Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot - Week 134

Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot!
My posts for the link up will go live on Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. EDT or, if you live in the future like I do, on Fridays at 3:30 a.m. CE(S)T.

I'm not a cook or a baker as you know if you have been here with me for a while, but for one of my advent calendars (I just didn't manage this year), actually almost exactly 15 years ago, I made "Rumschnitten" which translates to "rum slices". They belong to my favorite Christmas treats and are something even I can do if I feel like it.

You can find the original post here if you need more pictures, but here's the recipe (metric).

7 eggs (separated into yolk and egg white)
200 grams of butter or margarine
200 grams of sugar
200 grams of flour
200 grams of grated hazelnuts (I like to use almonds)
200 grams of finely grated baking chocolate

250 grams of powdered sugar
rum (I used whisky because I never have rum at home, but if you want your kids to be able to eat them, just use some other non-alcoholic flavor, it also tastes nice with lemon juice for example)

200° C (preheat!), 10 to 15 minutes.

Cream the sugar and the butter.
Add the yolks, flour, chocolate, and nuts. Without the fluid, this is a pretty heavy dough, be sure to mix well!
Add the stiffly beaten egg white and fold it into the mix. It will feel a little heavy in the beginning, but the dough will be getting smoother, and although it may seem that way, it won't lose much of the fluffiness. Just don't mix too thoroughly.
Spread the dough on a baking tray, about 1 cm high and put it into the oven, for about 10 to 15 minutes.
Mix the powdered sugar with the fluid of your choice - not too much fluid, so it doesn't run - for the icing of the cookies.
When the dough is done, apply the icing, and cut diamonds while everything is still warm.
Enjoy!

How about you? Are you ready for the weekend? A weekend of baking maybe?

As part of the reboot, we will be featuring a different blog every week.
How about stopping by and saying hello? Let them know we sent you.

This week, our spotlight is on Between the Bookends.

Paula from "Between the Bookends" says "I'm Paula, and I'm excited to have you here. This little corner of the internet will be a cozy little oasis for our shared love for all things books and writing.
Think of it as a cozy haven for
- Book reviews & recommendations: Dive into new reads or rediscover old favorites!
- What I'm currently reading: Let's nerd out over books together!
- Book club & Bible study (sometimes!): Grab your coffee, and let's chat!
- Link-ups (sometimes! Quarterly, maybe?), Journaling Prompts, Reading and Writing Supplies and Purchases, Scrapbooking, Digital scrapbooking and Book making (I'm not much for scrapbooking or digital books, but I know many of you are - So we're going to explore away with our Contributor Jennifer Wise from Photo & Story Treasures), and Random Musings - Because who doesn't love a good mix?
- Discussions and friendships: Let's create a community where bookish dreams come true!

Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!

Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household - The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!

Lisa from Boondock Ramblings shares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.

Cat from Cat's Wire has what she calls a jumping spider brain. She has many interests and will blog about whatever catches her attention - crafts, books, old movies, collectibles or random things.

Rena from Fine Whatever Blog writes about style, midlife, and the "fine whatever" moments that make life both meaningful and fun. Since 2015, she's been celebrating creativity, confidence, and finding joy in the everyday.


Here are some of my picks from last week's link up.

Karin shows an easy way to make a sweet and cozy wreath for your home.

If you are not in Christmas mood yet, I'm sure Lynne's beautifully decorated kitchen will give you a boost.

Amy shares pictures of her trip to Holy Hill with us, so lovely.

Have you ever seen a Christmas tree made from glass bowls? Here's one Ann made this year.

Is December overwhelming for you? Maybe Maria's free December planner printables will help you. 


Let's link up!

You can add links to specific blog posts of yours, but not just to your blog itself. The posts can be new or older and cover any topic you can think of - books, movies, fashion, crafting, thrifting, travel, art ... but only family friendly, please!
Have a look around, visit some of the other blogs and leave a few comments. You might discover something new and exciting!
Thank you for linking up with us!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Chocolate marzipan cookies - The tenth door

They are rich, yummy, and deadly - filled chocolate marzipan cookies. You can't eat many of them in one go, but that's probably a good thing.
While they are not difficult to make as I'm told, they do take time and a bit of effort. I mentioned before that I missed out on the baker genes that run in the family, so I'm always happy that my sister makes them for Christmas.

Here's the recipe (in grams as I have been told before that odd numbers are too confusing, but I'm sure you will find a unit calculator):

Ingredients for the dough
- 200 g wheat flour
- 75 g corn starch
- 50 g ground almonds
- 100 g sugar
- 1 egg
- 200 g butter (cold)

Ingredients for the filling
- 100 g couverture (bittersweet)
- 100 g marzipan raw mass
- 100 g butter (soft)

Ingredients for decorating
- 200 g couverture (it can be milk or bittersweet, you can also use white additionally, but they are just as good with just one kind)

Mix the flour with the starch, almonds, and sugar. Add the egg and cut in the cold butter. Knead well, then wrap the dough in cling film and put in the fridge for an hour.

Roll the dough to a thickness of about 5 mm on a floured surface and cut out cookies of about 2 inch. Cover the tray with baking paper and bake 8 to 10 minutes in the pre-heated oven at a temperature of 200 °C. Take the cookies off the tray right away and let them dry thoroughly.

For the filling, cut the couverture into small pieces and melt, then let it cool down to room temperature. Grate the marzipan mass finely and cream it with the butter. Add the liquid couverture and mix well. Put some filling on a cookie and then a second on top. Let it dry well.

Melt the couverture for decorating. Dip part of the cookies into the liquid couverture and let dry well.
If you have white couverture as well, you can decorate the cookies additionally.

For those who try this recipe, let me know how you like it!

I also found this recipe on different websites, sometimes with only 175 g butter. The one my sister uses was from an old advertising brochure which went into her personal recipe collection.

Random Saturday - Irish soda bread

I have baker genes on my paternal grandmother's side. Unfortunately I'm the one in the family whose baker genes decided to go on strike. I made my fair share of okay cakes and cookies when I was younger, then I stopped completely. I know there are people who can't understand the problem. You follow the recipe, everything is fine. Well, obviously it doesn't work that way for everyone. Apart from that I hate having flour everywhere, sticky surfaces, and more.

Every, now and then, however, I feel the urge coming back, usually when I don't have any bread around and I'm too lazy to go to the bakery which is incredibly far away from here, about one block ;-) Or on weekends. So whenever an easy and quick recipe comes my way, I put it on my list. And nothing seemed easier than the soda bread that I saw in an English TV show.
I prepared myself. I got baking soda and decided on spelt flour for my first attempt. Then when I checked out recipes again I noticed I had forgotten to get the buttermilk. Depending on the recipe you use you only need about four ingredients which makes the buttermilk quite important. Oh well.

Today I had it all. Again I checked out recipes and found that I was about to make white soda bread. Check out this article, there are also links to different variations. I learned about brown soda bread (I may have to get full grain flour next time, too) and white soda bread and the American variation. I may add caraway seeds the next time because I love them. Or maybe I'll make bread rolls to take to work with me.

I almost felt my baker genes waking up, ready to go. There was no stopping me. No salt in this recipe? Oh come on, at least a pinch. Here they used an egg, here they didn't. Hey, I have eggs at the moment, let's use one (and break one in the box, well done, Cat). Baking soda, baking powder. One recipe said this, the other that, the third one both. I still had an open bag with baking powder, so I went for both. My baker genes cheered me on. Until they saw my dough on the baking tray. "Too much buttermilk? Are you sure you should have put the egg in? Maybe you should have used a little more flour." When I tried to cut the X across the top, they grabbed their little bags and left again (but look, you can see the X a little in the picture after all!).

But guess what. The bread came out just fine. Yes, maybe I will use a little less buttermilk the next time, and depending on if I have one or not, I may add an egg or not. In the end it might not be a genuine Irish soda bread, but I like it and it's definitely a keeper for this baking challenged lady.

Bonus: Still almost warm, with butter and orange/ginger/passion fruit jam (a gift from my lovely neighbor lady). So good!!

Christmas bakery - The fifteenth door

I bet you have already been waiting for this post. Cat in the kitchen baking and making a big mess without guarantee to succeed. Always good for a laugh.
Sorry, but not this year, I think. This time I invited a guest baker, my friend Silvia who actually knows what she is doing and who was willing to take on the task of taking photos when making her annual Christmas Linzer Torte. There was a time way back when I made that a few times myself, but it has been so long that I don't think it would have been a good idea. I already had a sample of Silvia's Linzer this year, though, and therefore I know that it's good.

What is Linzer Torte? Obviously (well, I didn't know it until now) it's a cake made from "Linzer dough" and "Linzer mass". The so-called brown Linzer dough is similar to shortcrust and is made with raw almonds, cloves and cinnamon. There is a also a light version without cinnamon, but with lemon and blanched almonds instead of raw ones, but we will talk about the brown one.
"Linzer mass" is a pipeable mass resembling that of macaroons and it is used to pipe the lattice pattern on top. However recipes vary a lot which isn't unusual for such an old kind of cake and often the same dough is used for both the bottom and the lattice.
In Austria the traditional choice of jam is red currant, elsewhere raspberry jam is used.
Now why did I call it an old kind of cake? In fact a Veronese countess wrote a cookbook in 1653 and mentioned the recipe for the first time which even makes it the oldest known cake recipe.

Back to my guest baker. Silvia makes several smaller tortes, but you can make a bigger one on a baking tray and cut it into pieces afterwards.
These are the ingredients for a batch of 3 to 4 smaller ones:

1 lb flour
3 eggs
5 tsp. baking powder
1 lb hazelnuts
1 lb butter
3/4 lb sugar
4 tbsp. schnapps (in this case Himbeergeist)
4 tbsp. milk
1 tbsp. cocoa
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 pinch of ground cloves
1 tbsp. ground coffee
raspberry jam
yolk mixed with a little milk

Mix the ingredients (except for the jam and yolk/milk mix) to make a kind of shortcrust dough and put the dough in the fridge for a few hours or overnight (depending on how sticky it is).

Roll out part of the dough until it's thin and put it into the baking tray(s) of your choice. Leave enough for the lattice pattern.

Cover it with the jam. Roll out the rest of the dough and cut strips to put onto the cake. Brush the dough strips with the yolk/milk mix.

Bake at 340° F for 30 to 40 minutes.

Enjoy!

Challenge baking - The fifth door

Challenge you may ask? Let's face it, although there are baker's genes on my paternal grandmother's side, I'm not the one who has inherited them. I stopped baking years ago, not because what I made was terrible or inedible, but because it was a challenge every time.
I hope you'll appreciate what I'm going through here for you!
This recipe is from the 1970 Gas Cooking and Baking Recipe Calendar. You met this calendar before, in the 1952 and the 1958 edition.

Here's what you need for the cinnamon slices (in metric units!)
150 grams of margarine (or butter)
120 grams of sugar (I would recommend less, though)
1 or 2 eggs (the recipe calls for one, but my dough called unmistakably for two)
2 1/2 tsp of cinnamon
1/2 tsp of cardamom
a pinch of salt
175 grams of flour

Cream margarine or butter until fluffy.
Add sugar, egg and spices and beat until sugar dissolved.

Add sifted flour.

Hit head (preferably your own) on the counter if you get crumbles like I did, then bravely add a second egg ... and beat the dough until smooth.
Make sure to remember the spots on the wall and counter where little bits of the dough fly, so you can clean them off right away before you get dough on your shirt because you don't own an apron.

 
Spread the dough very thinly on a buttered baking tray and bake for 20 minutes at 180° C (=356° F) in the middle of the oven.

Take out of the oven and cut into diamond shapes or whatever is aesthetically pleasing to you.

I like the crunchy edges best and could have probably tried to spread the dough even thinner into the corners, and the cookies are a little too sweet for me, but overall I think I did quite okay.
Is there a special victory dance for baking challenged people like me?


P.S. Romantic that I am I prefer baking in the half dark (possibly aided by the fact that the bulb in my ceiling lamp has been dead for a long time, but I like the small lights under the cupboards better anyway) which gives my dough a slightly romantic (as in dark) look as well. I hope you'll forgive me for that.
P.P.S. Some of the steps are not exactly the same in the recipe as you probably already suspected.

Gas cooking and baking recipe calendar or The seventh door

I introduced this calendar already in March, the 1952 edition in that case. Since the recipe for today was "roast saddle of venison" (on an ordinary Monday (back then, not today)??), I decided to check the 1958 edition instead.
Pineapple macaroons - now how does that sound?

The ingredients are:
3 egg whites
0.8 lb grated almonds
3 canned pineapple slices, cut up very small
0.5 lb sugar
1 tablespoon of pineapple juice
0.1 lb crystallized pineapple chunks

For the icing: 4 tablespoons of pineapple juice, 0.5 lb powdered sugar

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Add the almonds and the pineapple pieces, then the sugar and pineapple juice. Make macaroons from the dough and put on a baking tray powdered with flour to dry. After a few hours put the tray in your gas oven (after all this is what the calendar is about) and bake for 20 minutes on 2 (180° C or 356° F). Afterwards glaze the macaroons and decorate with the crystallized pineapple.

Ok, who's going to make these for me?

The 1958 calendar cover picture ;-)

Saturday night ramblings

We didn't have those for a while, did we?

Let's make it short however.

I baked. You might think this is not exactly a big achievement, but knowing me ... well, it is. I'm amazed and stunned by myself, so much actually that I can almost ignore the knuckle I burnt in my usual klutzy way. It's not bad, it doesn't really show, it just hurts to remind me I'm a klutz.

What do I care? I got something to show and to eat, and mind you, even if I'm saying it myself, they are good, my "Seelen" which is what these bread rolls are called. It translates to "souls".

It's not the only thing I achieved in the last days. I won't bore you with stories of grocery shopping and folding laundry, but just show you the good stuff.

Do you remember the Gingham fabric pattern I made? With the beads that didn't want to play nice?

Well, I made two other patterns and am about to finish a more cooperative Gingham cuff. I'm having way too much fun with these.

This one is listed already - Houndstooth I

I took most of the pictures for this one and already edited them, I just need one more shot of the snaps, but you know how it is - Argyle (I love this one and would love to see it in different color combinations)

And of course a bad sneak peek pic of my Gingham WIP.

Ehm, yes. Not that short after all ....

The thirteenth door - who wants to lick the bowl?

This recipe came into my family via my sister, from her cooking/baking class at school. Ever since it has been a tradition to make these for Christmas and although I'm not the baking kind and although I got quite a few weird looks by people who know me well, I overcame my inner "non-baker" to make some for to show you.
Actually there were a few bakers in my paternal grandmother's line, but that gene cried out when it saw me and ran for its life ...

Let's get going and make some "Rumschnitten". Which means "rum slices", by the way.

What you need - in metric numbers. When I tried to translate that into US measurements, I was accused of trying to mess with peoples' minds because the numbers were so odd, hehe.
Just use this converter and you'll be fine (I hope ;-)).

7 eggs (separated into yolk and egg white)
200 grams of butter or margarine
200 grams of sugar
200 grams of flour
200 grams of grated hazelnuts (I like to use almonds)
200 grams of finely grated baking chocolate

250 grams of powdered sugar
rum (I used whisky because I never have rum at home, but if you want your kids to be able to eat them, just use some other non-alcoholic flavor, it also tastes nice with lemon juice for example)

200° C, 10 to 15 minutes (that's 390° F).

Don't forget to pre-heat the oven to 200° C.
And now get ready to mess up your kitchen! If you are like me, that is. After baking my kitchen looks as if a herd of warthogs has run through. Warthogs with very sticky feet, that is.

First mix the sugar and the butter until it reaches a fluffy texture.


Now add the yolks, the flour, chocolate and nuts. This is a pretty heavy dough without any fluid, so be sure to mix well!


This is what the dough will look like. Tempting already, I tell you ...


Afterwards add the beaten egg white and fold it into the mix.


You'll notice it'll feel a little heavy in the beginning, but after a bit the dough will be getting smoother and it won't lose much of its fluffiness although it may seem so to you. Just be sure not to thoroughly mix dough and egg whites, but probably it's not necessary to tell you that unless you are a non-baker like me. "Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it" as Stephen Sondheim put it in "West Side Story". "Turn off the juice, boy." Noooo, not the oven's juice!
Instead we'll spread the dough on a baking tray now, about 1 cm high and into the oven it goes, for about 10 to 15 minutes. The ones you see here were in for 14 minutes and 23 seconds.


In the meanwhile I mixed the powdered sugar with some whisky for the icing of the cookies. Don't use too much fluid or the icing will run off, but I also highly recommend not to use too much fluid on yourself and leave nothing for the sugar ;-)


When the cookies are done, take them out of the oven, apply the icing and cut them while they are still warm.
Voilà, there you are. Enjoy!


P.S. I will not jump into one of the discussions about if it's good or not to lick the bowl. Let me just tell you that sometimes I wondered if I even should bother baking those things before eating ...