This week's
Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, from the cookbook
Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, is
Kugelhopf, can be found on pages 61-63, and was chosen by Yolanda of
The All-Purpose Girl. If you would like to try the recipe before buying the book, click on Yolanda's site above and she will have it posted today.
Oh, yeah, this was one fine recipe. It took two days to assemble it, but it was really worth it as it was a big hit here at the house. A very fine use of flour, eggs, milk, yeast, butter, and sugar!
I had intended to give some of it away, but it never made it that far. It's GONE with the request that the recipe make a reappearance soon. (Pictured below is Mark enjoying it fresh and warm from the oven, declaring it "Excellent!")
Most of the two-day prep time was for the rising of the dough. Numerous bits of fiddling with dough...several rises and punch downs and waiting around (well, you didn't actually have to stand around while it was rising, but you did have to keep thinking about the time frames for each time which is a tad distracting).
I baked it in a bundt pan as I already had one of those and the Kugelhopf pan was over $30...not like me to buy a special pan if I know I am only going to use it once, so I didn't splurge as I wasn't certain how well this was going to be received. It turned out lovely in the bundt pan, so I am thinking that is the way I will go from now on. (If it looks a little lopsided, that's because I dropped the silly thing on the way to the oven, but it didn't drop far, and it landed right side up, although I think one side deflated a bit...didn't hurt the taste one single bit.)
The instructions were to baste it a bit with melted butter and sprinkle it with sugar, then add powdered sugar right before serving. I figured one kind of sugar was quite enough (and it was), so I skipped sprinkling on the powdered sugar at the end.
Asked what Kugelhopf was, I had to respond, "I don't know," so I just said it was sort of like bread and sort of like cake.
It's actually difficult to describe...but very delicious. It isn't very sweet, like a cake would be, except for the crunchy bits on the outside where the sugar and butter worked a little magic.
I used golden raisins as frankly I was getting a little tired of everything looking like chocolate or like it had chocolate chips in it, so I decided this week, I would go with the golden raisins instead of the dark raisins. Great choice...they looked very pretty and tasted delicious.
The texture is like a very light and airy bread (even lighter than brioche).
Would I spend two days making this again? In a heartbeat. My swimmer says, "Again, Mom, Make it Again, Please? It is so great and I can just slice it up and take it with me for breakfast before swimming." How can a mother say "no" to that? If the boy is willing to wake up at 4:30 a.m. each morning to go to swim practice, I certainly can make it a little more worth his while. Ulrike has me thinking along the lines of lemon and almonds to accompany those little golden raisins, and I am so going there with that in next one I make. Definitely a hit around here...I made the recipe exactly as in the book (well, except for the dropping part which was my own special touch, hopefully not to be repeated), and baked it for the time specified.
Next week's recipe was chosen by Isabelle of Les Gourmandises d'Isa, is Arborio Rice Pudding, White, Black (or Both), and can be found on pages 412-413.
Click here and then click on individual bakers' blogs at the site if you would like to see more of this week's recipe and the various ways people interpreted their quest. It is too late to join the online TWD baking blog, but you can always join us in spirit as the recipes for upcoming weeks are posted on the site and you can bake along in your own kitchen. See you there!