The ingredients I use are

• bisquit (in this case using sponge fingers as a kind of substitute
• raspberry and Waldmeister jelly
• custard
• sliced almonds
• candied cherries
• whipped cream

To prepare the dish, first cook the jellies and the custard and let them cool down until they’re at most luke warm. Then use a big bown - glass looks nice and put the bisquit at the bottom, just covering it with the liquid jelly. The brilliant idea being that the jelly soaks the bisquit and solidifies around it. Adding some Sherry at this stage always seems to be a good idea. Throw some of the almond slices on top and hide a few halves of the candied cherries (a.k.a landmines of triflemaking) in there as well before covering it with custard. Then do a second layer, using the other kind of jelly. And top things off with cream that in turn can be decorated with almonds and candied cherries. Let this rest for a few hours so the jelly can solidify properly and then go yum-yum-yum all over it.

The very wide format is odd at first, but it’s actually a very clever thing for two reasons: Firstly, you frequently don’t have a lot of space on your work surface while cooking. This makes it difficult to put the cookbook on there - particularly if you are using a large chopping board and need to handle things like large dishes as well. However, you can always fit a book like this at the back of your work surface behind all the stuff you are using for work. If your eyesight is in reasonably good shape you may even be able to read it there…

Secondly, despite being a hardcover, the book’s binding is nice and flexible which means the book opens flatly on the table with no danger of the pages accidentally flipping over. That certainly improves the usability of the book, and I imagine that the very wide pages also help achieving this.

I quite like the book’s design as well. It is all of interesting, clean and useful. Just as it should be. With the pages being split horizontally into two columns, the narrow outer one of which contains the list of ingredients and names of the dishes while the wide inner one includes the short instructions. Simple lines are used as separators and Univers and Garamond are used as typefaces (the Garamond with the IMO ugly italics, though). All very reasonable, functional and simple. Hooray for German design in 1967.

Interestingly the book was published by Siemens, Germany’s favourite corporation for making everything from high-speed trains, to telephones with the shittest (I guess that’s a word these days) user interfaces, to nuclear power plants, to household machines. In fact, it seems that the purpose of this cookbook was to make housewives comfortable with the wonders that are electric stoves, blenders and other utilities. Hence you’ll quite frequently see Siemens’ (and occasionally other companies’) equipment in the background of the photos in there. But it’s still a reasonably useful cookbook - unlike the stuff you’d get these days. (However - as my mum informed me - the book’s index is a piece of crap [my words].)

Being a few decades old, the book also carries the style and thinking of that age. The photos have that yellowish 1970s look and - while doubtlessly being specifically arranged - do not have the shine and lifelessness of today’s food photography. There is grease, there are non-white dishes, there are backgrounds to be seen.

But what’s best are the chapter names which not only display the sexism of the age by describing kitchen tools as Das Handwerkszeug der Hausfrau - the housewife’s tools, by suggesting snacks for a Herrenabend without a female equivalent or by providing a chapter Gerichte für Junggesellen - dishes for bachelors. Oh my, how times have changed! The lazy bachelors all grow fat on frozen pizza these days, and this paragraph won’t be able to fit a full elaboration of my own 21st century culinary misogeny…

Example recipes seen around here: Träubletorte, Biskuitrolle.

Now the thing is that grandma isn’t always right. She just had preconceptions about things being hard. For example she used to say that making yeast dough is hard. Probably because that’s what she had been taught. Yet, of all the yeast doughs we (or more realistically: she) made, exactly none came out bad. And every single time she was delighted at how well it came out. Not being the cheerful type I simply concluded that making yeast dough isn’t hard, which in turn made it an easy but still time consuming thing to do.

And coming to think about it the thing that (spectacularly) failed at my earlier attempt of making a Biskuit was that I made a Biskuitrolle for which you bake a flat bit of the cake, spread jam on it and then roll it up. And the main problem was the rolling up. Instead of nicely rolling up, my cake mostly broke. Leaving me with a mess of tasty but broken cake that had jam all over it.

When my colleague recently brought a nice Bisquitrolle with him, I immediately had to ask what the trick was. The first trick was that his grandma made it, and the second was that you need to roll up the dough while it’s still hot. You place a towel on it, so it doesn’t stick together and then you roll it up until it’s cooled off. Once it’s cool you can put the jam or creamy filling on it - without fully unrolling it and then you can roll it up again just fine. Both easy and - as I learned - working rather well.

I also found a very simple recipe in an old cookbook for making the dough which worked suprisingly well. (Surprisingly because there were a variety of recipes and this was the most simple one with the advantage that I actually had all the ingredients around.) It requires:

• 3 eggs
• 3 tablespoons of cold water
• 150g sugar
• 1 pack of vanilla sugar
• 60g flour
• 60g starch
• 1 teaspoon of baking powder

You add the water to the eggs and give them a good beating until they become a thickish cream. Somehow the water seems to really improve the behaviour of the eggs here. Then you add the sugars to the cream and beat them in as well.

Finally you sift the flour, starch and baking powder onto the cream and carefully drag them into it. I assume that using the mixer for this step would destroy the creaminess a litte. From my experience I can also say that you may just get away with using 120g of flour if you don’t have any starch at hand.

The result of this is put on a rectangular baking tin covered with baking parchment (tin foil seems to work as well) and baked for 13 minutes at 220°C. After baking you immediately remove it and carefully peel off the parchment/foil. Then you put a towel on top and roll up the cake with the towel inside.

After it has cooled you unroll it as much as you can, remove the towel, put in some jam or other substances and roll it up again. I used mum-made raspberry-redcurrant jam and some almond slices, if you must know. As the ends will look a bit rough and uneven, you cut them off to give the nice look you probably wanted. This has the excellent side effect that you now have a very good excuse for eating the pieces you just cut off. Hmmm.

Anyway – I needed some meat yesterday, and thought about a different salad with meat. Simply by taking salad and putting some meat on top. And I ended up with this:

It started with some rucola, I then fried two sliced carrots in a pan and added two or three chopped up tomatoes to the mix later on. Those bacame all mushy and warm. This was salted, peppered and Cayenne peppered (a fresh chili might have been nice but wasn’t around) and then put to the side of the pan to create a free area for the steak. I only seared the steak briefly, leaving it raw in the middle.

Finally the steak was thinly sliced, chopped coriander was added to the tomato-carrot mix which was then mixed with the salad (giving an IMO nice hot-cold contrast when eating), this was put on a plate with a few steak slices on top and coarsly grated parmesan yet on top of that.

Eat with a buttered toast and grunt.

Cooking the dish was nice and simple. As I wanted rice to go with it, I first put some rice in the rice cooker. Then I halved the seedless grapes and put them in a medium-hot pot with plenty of melted butter (quantity: a knob – whatever that may be). It takes a moment for the grapes to become soft, so I started with that. While they are cooking you spice them with salt and pepper – where the pepper plus grapes combination turns out to be brilliant. At the end you’ll have soft-ish grapes which lost a bit of their colour and which are in a slightly spicy buttery sauce. Just before finishing to cook them add some lemon juice and half of the chopped chervil (OK I used rough parsley instead because I couldn’t figure out that chervil is Kerbel in German while at the supermarket) you bought.

While the grapes are simmering, fry the fish after salting and peppering it. First the side with the skin in an olive oiled pan for a few minutes and to finish it off turn the pieces and fry the other side while adding some extra butter for bonus goldenness and butteriness. While doing that I found that the thin slices of fish are rather fragile and like to fall apart when you turn them over.

And once you did all that, dinner is ready. Serve as rice + fish+ grapes + leftover chervil and you’ll be fine.

Cheers to The Guardian and Mr Rhodes for the idea.

[Wondering whether I should put an amazon link or not… I quite like the recipe but seeing the guy’s picture on the book titles reminded me that he’s the TV cook I really don’t like, so I wouldn’t buy his book… Hmhmhm.]

• 125g butter or margarine
• 125g sugar
• 3 eggs
• lemon zest
• baking powder
• 200g flour
• a little milk
• 500-750g of apples or other fruit

Preparation

You will need a medium sized bowl and a hand mixer for this. Pre-heating the oven to 200°C is a good step to start.

Make sure the butter isn’t too cold and hard and mix it for a short while so it becomes a bit creamy. Then add the sugar and mix for a little, then add the eggs (3 small ones, 2 will do if you get XL eggs) as well as the lemon zest (or a little lemon flavour powder/essence) and continue mixing for a while. You should have thinnish creamy mass after this. Keep mixing and add the baking powder and flower as well as a bit of milk. Dose the milk such that the dough remains quite soft (like muffin dough, say). Then put the dough into a well-greased spring form of 26-28cm diameter.

Now peel the apples, remove the pips and core and cut it into four to six wedges. Make about four length-wise cuts in the outer side of the wedges. These will open up a little during baking and give the cake a great look. Then put the wedges on the batter and press them in slightly.

That’s it. All that remains to do is baking the cake for around 45 minutes at 200°C and to enjoy it. I recommend serving the cake with a bit of icing sugar on top, slightly cooled with freshly whipped cream.

The cake can also be made with virtually any other fruit. Cherries work well, particularly those from a glass. And fresh rhubarb is definitely worth a try. For an extra twist you can add almond slivers on top before baking. The photo below shows the cake with apples and rhubarb:

add some celery, onion and garlic:

after a while add tomatoes, chickpeas and spinach (unfortunately of the frozen kind at this time of the year, but that worked surprsingly well):

then stew that with some broth for three quarters of an hour and finally add some ham oil and – fun extra hint! - grated hard boiled egg on the top. Tastes great.

But my omnivorous self wasn’t content with that so there was also a salad before – where I used what I scraped out of the tomatoes that went into the soup plus some balsamic vinegar for a tomato dressing – and some Waldmeister jelly with custard. Both of which come in little bags an need stirring but I paid enough attention to the custard that it didn’t get a yucky skin for a change. Yummy and mostly green, all that.

Did I mention there’s also a cake?

The cake has a thin shortcrust dough at the bottom and red currants in a kind of almond meringue on top. Its blend between sweet and sour is just perfect and I’m pretty sure I could eat it every day.

The big problem with the cake are its ingredients. Not only can red currants be quite pricey – more relevantly their season seems to be very short and easy to miss. Thus, on seeing them in the supermarket two weeks ago I immediately bought a pack… just to have my flatmates eat half of them before I could get hold of the recipe. Another week, another shopping spree and a quick digital photo sent from my mum’s cook book (digital cameras + e-mail seem to be the 21st century fax) and I was in business. So for my future memory and your enjoyment, here comes the recipe. You’ll need the following ingredients:

For the crust:

• 200g of flour
• a tiny bit of baking powder
• 1 egg
• 50g of sugar
• lemon zest
• 100g of soft butter or margarine

• 500g of red currants
• 5 egg whites
• 200g of sugar
• 100g of ground almonds (or more)

First prepare the crust: Mix the ingredients in the order given above, and knead a dough of them which shouldn’t be sticky but shouldn’t be crumbly either. I’d rather have the dough a bit on the greasy side to make sure it doesn’t stick to the pan. Roll out about half of the dough on the bottom of a well greased round (26cm diameter) baking tin [we typically use a Springform in Germany, a word and device which at least according to Google could be known in the rest of the world as well]. Then make a thinnish roll from the rest of the dough, place it along the edge of the tin and press the dough upwards, giving you a nice and thin outer crust for the cake.

Next for the filling: First you need to wash the red currants and remove the little wooden bits. That can take a moment, so it might be good to do it in advance. Next whip up the egg whites so they’re really firm and whip the sugar in as well, giving you a stiff-ish shiny mass. Then drag the almonds into the mass and split it in two. Put one half aside for a moment and carefully add the red currants to the mass. Then put that mixture onto the crust in the tin. Finally put the other half on top – which will give you a nice and slightly crisp-meringuey top.

Bake at about 180°C for 55 minutes.

In my opinion it’s best to let the cake cool off, then put it into the fridge and remove it about half an hour before eating, which will give you a lovely room-temperature crust but refreshingly cool berries. Having some whipped cream of top doesn’t hurt either…

Ugh, this photo just doesn’t do the cake justice…

Turns out the cake recipe comes from the So schmeckt’s besser cookbook.

As there were a couple of bananas in the kitchen that were starting to go brown, I went for a banana bread. Not only does this mean you don’t have to eat the squishy and possibly too tasty bananas – I’m not a big fan – having those ‘bad’ bananas is actually better for banana bread as they are more squishy and thus distribute better in the batter and they are their taste is stronger, which is just perfect for banana bread.

And making it was simple. First get some fat (around 200g of margarine I’d guess), whip it up a bit then add some sugar (150g?), vanilla sugar, baking powder (I used around half a German pack, which I’d guess are two to three teaspoons), eggs (I used three). I also found some ground almonds which needed to be used up so those went in as well. Then the bananas and finally flour and a dash of milk balanced to have a texture that still easily tears but isn’t liquid.

Finally I put it in a baking tin and into the oven (200°C) until it looked finished. It’s not extremely pretty but it has a firm crust now and is still of moist banana goodness on the inside. Just the way I like it (although I assume that some people can’t stand this).

half a litre of cream, a few spoons of sugar, vanilla and a three leaves of gelatine. I was quite keen on trying that out as I’ve never used gelatine for cooking myself. The process is rather simple. You add the sugar and vanilla to the cream and boil it. While that’s happening, you put the gelatine in a bowl of water, so it can soak a bit. After the gelatine is soft and the cream has boiled a bit, you take the cream off the stove, add the gelatine and stir it under.

Then you put the resulting liquid in a large glass dish, or in serving size glasses. As what you’ll be eating is essentially pure cream, remember to keep the servings small. Let them cool for an hour or two and then put them into the fridge, so they can become properly solid. That’s it.

Using proper vanilla to do this is probably the preferred method, but it’s rather pricey. So we settled for a compromise between ordinary vanilla sugar and the real stuff: A sort of poncy vanilla sugar that’s made with Bourbon vanilla and has those black dots in it. While I’m not 100% sure how natural the whole thing was, its vanilla taste and colour was much more intense than that of ordinary vanilla sugar, giving you a strong vanilla taste in your Panna Cotta. As the Panna Cotta only solidfies slowly, you’ll find all the black bits of the vanilla sugar at the bottom of the glass, which is a bit of a shame and actually looks rather weird.

The vanilla taste may be all nice and dandy but it’s not too exciting, so you can add further things to the dessert. We used ‘Rote Grütze’ for that, a German berry dessert which is quite nice. But I guess that fresh strawberries or blueberries might have been even better.

What still irritates me, though, is that the recipe is so simple. Perhaps it was just a simple student version that I got hold of. I’m also interested to try some variations. Making it with slight less fat – perhaps just a quarter litre of cream with a quarter litre of milk. Not that I’m into dieting now but with the current recipe, you basically end up feeling very stuffed after only eating a little. That way, you might be able to eat more. I’d also be curious to see how using coconut milk would work out. That wouldn’t be properly Italian, but sounds quite good.