Toasting to Germany

With all of the events we having going on in our lives I’m surprised we eat at all sometimes. This week Frannie you had a report due on Germany, and to my surprise you blindsided me with having to cook a German dish for about 100 people. After trolling through a few recipe books and the internet AND convincing you that although black forest cake is a wonderful treat, it’s not the best thing to make if the cherries are not in season. Moreover, since beer was definitely off the menu for grade school kids, you and I decided on a very lovely German apple cake recipe. 

I think this might be the first time I’ve had you try to cook anything on your own from scratch – aside from peeling the apples, but don’t worry that will come in time or you can always get one of those really fun peeler/slicers we see on the cooking shows. I thought you did a great job getting the ingredients together and even the calculations for doubling the recipe, and if our oven would ever cook things in the time it’s supposed to it would be a miracle but even that didn’t slow us down. It was nice to have an afternoon with you in the kitchen, talking about life and teaching you how to read a recipe, and the smell of the apples and cinnamon as they were baking, was to die for. I only hope it tastes as good as it smelled coming out of the oven.

So what did we learn this week? Well, you and your sister still need to work on communicating things to me a little sooner than you normally do. You learned that depending on the dish, the tartness of the apples makes a huge difference in the flavor of the dish – Granny smiths for this cake definitely. In addition, I think I learned that spending an afternoon in the kitchen – planned or not – with my daughters has got to be one of my favorite things to do. I need to be reminded of that from time to time.

Tips for making this cake:

-          Use tart apples and slice them small

-          I think I might try to add nuts next time – maybe pecans

-          This is definitely more of a coffee cake than a dessert cake and it did call for a cream cheese frosting that neither one of us is fond of so don’t worry about topping it unless you want to

Next week we are going south of the border, I will be planning for the Coaches dinner and figuring out how to make Carne Asada and Fajita Chicken for 200+ people.