Cookfolio

Have ever wondered where to get that special cake for your birthday, well look no further! The Bagel Alley in Wassenaar is your new favourite destination. These ladies know their cake! There is no ‘slagroom-boring-Dutch-cake’ to be found, just seriously delicious cake. Read more about Bagel Alley and the cake above on SuzyOge.com.

P.S. The cake was to die for by the way, shame there were no left overs.

[flickr]photo:3827049446[/flickr]

If you have ever been to a Dutch birthday party then chances are high that you have been treated to a slice of Dutch Apple Cake. Even thought the Dutch have a really sweet tooth there really is not that much of a selection at the bakery. They also tend to prefer what they like and not venture into unknown territory.

But then again Dutch Apple Cake is one of the best! Most people take the easy route and head to the bakery or Hema for a good Apple Cake. Others, me too at times, head to the supermarket for a cake mixture. This weekend it was time for some real baking and so I pulled out some books to search for the recipe. My usual move would be a search on Google.com but I was hoping that at least one of my cooking books would provide me with a good recipe.

I was in luck. A couple of flicks through the Margriet Margriet Kook Boek and I had found two recipes that were straight forward and didn’t require an extra trip to the supermarket. I did adapt it by adding a jam glaze, more sugar to the pastry (by mistake) and a tablespoon of cornflour to the apples but I heard no complaints and only praise once the cake was ready to devour. I also loved the cake but as I only had the bigger cake tin it was flat and petit, not at all like the hearty thick big original cake. So that means maybe I will make it again when I get my cake tin back!

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the whole reason I made this recipe is because we have about 2 bags of apples from our back yard! Yippe… third year around and the taste is fabulous.

Ingredients
200 gr flour
75 gr castersugar
pinch of salt
1 egg yolk
100 gr cold butter or margarine
extra knob of butter
500 gr peeled and sliced(or diced) apples
ground cinnamon

Method
Heat oven to 170ºC. Sift flour, sugar and salt in a bowl. Add the egg yolk and small blocks of butter and crumble the mixture with your hands blending all the ingredients together. Grease the tin with butter and cover the tin with a  thick layer of the pastry dough. Mix apples and cinnamon (I added sugar, we had sour apples) in a bowl, I also added a tablespoon of cornflour. Spread the apple mix over the pastry dough and bake the cake in the middle of the oven for 45-60 mins. Let the cake cool down in the tin before removing it. I glazed the cake while it was still warm with raspberry jam. ‘Eet smakelijk“!

An unusual cake, it scores badly on appearance but the taste definitely makes up for it! I think to liven it up it would be nice to add some colour, maybe pink

Ingredients:
250 gr flour
325 gr sugar
4 eggs
salt
vanilla sugar
1/2 cup water
baking paper

Method:
Beat eggs, sugar and a pinch of salt for 8 minutes. Add vanilla sugar, sifted flour and water, mixing carefully to retain fluffiness. Pour mixture into a lined steamer pan. Wrap a teatowl around the steamer to seal the pan. Steam the cake for about 45 mins. Serve with butter or margarine.

Slamat makam

[flickr]photo:3690150742[/flickr]

Sometimes it’s just easier to order a cake. Especially when you have no time left and can’t think of any ‘no fail’ cake recipe. I find that most recipes that I have in Australian books never seem to work her in the Netherlands.

So luckily we have Hema.nl to order fun coloured cake. Selma had already said that she would prefer the Twitter bird instead of a photo of her. So as the days went by, and time was running out I still had to design a nice image.

I emailed the folks at mysocialbuttons.com to ask if they had a bigger image of the Twitter bird. Randa Clay kindly responded with a link and pointed out that it was actually the Twitterific image that I was looking for.

The rest was easy now I had the key element. I twigged a Twitter page, uploaded the image and picked up the ready made cake in the store 2 days later! Selma was so happy to see her favourite bird and the cake was delicious and really tasty. Shame that we had to cut the bird but it had to be done!