First a recap of the recipe: Take the yolks of 8 eggs, and of 4 eggs the white. 8 loth sugar, spice to taste, beat all this together very well, then stir enough flour into it so that it makes a thick dough. Roll it well through, cut it and bake it till done. They can be rolled very thin, as they rise quite a bit. This makes about 70 to 80 cookies.
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Okay, I took a trip to the local supermarket to gather up the ingredients...Eggs, Flour, Sugar and lard (to try them fried as well as baked).
I had to guess what kind of flour might be appropriate as I was presented with a dizzying array of flours at the supermarket. As for the lard, I figure if Grandmother Dahms fried anything, it would have been in lard. Apparently, non-hydrogenated lard is better (so says Chef Google) but difficult to find and I am not up to rendering my own. As it will become apparent in the next picture, I had no need of all that sugar...
This is 8 loth of sugar. It's about 116 grams...that comes out to just a bit less than a cup of sugar...
The ingredients are ready. 8 egg yolks, the whites of 4 eggs, 8 loth of sugar and some "spice to taste"... for the spice, I added 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon. I whisked all those together before adding the flour.
Three cups of flour wasn't enough. When I tried to roll it out, it was just all sticky and mushy, so it went back into the bowl and I added more flour.
With about 3/4 more cup of flour (so, about 3 3/4 cups total), I ended up with a ball of dough that was sturdy enough to roll out.
After flouring my work surface and the rolling pin, I rolled the dough pretty thin as the recipe says to. It's probably 2-3 mm thick.
Next, I cut it into diamond shapes. Chef Google came to the rescue with instructions on how to cut and fold Schurz-Küchen.
Once the diamond shapes were cut, I cut about a 1" to 2" slit in the middle of each one. The small slits were better for the fancy folding and tucking step that comes next.
Then, you take one corner of the diamond and put it through the slit and with a little manipulation, you end up with the cute little shapes shown in the picture below.
The Schürz-Kuchen are ready for the oven. I set the oven temperature at 375 F and baked for 10 minutes (when it looked like they were done). Again, Chef Google helped with this.
This is what one looked like right out of the oven. I probably could have let them cook a little longer to get a real golden brown, but I think they would have turned into little bricks if I had.
On the broken surface, it's a pretty dense little cookie.
All prettied up with powered sugar and ready to eat. So, how did they taste? Well, a bit bland. They had the texture of a dense cake (maybe like a kind of dry pound cake) with a firm crust. Not very sweet at all with a hint of cinammon. More like the flavor of a rice cake than of a sweet treat. They certainly tasted authentic and I do think they turned out how they were "supposed" to. Still, the recipes I've found on Chef Google say to fry them, so that's next...
A few scoops of lard in the pan. I've never used lard for anything before, so I was just hoping to not burn down the house.
Once the lard melted, it behaved just like any cooking oil. I fried them til they were a golden brown on each side. It only took a few minutes.
The finished result. I dusted most of them with powdered sugar.
The air bubbles on the broken surface are a lot bigger in the fried version.
Here's a side-by-side comparison of the fried version and the baked version. Obviously, the baked version is much more dense.
Bottom left: Baked and plain, Top middle: Fried and dusted with powdered sugar, Bottom right: Baked and dusted with powdered sugar.
The fried ones where definitely an improvement over the baked ones. The outside was crisp and the inside was still pretty dense, like a very firm cake. As far as taste, they just had a little bit extra "something" that made them a little tastier. They still aren't going to win any prizes for sweetest dessert. The flavor is more like a biscotti. They seem like something you would eat while drinking your coffee or tea, not as a dessert.
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Congratulations to me! I made it through the first recipe without burning down the house and actually ended up with an edible product. Next up is Mürbeteich (Short Pastry Dough).
