Jam traybake - kavart tészta

 

Going through all the mess in the house, another recipe book surfaced, this time one with my favorite recipes from my grandma's cakes, in fading ink. I guess it is time to retry them all and digitize them before they fade forever.

The simplest of all is a traybake, made with few ingredients and jam, an easy and cheap one from the good ol' communist days of empty shelves. 

The flavor resembles that of a banana bread without the bananas, but if you have some laying around bananas can be added. I did.

I also reduced the sugar amount in the recipe from 300 g to 200 g knowing that I'll add the bananas, plus, due to over the 22 years of low sodium & lower sugar cooking we would probably not like it with that much sugar/flour ratio.

Ingredients for the basic cake (really good on its own)

2 large eggs

200 g (1 cup) sugar (the original recipe asked for 300 g sugar)

300 g (2 cups) flour

1 lemon zest & juice

2 heap-full tbsp of jam (I added strawberry to make a strawberry-banana bread, but anything works very well), it would be 4 tbsp measured strictly by American tbsp standards

1 tsp cinnamon (optionally add cloves, and cardamom, too)

1 tsp vanilla essence 

pinch of salt

250 ml (1 cup) milk

1 tsp  baking soda (you can add 1/2 tsp baking powder + 1/2 tsp baking soda if you don't like the taste of one or either of them in a cake)

1/2 cup flavorless cooking oil

Optional (my grandma's recipe did not ask for any, but I used to sprinkle walnuts anyway)

bananas (I mixed in 3 bananas that I had on the counter, overripe to be eaten as is)

walnuts, pecans (1/2 - 1 cup), preferably soaked (I didn't have any pre-soaked nuts, so I just chopped about 1 cup of pecans and divided it on top of the two breads)

Preheat the oven to 360F, and line a 22cm x 35 cm tray (9" x 13") or two banana bread trays (5" x 9") with parchment paper, or grease with butter and sprinkle with flour to prevent sticking.

Sift the flour, and mix in the salt and the dry spices, and add the baking powder to the flour mix, and / or the baking soda to the milk.

Whisk the eggs together with the sugar, add vanilla, the 2 tbsp of jam, the lemon zest and juice, 

At this point you can mix in the banana, if you add any.

Then pour in the milk (with the baking soda), add the cooking oil, mix thoroughly. Sift in the flour, and mix for 5 minutes until smooth (grandma's recipe asked to be mixed for 10 minutes, but I don't know if that is really necessary, especially with a stand mixer).

Mix in the soaked, drained nuts. I like them soaked because they will not absorb the moisture from the cake. If you did not soak them n worries, just sprinkle them on top of your batter. That's what I actually did, I very much like some crunchy nuts on top of my cake 😄.

Bake on the middle oven shelf for about 40 minutes until golden brown.

Remove tray(s) to a rack, cover with a kitchen towel, and let it rest for about 10 minutes. You can then remove it from the tray if you wish, or cut them into smaller, easier to store, blocks if necessary, or just leave them in the tray until serving. As it stands the moisture dissipates thorough the cake and makes it wonderfully moist, and I prefer to let it sit for about 2 hours (at least) after baking.

Do not cut into tiny serving sizes before you are actually serving them, they dry out much faster. I like the IKEA cake plate with cover, keeps the cakes moist and it looks awesome, too. Stores without any issues for 2 days at room temperature. It doesn't last longer in our family.

Bon appetite!

Korvapuusti - frozen raw and baked fresh

Nothing new under the sun, but I wanna share with you how to enjoy only the right amount of sweets a day, and have some goodies hassle free later.
When you make korvapuusti, or Dallaspulla for example, freeze the amount you don't need.
When to freeze them?
Raw, just when you would put them in the oven to bake, maybe 5 minutes earlier.. Meaning, if you would leave them 10 minutes to rise after they are cut, let them only 5 minutes and put them in the freezer.
When cutting, instead of placing them on a parchment paper covered tray, place them on a thin, straight support, like a wire rack covered with parchment paper, wrap with plastic wrap and put them in the freezer. When they get properly frozen, put them in a bag and keep them, obviously, in the freezer. They survive for weeks, even up to three months.

When you wanna bake them, just take them out of the freezer, place them on a tray covered with parchment paper. Heat the oven to 225 C, or 430 F, and bake them for 10 - 12 minutes.
Tadaaamm.. 
They are soooooo good, even better than when you made them at first place, because now you skipped the hassle of preparation and could focus only on their taste..

Foszlós kalács - challah

This is not the Jewish challah. This is an egg-free, much more white, more fluffy version my Grandma used to bake for every Xmas and New Year. I wasn't sure whether I really liked it so much, or was it just the memories that made it so good.
Anyway, in our region this kalács, and not the "bejgli", is the typical Xmas treat, and I was looking for that particular taste..
In our village everybody makes "kalács" kinda the same way I cook: "I had this much milk for the purpose, so I added the required amount of yeast, and added as much flour as it took to make a soft dough".. But DON't ask for the recipe.. *Sigh*...
Noh, yeah, but my fingers are trained for the bread, "pulla" and "aranygaluska", so I was quite skeptic I'm gonna make any good kalács without some guidelines.
And I found some at Szellem a fazékban blog. Not so useful ones, after all, but it gave me courage to start :). In the recipe says 200 ml milk, but there is no way you can work that amount of flour together in a soft dough with that little amount of milk.. You can of course try, but when I saw that about 1/3 of my flour didn't even cling together with the rest, I just added another 100 ml milk, and a bit later another 50 ml, 'cause I didn't find the dough very soft. At the end of the day, it was still my fingers I used for measurement :) and forgot about the recipe, but I made it at least the same shape as in the recipe because it looked soooo great (isn't it?), regardless that this is not the traditional shape for a "kalács".

Ingredients
600 g flour (~1 liter or ~4 cups)
30 g fresh yeast, or 10 g dry yeast, about 2 heaped tsp
1/2 tsp salt
100 g icing sugar (3.5 ounce)
125 g butter (1cup)
350-400 ml hand warm milk, (1 1/2 - 1 3/4 cups) depends how much the flour takes in to make an easy to work with dough, not sticky but not to hard either. 

I used a bit more then 350 ml milk, and though it looked OK, it was hard to roll it out after 45 minutes raising. So, next time I will for sure use 400ml to make a bit softer dough.

Work it together in a smooth, easy to kneed dough (needs quite a bit of kneading to get enough air in it), and let it rise for 30-45 minutes, until the dough grows to about double size.
Divide the dough into 3 parts, roll it out in about 20x40 cm sheet, spread the filling, roll it on the longer edge and try to keep the length. If it shortens just roll it a bit thinner and longer.
Do the same with all three portions and make a nice braid to fit your tray.
Let it rise for another 20 minutes, spread some egg on top, or if you want to leave the eggs out completely then just a bit of water. Let it dry for a minute, or two.
Meanwhile preheat the oven to 190 C (375 F) and bake it for 30 minutes on the upper racks. When ready wrap it into kitchen towels and let it cool for about 1 hour. Ready to be served with chocolate milk in the morning.

For the original shape just divide the dough into two, roll it out in a 20x25 cm rectangle, roll it up on the longer edge and place them in two 10x25 cm (preferably 10cm high) trays. Bake for 30 (20? I shell try) min.

Filling
100 g icing sugar (3.5 ounce)
100 g ground poppy seeds or walnut (3.5 ounce)
milk, enough to boil it in a soft cream

The filling is for 1 roll, you will need 3, adjust the amount based on whether you want 2 nut and 1 poppy seed, or 2 poppy seed and 1 nut, or all of them the same.
Boil them together for couple of minutes until they blend nicely in an easy to spread, creamy texture.
 
And one last thing!! If you have leftovers that are dry and you don't feel like eating them as such, beat one egg, (add two tablespoons of milk), dip the kalács slices in the egg and fry them in hot oil, for just couple of minutes, ~1/2 min a side. It is a sort of french toast. Sprinkle it with icing sugar, and tadam, you have a new, fresh breakfast/dessert reusing the leftovers.. It is yumi.

PS. In the pic you see the "kalács" with cocoa powder and cinnamon filling, something you can try as well.
And one secret :). To make the nice cocoa swirl like in the pic don't add cocoa powder straight to the whole amount of dough you want to be with cocoa. Take a large pinch of dough, add a tsp cocoa, work it together well. When the small pinch of dough is smooth, add it to the whole amount of though you wanna be dark, and kneed it together.