much quicker chopped up than almonds.

Mix the cinnamon with the other spices in a small bowl.

The oat & sunflower seed mix, as well as all the nuts now need to be toasted. As it’s quite a large amount of oats and nuts the toasting needs to be done in batches. I always start with about 3 batches of the oat & sunflower seed mix by heating a non-stick frying pan over a medium-high heat and spreading a thin layer of the oats & seeds in the pan. They need constant stirring so nothing burns – you are aiming for an even golden colour.

Once the first lot is done, set the toasted batch aside in a big bowl and mix with a teaspoon worth of the spice mix, while the granola is still warm. Continue this until all the oat & seeds as well as the nuts have been toasted and the spices are mixed in (if any spice mix is left at the end, just stir it all in then). Stir in the cranberries and apricot pieces.

Finally pour in the maple syrup and oil and mix everything well with a metal spoon, then spread the granola on 2 baking trays to cool down. After an hour or so, it should be cold and can then be kept in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks.

Serve however you like your granola, probably with some Greek yoghurt and fresh fruit.
I quite enjoyed mine on top of a posh vanilla yoghurt…

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Apple Cinnamon Waffles

Posted on December 3, 2011 by thesweetestbrunch

I have only got one waffle recipe on here so far and I was also running a bit late with this post again, so I needed it to be something quick and easy to make/write about. My fruit basket presented me with two old apples that were starting to go a bit wrinkly, so I thought I’ll better quickly turn them into apple and cinnamon waffles.

I guess any normal waffle recipe would do for this, as long as you add some grated apple and a good pinch of cinnamon, which is pretty much what this recipe is.

When it comes to the grated apple, I suggest you grate the whole apple – skin, core, pips and all (well maybe not the little woody bit the apples hangs on, which I have no idea what it is called in English). I find it quicker to then pick out the pips from the grated apple,  if they don’t get grated up anyway and I don’t think it’s the end of the world to eat one, should it get overlooked. Although when we discussed this in my office the other day, my colleague Anna brought up a story of some Russian having an apple tree growing inside of him…yikes! Turns out the story was actually about a fir tree growing inside someone’s lungs…or not…but you can google that yourself but NOT when you’re about to eat, please.

Anyway, back to waffles…kinda lost my thread now… so without further ado here’s the recipe!

For about 6 waffles you’ll need:

  • A waffle iron (funny that)
  • 250ml milk
  • 2 eggs
  • 40g sugar (I think up to 50% less is ok here too, if your apples are sweet)
  • pinch of salt
  • 1 Tsp cinnamon
  • 180g flour
  • 15g baking powder
  • 3-4 apples, grated
  • a little oil for the waffle iron
  • icing sugar and/or maple syrup to serve

Separate the eggs and whisk the egg whites with the pinch of salt until it forms stiff peaks.

In another bowl whisk the egg yolk, milk, sugar and cinnamon. Mix the flour with the baking powder and add to the eggy milk and whisk well.

Stir in the grated apples and then fold the egg whites under, preferably with a handheld whisk.

They need baking immediately, so oil up your waffle iron and bake the waffles at quite a high setting. They need to be well baked through because of the high amount of grated apples.

One slight warning, I found that the waffles kept sticking to the iron despite frequent re-oiling. Longer baking made a difference but I still needed to pull them loose with the help of a fork…
Would be great to hear some of your experiences on that, thanks!

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