Frozen easterbunny special

This is the last of this year's easter presents:


Easter ice cream!

Take 200g carrot puree, add some lemon juice (probably 1-2 table spoons) and 150 g sugar. Adjust the flavor with a little bit of maple sirup, and mix 1/8 l heavy cream into it. Cool that mixture down in the fridge, and when it's cold, stir it well again (or don't if you'd like it to be orangy-marbled) and pour it into your ice cream machine. After 20-40 minutes you should have some beautiful creamy carrot-bunny-easter-special ice cream, that you can serve with caramelized walnuts.

Keep in mind - I have not yet tried this recipe myself (I create to many recipes and can't keep up with testing them..).
Depending on your taste & how sweet your carrots are you might have to play a little with the proportions, but based on my icing-experience this should make a real cool easter treat :-)

Introducing: Icecream Madness

Last week I had a visitor, Christian, who loves ice cream and always discovers the newest, strangest and most delicious ice cream creations in the freezer section, local ice creamery and private cookbook of secret ice creamers.. When I saw him last, he introduced me to Pomegranate-Chocolate, which is outstanding. This time, in Nashville, there were no really wild things to be found, but we ate lots of ice cream anyway...

This morning I remembered that there is one ice creamer in Nashville who is really crazy. She designs ice cream that no one has ever heard of, creations so utterly unspeakable that I have to talk about them here, starting now, tasting soon... Without further introduction:

Welcome to the new section of TasteBuds: Icecream Madness!, by Elin

My ice cream inventions date back to my first ice cream maker, obtained as a gift from my dear & master-chef mom in 1996, I believe. Maybe christmas 1995. A while ago.

I started simple: lemon ice cream, the most difficult and complex of the simple flavors that I know of. I tend to eat lemon ice cream in any ice cream store, first thing, to find out how they do it, what their philosophy is about and whether I wanna steal their recipe..
After years of making cream, yoghurt, and buttermilk based lemon flavors I figured that it is one of those things that one day I will discover perfection and die with heavenly lemon ice cream on the tip of my tongue.
So, I haven't tried anymore, I'll start again maybe when I turn 80 or so.. just in case I'm right.

After the first lemon, I became inventive. Some of it is actually quite good, although opinions varied about the smoked trout ice cream on horseradish whipped cream..

I wrote my private ice cream cookbook (and one I gifted to my mom a few years back, with pencil drawings of each recipe), containing some tested and lots of never realized recipes, ranging from classic sweet to savory, from standard compositions to crazy concoctions - be prepared, they will make their entrance into the world on online cooking.

Now.

:)

Easterbread

Happy easter!
As you can see, the easter bunny dropped in for a visit!
..and, no, this is not my cat but some poor kitty that could not fend of his/her can-opener's silliness and ended up engraved as feline easter bunny in the net.


Eastern in Germany is still a big holiday, actually the most important one after christmas. People visit family, children receive gifts, there is a lot of cooking and eating, and most of this is still somewhat traditional, at least there is a common framework to it all.

And it starts with breakfast (let me skip Karfreitag etc. which is not commonly observed, unless church is involved, and go straight for the good food..)
Besides the religious aspects of it, Eastern is a holiday that revolves around symbols for renewal, fertility and spring. Easter sunday starts in that spirit with a special breakfast, sporting more eggs and presenting them much nicer than usual.

Traditional easterbread dough is braided around hardboiled eggs and then baked - so your first food will be fresh, warm bread, from white flour, sometimes with raisins, very light and fluffy, typically with a crunchy crust - but also an egg, perfectly held in place by the bread like in a little basket, sometimes painted before baking.

German breakfast typically consists of bread, butter, sweet spreads such as marmelades and honey, boiled eggs, and sometimes sliced sausages/salami/ham and cheeses. Thus, while the general notion of bread, egg and things for a sunday breakfast is not out of the normal, the specialty about this breakfast is the presentation as well as the recipe for easter bread itself.

From the above bread version one makes typically one for each person at the table; but the larger part of the breakfast bread will be coming from this:


In my case, this is the same dough recipe as the egg-basket, only that this bread is braided and bigger. It is a yeast & white flour dough, with milk as the main liquid, some molten butter & eggs (about 3 eggs for 700 g flour). Typically it has a little bit sugar in it as well, and sometimes raisins; I added flax and sunflower seeds. The proportions of liquid to flour depend on how your flour behaves and on the size of the eggs - start with 1 cup or ~ 250 ml liquid, but be prepared to double that as you need it to be able to shape the dough but not have it stick to your hands like wet clay.. I typically warm up the milk with some sugar (~ 100g) and butter (about a stick, i.e. about 125 g) and then stir in my dried yeast and let it go for a little while. Dry yeast does not need that treatment, but it smells awesome..
Treat it like a normal yeast dough - let it rise, knead it, and give it some warmth and time before shaping it into the braids.
Brush it with egg yolk mixed with a little bit water, and bake it at 350 deg F for 50 minutes.

And then: have a wonderful breakfast!

Carrots for the easter bunny

Where there is an easter bunny there must be carrots.

While this is not a real traditional saying, there is certainly truth to it. During the easter holidays, carrots show up in form of Marzipan treats, as sugary decoration on pies, and, most importantly, in the carrot cake.

My version, as almost any other I've ever seen, has a combination of all, sugary, marzipany, and real veggie carrots to make sure the bunny gets plenty of vitamine A..

The recipe is based on a simple cake batter: equal parts (weights) flour, sugar, butter & eggs are mixed together, with some baking powder. To make it a carrot cake, one essentially replaces the flour with carrots, and, adds typically ground almonds, or, what I like a lot, ground walnuts. Either tastes great. I usually use 300 g each, and instead of 300 g flour I'd use 250 g finely shredded carrots + 50 g flour + 100 g walnuts. I also replace the usual white sugar with brown sugar, and some dark honey.
All that will make a thick flowing batter that is baked at 375 deg F (170-180 deg C) for about an hour.
The decoration, as seen on my cake on top, is easily made by squirting bought colored frosting onto parchment paper. Try to squirt it on in carrot shape to begin with, but it can be formed using a wet finger. Let it dry, and let the cake be cooled down before moving the deco carrots onto the cake..


Only with such a cake to hope for, the easter bunny may be in the mood to lay those nicely colored eggs in the carefully prepared nests which we as a kid still had to build from moss that we collected around the house. A nice, soft, green nest that would be filled the next day with eggs and chocolate and all kinds of cool things a rabbit could carry on his back...


Coloring eggs by the way is real fun, and can be done in very natural & creative ways - for example, onion skin is a good coloring agent - wrap the eggs in several layers of onion skin, tie it up with some thread and boil it - use yellow and red onions for different colors. Wrap the eggs first in textured cloth, then surround that by onion, or blue cabbage, and boil it - the egg will have a nice texture, showing the structure and boundaries of the cloth wrap.
However, buying coloring agents will help you to those very strong colors, of course. Onion peel is not quite that potent.

If there are kids around, I leave a little dough of the carrot cake out before the carrots are added, and bake it as two cookies that are flown together - when it is done, I carve out ears from the one "cookie", paint a face on the treat and glue it into a small nest that I made from green frosting. You can even "glue" some little sugar eggs into the nest, that also helps stabilizing the cookie bunny standing up.

After all that carrot cake, that makes one real happy easterbunny! :)

Lea in Luxembourg

Luxembourg is a beautiful tiny country between France, Germany and Belgium. It's native language sounds like a mix between french and german (here is a sound example with german translation), and is very similar to the local dialect of my home state Saarland, which is immediately bordering Luxembourg. The two languages are actually more similar to each other, than my dialect is to german. Naturally, the food and local traditions I grew up with are also very common to Luxembourg, and all this closeness gives me a sense of family pride when I write about Lea Linster.

Lea Linster received the Bocuse d'Or in 1989 (look at photos from this year's challenge), as the first, and to this day still the only, female chef. My parents recently had the "Menu BOCUSE D'OR" at Lea's restaurant, and my mom described it as "Just perfect." I never heard a rating that simple, almost speechless and admiring from her - she has praised chefs before, but perfect? I'm stunned. It sounds like it is not only worth writing home about, but also very worth looking at the menu a little bit closer. Here are two courses of the Menu Bocuse d'Or, photographed by my parents.

LOBSTER
Cooked in stock, unshelled, served with a small salad, tarragon sauceLAMB
Saddle of lamb in potato crust from the oven, in itss juice perfumed with rosemary

Lea is a very personable warm lady, and inquired about me when my parents told her they would come back with me some day, and that they took pictures of the meal to send them to me - when she heard that I like to cook, and that last time I visited home was especially into all that local traditional food that you cannot get anywhere else, she got excited and gave them a present for me: her cookbook, with a really sweet note she wrote to me:
Here is also a link to some of her recipes. Her cookbook is on the way to me, and she told my parents that there is also a great recipe for kniddelen in it, which are known as "Mehlknepp" or Mehlknoedel in Saarland. I look forward to reading her book, rediscover this dish, and will try it out and report as soon as I got the book in my hands.

Until then, when you go to Luxembourg, visit Lea Linster, give her my best regards and thanks, and have a "perfect" dinner. :)