SusieJ's Advent Calendar December 10, 2008

The recipe: Apfelkuchen

You can still find good apples in December, so why not bake an Apfelkuchen? It's not complex (the dough for the crust is very forgiving) and tastes wonderful. It's best to use very tart apples, like Granny Smith. This is one of Heidi's wonderful recipes.

The surprise: Virtual gingerbread house

This gingerbread house is all the fun of decoration your own house, without the mess or calories. Years ago I'd hoped I could get my Flash and design skills up to this, but this would be hard to beat!

It happens to the best of us

My Tante Heidi is the best baker I know. She can bake three or four cakes in an afternoon without breaking a sweat. Each will be more delicious than the last. She and her daughter, my cousin Nina, bake at least a dozen Christmas cookies in one weekend (I can barely bake a half dozen in a month). Heidi gave me my first baking cookbook, and really showed me how to bake.

While visiting one summer, I offered to make my grandmother's lemon meringue pie, which Heidi and my godfather, Ernst, both love and have fond memories of. It felt odd searching to buy a pie plate in Germany; we eventually settled on using a springform Heidi already had.

I showed Heidi how to make an American-style pie crust, which is very different from a German Mürbteig. Then came blind baking the crust, that is, baking the crust by itself in the pan, before adding a cream or custard filling. Now, I only blind bake a crust once a year, at Thanksgiving, for the pumpkin pie. The recipe I use recommends freezing the crust in the pie plate for half an hour before backing. This way the crust edges don't slide or fall to the bottom.

I didn't remember this technique for the lemon meringue. I did remember the technique of "put something heavy and not burnable like beans or rice on top of the crust before baking." I forgot the part that says "put something like foil or parchment paper between the crust and the rice, or you'll be picking baked-in rice out of the crust for an hour."

Tell me about your own disaster!