Pancakes afternoon

So, yesterday we had our first 'real' meeting, meaning that we met with the intention of cooking together. And having fun ^^

We decided to start with something very simple to cook: pancakes! Yippiiieee!

Not that it's really necessary for pancakes, but still, we looked up 'official' ingredients in an Austrian cookbook:

• 3 eggs
• 1/8l milk
• a pinch of salt
• 100g flour
• butter for frying
• apricot jam, icing sugar, ...

Well, that's a start for getting an idea of how much you might need of what. The recipe didn't specify for how many portions the given amounts would last. We were three, so we planned to do double of what was written there. Anyways, for pancakes you don't have to follow any recipe, just have all ingredients at home and start mixing like this: put flour and milk in a big bowl and mix them until you're satisfied. Add the eggs and the pinch of salt. It should all be quite liquid still.

Then, on to the stove: you should have a frying pan at least as wide as the pancakes you want ;-) We had a shiny new Teflon pan. The great thing about Teflon is that you'll hardly need any fat for frying. Meaning that you won't need the butter mentioned above in the ingredients list. We still melted a tiny piece of butter in our pan as a start. Then we used a ladle to drop our liquid-pancake-dough into the pan. Make sure you let it run around the pan as far as you want your pancake wide - yes, by moving the pan around ;-)
As soon as it solidifies you can flip it, wee-hee! We did so with wooden kitchen tools, in order not to scratch the Teflon, well, duuuh... if you feel like, you can flip'em more than once, and also flip'em through the air if you're bored... do that until the pancake looks like you want it. Put it out of the pan, on a plate where you'll collect all your pancakes.

Blablabla way too much text for the simple task of making pancakes already! Here's a shot of our lil' pancake factory:

In front there's our bowl of pancake-dough with the ladle. Behind it the pan with a pancake in production, and the plate with the already finished pancakes.

At the end of our cooking session:

 In the pan you can see The Last Pancake. Its already-done brothers hadn't left us with enough dough, so this one was a little diminished in size... and the plate on the left is filled with the ones that got away, uuuhm, well, let's say: that's our Kaiserschmarren output of the day. Big secret: if your pancakes don't stay in one piece when trying to flip them, just cut them up and say it's Kaiserschmarren, Emperor Franz Joseph I.'s favourite dish. No harm done.

 And our prepared table, just before we dug into our lovely pancakes:

The big yellow glass in the back with a spoon in it contains something we almost haven't mentioned yet: something to put onto our pancakes before we roll them up and eat them! In the 'official' ingredients we've mentioned apricot jam and icing sugar, but you can use basically anything you like. In this photo you see vanilla sauce from France that one of us had personally imported. Mmmmh. Classically you put some jam on them, roll them up and then put some icing sugar. But of course any kind of sweet sauce is fine. Really, whatever you like. The French and Belgians even put salty stuff on their crepes. But those are thinner than the ones we managed to do :-D

Oh, and another good Austrian thing about pancakes: whatever you have leftover after the meal, well, keep it in the fridge for tomorrow. Then you'll cut them into stripes, and put them into beef bouillon, or any other kind of clear soup you like. Just be careful, you might enrage a French person if she/he was involved in the cooking and calls your pancakes crepes ;-) They don't seem to like cutting them up and putting them into soup. But it's just so good!

That's it for now. Looking forward to our next cooking session, when we'll finally cook something non-sweet - or so we hope.

Mahlzeit, everyone!

Let's start! (incl.cake^^)

Hello world,

Three weeks ago some friends came over for a chat while eating a Gugelhupf I made. I followed a simple but very yummy recipe for a cake that I had already blogged about in German years ago. Yesterday I met up again with those friends for cooking and chatting. And since that's quite a fun activity we've decided to do this on a regular basis. And blog about our experiences :-)

And to make it interesting for the world out there, we'll share the recipes we try out. And our stories of success (or not...). And pictures. Not that there's a lack of recipe sharing places around the web. But since cooking with friends is so much fun, we wanted to share. Who knows, some of you might enjoy it, just like us.

So, as a start, we'll give you a translation into English of that simple cake recipe:

Aunt Chef Cake

A simple but good cake, using a cup of yoghurt as ingredient and as a measuring device :-)

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of yoghurt, 250 ml
• 3x the same cup, filled with plain flour
• 2x the cup with sugar (one cup is enough unless you want it really sweet)
• 1x oil into the cup, one finger high (1-1.5cm)
• 2 eggs
• baking powder, 1 pack
• vanilla sugar, 1 pack

Mix everything together into one homogenous mass. Grease a cake pan with oil or butter and sprinkle it with flour (so the cake won't stick). Pour the mass into it and put it into the oven for about 40 minutes at 150 degrees Celsius.
To check if the cake is ready, you can put a thin skewer into it. If some of the dough sticks to it when you pull it out, the cake still needs more baking.

Variations: add half a cup of grated hazelnuts or almonds. Or coconuts. Or cacao.
Especially with cacao: do a marble cake! Mix the cacao into the second half of the dough after putting the first half into your cake pan. Then pour that cacao-half on top of it, and go through the whole dough with a fork once or twice. Mmmh, marble cake!

Anyways, since we want to blog about our experiences here: three weeks ago we just the did the classic version with none of the variations. Even after years of baking this cake, it's amazing to see how fluffy it turns out. And how yummy it is to eat!

Mahlzeit, everyone!
(explanation: the English language doesn't have a proper way for saying 'Bon appetit!', so we will use its German short version here, i.e., Mahlzeit!)