Coconut-Rhubarb-Cake

It´s been a while.
I´ve been quite busy with University stuff... But now it´s the semester break, three heavenly months without classes, just me, work and food. Yay!
My first week off was well spent: I went to a very nice restaurant with my dear friend Mire. They offered an amazing set menue for a fixed price which included a course of wagyu, japanese beef, better known as kobe beef. It was good, I can tell you that much. In taste much closer to wild game than to ordinary german cow. Mmmmh. The other courses were amazing too. I loved the dessert, variations of coffee. Thanks for that supernice evening Mire!!
We didn´t dare to take pictures because it was such a nice restaurant so you´ll just have to trust my words, sorry.
Anyhow. I also got to cook. Last tuesday was my nameday so... Nah, I´m not catholic so actually I shouldn´t care about this particular "holiday" but it brings back pleasant memories from my childhood were my grandma´s italian-catholic neighbor who had the same name as me, Anna, used to bring me supernice presents just for being called "Anna". And I had time so:



I made Turkey-rolls filled with creamcheese with herbs in puff pastry and for dessert we had Clafoutis (which is basically fruit baked in light dough) and homemade ice-cream.
Sounds tricky and highclass? It´s not.

IngrediencesTurkey Rolls:
2 pieces of Turkey
Creamcheese
Herbs
Puff pastry (I´m too lazy to make my own...)

Clafoutis:
1 Egg
20g Butter
40g Sugar
60g Flour
100ml Milk
Baking Powder
Fruits (I used Raspberries & Blackberries)

Icecream:
Icecream machine (my sister got us one two weeks ago)
200ml Milk
125ml Cream
Vanilla
2 large Eggyolks
60g Sugar

How to

Turkey Rolls:Mix herbs with creamcheese, smear on turkey, roll turkey. Put turkey on puff pastry, cover with more puff pastry. Put into the oven for 35-45 minutes at 180°C.

Here´s some yeasty awesomeness: I used this recipe from over at Joy the Baker and it worked great so: use it. Not hard to do (as usual), very handsome and incredibly yummy! I didn´t even have to alter anything, really. I thought about using the yeast dice you usually gt over here instead of the dry yeast but then decided against it and stick to the recipe. It was my first time using dry yeast and I was happy with it.

Mix 2 Cups of flour, the yeast, salt and sugar for the dough in a bowl and set aside.
Whisk the eggs together and set aside, too.
Warm up the milk (no cooking needed) and let the butter melt in it.
Add the water and the vanilla extract to the mil and butter.
Let it cool down to about 50°C/115-125°F. For me that didn´t mean letting it cool down because it never got that hot in the first place. I´m used to handling things lukewarm when dealing with yeast.

Now the milk mixture goes into the flour mixture. Joy says to mix with a spatula. But remembering my hate of floury hands I used the handmixer. Worked great.
Add the eggs. That´s what I call gooey. It really takes a minute or two to get everything mixed together and then it looks... well... not pretty.
Add the remaining flour, mix and let the very sticky dough rest for about an hour. Make sure it´s covered and in a nice warm place. On a sunshiny day I put my dough on the windowsill and hope that someone walks by and thinks "Oooh! Dough! Nice!" Never happens because I live on the fourth floor...

While the dough rose I watched cartoons. I can recommend that.
<-- Dough before rising.

An hour later:
Put together the sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon for the filling.
Butter your cakepan. Let the butter melt and get a bit brown. Watch out because butter is a bitch: it refuses to get brown when you watch. You look away and suddenly it´s all black...

<-- Dough after rising.
Deflate the dough by kneading it. Add two tablespoons of flour to it to get rid of the stickiness.

Let it rise for another 5 mins.





Butter it. It´s easiest with a pastry brush.

I made another layer cake. Usually I don´t bake this much but... I felt like it. And it was my sister`s birthday.
Ich hab noch eine Torte gemacht. Üblicherweise backe ich nicht so viel aber... ich fühlte mich danach. Und meine Schwester hatte Geburtstag.
Ingrediences:
Bisquit cake:
125g Flour
175g Sugar
5 Eggs
1ts Baking powder
Food coloring (apparently the powder kind by Brauns Heitmann works great on no-cocoa dough...)
Bake 20-30 mins

Italian Buttercream:
250g Butter
4 Eggwhites
a pinch of salt
200g Sugar
150g Brittle
(Butter & Eggwhites at roomtemperature)

Since it´s pretty...longwinded to make bisquit I´ll post proper instructions to that later. But in order to make a Rainbow Cake I divided the dough up into five bowls and added a different color to each. Fun!
If you wanna do it I recommend thinking about which color goes first beforehand because you´ll need a bit more of the first color, and least of the last color.
You just fill in the dough of the color you want to be outside in the middle of your cake pan, then fill the dough of the next color in the middle of that and so on. Like that the first color-dough gets pushed to the outsides by the second, the second by the third and so on. It´s real easy.
I used the full recipe this time because I wanted to get four layers but i had to bake two cakes and cut them up like that. I was a bit worried because usually recipes say you need to bake immediately after having added all the ingrediences But baking two cakes meant I would have half the dough just sitting there while the first one was in the oven and... it turned out okay.
The Buttercream is pretty easy to make, it just takes some time. Apparently the Italian Cream is the easiest and looking at the recipes it really seems to be.
You whip up the eggwhites with a pinch of salt until they start to get firm. Slowly add the sugar and keep whipping until the eggwhite is so firm that you can hold the bowl upside down over your head (or someone elses) and nothing drips or even moves. Set aside.
But the butter in a bowl and whip it. If you have a machine, you´re lucky. It need to be whipped for 15 mins. Doesn´t sound like much? Try holding a hand mixer in one hand, a bowl full of butter that keeps splashing around the kitchen and then watch the hands of the clock. They´re moving in slow motion, trust me. But the butter ends up being white and creamy like... cream. It gets a sweet smell too. Nice.
Slowly and by hand add the butter spoon by spoon into the eggwhites and stir. Those two ingrediences, usually unlikely to go well together, really need to blend together. That done you have buttercream. Yay! You can now add fruits like strawberries or lemons, nuts, chocolate or whatever to make it even better. I decided to go for nutbrittle. Crushed, mind you. The smaller the better. Into the shredded brittle I added a spoonful of Rum, just for the fun of it. Didn´t come out in the taste at all.
Just add the crushed brittle spoon by spoon to the cream and you´re set.
This time I bought an adjustable cake ring for dressing the cake and maaaan, it´s so much easier like that! You just put the buttom layer in, make sure it´s tight and then throw in the cream. Make sure it´s everywhere, smooth it and then add the next layer of cake. And so on.
I precut the upper cake layers (not the bottom one, that holds the cake together) because cutting layercake just plain sucks. If you do that make sure you got the cuts all exactly over each other!
After the last layer I put the cake in the fridge and let it cool a bit before removing the cake ring and applying the cream as frosting. It stayed together perfectly and I just had to smear the cream all over the cake, smooth it and decorate it.
It was very yummy, looked great inside and out and my sister was happy.
Downside: It pretty much took me half the day. Make dough, color, bake, let cool a bit, then bake the next, let cool completely. Make cream, cut cake, assemble cake, decorate... But it was worth it.


The pretty rainbow dough.
Der hübsche Regenbogenteig.

I made Red Velvet Layer Cake. Only it wasn´t red. And I didn´t find it particularly velvety, either... But it´s yummy.