Good day to all and good mood my dear readers read.cash. I would like to say that I write about cooking and cuisine, as well as everything related to it.
I continue to publish recipes, menus, and other stuff, that solve one problem: "how to make sure that at home there is always a healthy, delicious homemade food, and you spend a minimum of time, effort and money.
Cupcakes, stollen and panettone... Without them, the holidays are like pastries without raisins.
Candied cherries, along with raisins, look wonderful in Christmas muffins, and candied cherries as bright as the cheeks of young skiers after four hours of skiing.
I usually bake Christmas cake every year, mostly for myself, because with it I... travel back to my childhood: when I was little and winters in Ukraine were snowy, my mother had no time to bake her famous Napoleon, Kolobok, or Tiny cake, she spoiled me with a store-bought Stolichny (Capital) cake... And it was a real Christmas miracle! So, attention, moms: be vigilant, dodgy and a little lazy - buy your kids ready-made pastries, wieners and chips (just kidding). Where's your farm products to the glucomate-sodium power of the general public! :)
And while a fastidious young lady, frowning and shifting eyebrows, forges raisins, and one teenager concentrated sniffing and carefully avoiding reproaching Mom's gaze chews the purchased cookies, I chew a cake from my childhood and remember how I was walking in winter with my grandmother, a sled, a heavy fur coat and a prickly knitted scarf, and a downy scarf, and above me, against the velvet sky, shiny, fluffy new snow shimmering furry spruces. And then for afternoon snack was a cupcake.
Now, the cupcake: a woman recently revealed America to me by stating on Facebook that "you put leavening agent in a cupcake. Leavening agent for dough. It's a white powder. It's also called baking powder. It consists of flour, baking soda and citric acid. And no yeast, no."
But my childhood cupcake is not a stollen. First of all, mine is fluffier - there is no milk in it. Second, the cupcake is eaten immediately, while the stollen is eaten after three proverbial (fiends!) weeks. Third, the stollen is sometimes soaked in fragrant alcohol, so it won't dry out in three weeks (who would have let it dry out at my house!).
But then I remember again my maman, who for Orthodox Easter used to bake something traditionally Polish, I suspect Christmas, vanilla-scented, with raisins and candied fruits right to the heart, and sprinkled with powdered sugar. As I look at these beauty treatments, I sometimes allow myself the sacrilegious thought that my mother doesn't squawk over her grandchildren as much as she does her bakery creation...
Still, baking-but powder. I put yeast in the cupcake, and the cupcake turns out lopsided - with one side turned around - and so touching, homemade and truthful: you certainly can't find such disabled people of selfless labor in a candy store. And from this wound you can see a scattering of yellow-orange-green candied fruits, and scarlet spots of cherries, and all the raisins stashed in the house. And it smells like vanilla and my childhood.
And God forbid the cupcake is actually Italian.
Yes, it became mine by happy coincidence: a yellowed page with a recipe from a cookbook 50 years ago was suddenly shared with me by my mother-in-law. And more in such impulses of the soul has not been noticed: along with a recipe for cake and red velvet handbag, and top with glass beads, and a long skirt of taffeta were not given to me, but only borrowed. Right when we were first shut down for a month-long quarantine-and after the first scare, they took it back.
The cupcake would be very pretty on the Christmas table. It can also be used as a Christmas gift. There's still time, but hurry: it's only 27 days until Christmas (I'm not Catholic!!! And we celebrate Christmas the old style--January 7!!!)
My Christmas is unthinkable without stollen. It symbolizes the swaddled baby Jesus - hence its peculiar shape. Nowadays, most of the time, special industrially made molds are used to bake the stollen, but true connoisseurs consider this a violation of tradition and almost blasphemous. Their argument: make a mold in the shape of a baby and start a discussion about whether to cut off the legs or the head first...
Now there are recipes all over the internet where natural products and spices have been replaced by all kinds of essences: essence instead of lemon peel, and essence instead of aromatic bitter almonds... And there is even a "all in one bottle" version - essence flavored stollen! Nightmare horror!!!
There are many recipes for stollen: regional, family recipes, author's recipes, with marzipan, with cottage cheese... The one I'm offering today is real!!!,Italian and where its tradition and fame came from.
Here's the recipe:
750 grams of flour
125 grams of sugar
250 ml of milk
350g butter
2 eggs
80g yeast
2 tsp. sugar
1 sachet of vanilla sugar
150 g brown raisins
150g yellow raisins
150 g raisins
6 tbsp. rum
100 g chopped peeled almonds
50 g ground bitter almonds
100 g candied orange candies
100 g candied lemon
1/2 lemon peel
1/4 tsp. ground cardamom
1/4 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. salt
75 g melted butter for greasing
1/2 cup powdered sugar for sprinkles
Rinse the raisins, pour over the rum and let stand for an hour or more.
Rinse raisins, fill with rum and let stand for an hour or more.
Mash the yeast with two teaspoons of sugar until a homogeneous liquid mass is obtained. Leave it on for 10 minutes, so that they are slightly creamy.
Sift flour, mix with sugar and salt. Dissolve yeast with warm milk and pour into flour, add spices and vanilla sugar. Gradually add butter at room temperature and knead well to make a smooth and soft light dough.
Dry the raisins. Chop candied fruits finely, mix with raisins. Add chopped almonds. Sprinkle everything with two tablespoons of flour and stir - this will distribute the mixture evenly in the dough.
Mix everything with the dough with your hands, do not knead any more, otherwise the dough will darken. Shape the dough into a ball, place in a bowl, cover with plastic foil and set in a warm place to approach for 30 minutes.
Knead the dough and set it again for 45-50 minutes. This is what the dough looks like.
Divide the dough into 2 parts, form an oblong loaf of each, with the edge of your palm or a rolling pin make a longitudinal depression, dividing the dough in a 2: 1 ratio. Loosely, without pressing, bend the smaller part into the larger one to create a stepped fold - a typical shape for a stollen. These are the "lyalekki" that turn out. Stollen should look like a swaddled baby.
Transfer the formed stollens to a baking sheet lined with baking paper, cover and allow to stand for 30 minutes. 12. Preheat oven to 190 ° C. Bake the shtollens for 70-90 minutes. If the top is going to darken a lot (and it will!), Cover it with baking paper or foil with the shiny side up. Remove the finished shtolls from the oven.
Brush immediately with melted butter. Their surface is likely to crack - don't worry, this is not a defect, but a feature! It should be so!
Sprinkle with powdered sugar on top.
By the time you eat it, it will have turned into a lovely, sugary, marshmallowy substance.
Now the stollen should be out of sight for a few hours, such as overnight overnight so they can cool completely.
I put one loaf of Christmas muffin in a corner somewhere of the middle shelf of the refrigerator until Christmas. A fully cooled stollen, if they want to put it away until the holiday, put it on clingfilm, or baking paper, sprinkled with powdered sugar and sprinkled with powdered sugar on top, then tightly wrapped tightly. In the film or baking paper stollen leave it for a few days to let it mature for a few days, about 2 to 3 days to 3 weeks.
If you are going to eat it right away, you can sprinkle the stollen with icing, sugar or chocolate, let it cool completely and serve.
Traditional Christmas cupcakes last not just not just a month, but years. And the ingredients of these muffins include eggs and fat and butter, products with a limited shelf life in ordinary conditions. Nevertheless. these muffins-- they don't go bad for centuries. Obviously, alcohol is a preservative, but there's not a lot of it.
The stollen holds its shape well when it is proofed, but when baked, because of the large amount of oil in the dough, it begins to spread wide. To avoid this, for the first 30 minutes of baking, support the sides with, for example, cardboard boxes from rolls of foil or clingfilm
Over time, the stollen becomes softer and more flavorful, so it's best to bake it at least 2 weeks in advance.
I baked the stollen tonight, and this morning I couldn't resist cutting it up: gotta taste the balo, and first of all, take a picture! :)))
I was pleased with the taste without reservation, but I have to agree with many generations who have baked Stollen before me: it should rest, it will only do him good!
Well, the holiday spirit has reached me too! And today I would like to urge you to make Stollen!!!! To my taste (and the taste of 5 other people) it turned out oooooo tasty, to be honest, I didn't even expect it to be this good. Overall, it tasted a lot like Stollen, but tastier because first, it has more filling, and second, I liked that it is not very sweet, and all the sweetness is concentrated in the powder that we sprinkle on top of the Stollen! Of course, it would be better to let the Stollen infuse for a week or two, but my one was barely cooled down.... A real fight broke out over the last piece and the men. The men greedily and quickly finished the Stollen, while we were indignant as to why they didn't pour us tea while they quietly finished it themselves))))) In short, I want to say, bake!!!! it is soooooo delicious))))
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I thank God for his help in writing this article, and you, dear readers, praise him if your reading has been helpful to you.
I want to know your opinion.
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Wowww love your cupcakes yum yummm