Alpha Bakers - Dattelkonfekt

German baking is a great thing. I feel cozy just thinking of it. In my mind, German bakeries are full of dark, sour bread and gingerbread. Stodgy anise and apple filled yeasted pastry. In this mind palace of mine, all German dessert is half breakfast, which is exactly how I like my dessert. Between that and my grandmother's signature kompot, I am a true daughter of my Eastern European ancestry. But we knew that by now, of course. Can't wait for that Polish Princess (next week's recipe, a riff on a modern Polish status cake). I'm also pretty excited for this book.

Dattelkonfekt has many of the ingredients I love--meringue, sturdy sweetness, simplicity--and although I'm not usually given to the sticky sweetness of dates, I do eat more of them around Passover, especially when  I'm feeling Sephardic. So, in a way, this cookie links my Jewish identities. It's a perfect Passover treat, in that it's both flourless and kind of tastes like charoset, at least the date/orange kind I've been making in recent years. That said, my mind has been kind of elsewhere, and I baked this recipe late and took no pictures, and messed around with it.

The original recipe calls for an equal amount of dates and almonds, ground finely and folded into a sturdy egg white meringue with sugar and vanilla and not much else. My food processor was a bit too small for the date mixture, so I ended up with some lumps, although I helped out with my hands. I had no almonds, so I ground up a pile of walnuts. Walnuts are more oily than almonds, so my date mixture remained lumpy, but I thought their bitter edge cut the dates nicely. I also ran out of white sugar, so a little brown sugar entered the mix, which added moisture (bad in a meringue) and also made the cookies more prone to burning. It did add another darker flavor element, though, which worked.

I baked on a humid day, and had the aforementioned extra moisture, so it was no surprise that my cookies came out flat and chewy. They were no beauty queens, but they had a kind of health food cookie satisfaction (basically sugar). I took them to work and put them on the break room table, then noticed there were several bags of oreos there, left over from a book club meeting. I ate six oreos and left the dattelkonfekt. True story.*

*It was probably more like 7 or 8 oreos. I love oreos.

Sticky Sticky Toffee with Lemon Peel, Raisins, Dates, and Delicious

The dessert so nice, I blog about it twice.

The last time I brought up Sticky Toffee Pudding around here was back in 2009, when Miriam (then dubbed the 'reluctant foodie,' made David Lebovitz's recipe as a guest post. Time has passed, Miriam has gone from reluctant to as obsessive as the rest of us (she owns a cake stand and hosts several-course dinners), and Rose Levy Beranbaum is bringing sticky back.

Rose's version of Sticky Toffee Pudding, that extra-Brit dessert, begins by boiling a cup of stout, adding baking soda, and pouring the whole thing over a bunch of dates. When well soaked, everything is pureed. My dates were very old, so I was worried that they would be too dried out. That turned out to be only half the problem, as I only had about 2/3 of the amount that I needed for the recipe. The pantry came to the rescue, and in addition to my dry dates I added a few tablespoons each of lemon peel, orange peel, sultanas, and zante currants. Soft and gooey and lemony.

The Reluctant Foodie: Sticky Toffee Pudding

Photo courtesy of Sarah Bishop-Stone. Note Moosewood Cookbook display stand.

Most of my friends are at least semi-foodies--they work in the restaurant industry, they love to cook and talk about restaurants, or they just live in New York, which pretty much qualifies regardless of other factors. The yearly gift exchanges put on by my theater company tend to resemble bridal showers, with all manner of woks and wine glasses and serving bowls and cake stands being passed back and forth. We did have one half-holdout, though, a girl who demanded that her pyrex casserole dishes be accompanied by some big earrings, at least.

While I'm sure she maintains a similar gift-related stance, I think we've finally won Miriam entirely over to the dark side.* Not only did she just admit to watching an NYTimes video about beets, she has baked at least four times in the last month. "People were just so excited to get the cookies," she said, at which I nodded sagely and pointed out that this was a largeish part of my motivation. I'm happy to say that she's taken inspiration from this blog, and two out of four have been World Peace Cookies and Salted Oatmeal Cookies.

For her birthday, Miriam attempted her most ambitious project to date, Sticky Toffee Pudding, and requested to detail her triumph in a guest post. Here she is:

"I spent Passover of 2006 in London, visiting my then-boyfriend's family, which favored lengthy and delicious meals, and kept a fairly loose version of kosher-for-Passover. One day, at a riverside inn an hour outside the city, whose location had something to do with "The Wind in the Willows," I ordered a sticky toffee pudding for dessert, thinking that "pudding" was a safe bet for something flourless. It wasn't until I was halfway through with one of the most extreme desserts I've ever had that I even realized that what I was eating had clearly been leavened and baked, and by that point I was too engrossed to care.

When we got home, Katya was convinced to make a sticky toffee pudding for us, and since then I've had it in the back of my mind as something complicated but not completely impossible to make at home--so my 29th birthday seemed like the right occasion to try. The dates and molasses required advance planning (cf. the delis in New Haven don't sell any food), and I had to sub in half-and-half for one of the cups of cream (there seemed to be one 8-oz carton of heavy cream in all Connecticut), but it was delightful and impressive for my birthday guests. This recipe is something I would never have attempted a year ago.

I hereby give you my adaptation of David Lebovitz's recipe for sticky toffee pudding, with the following notes: 1) half-and-half worked just fine in the toffee sauce, 2) I used regular dark brown sugar and no ginger, 3) I would make extra sauce next time, since I ran out of it before I ran out of pudding, and 4) I was initially worried because the sauce didn't seem to be thickening in the pan, the way he describes, but once I took it off the heat it thickened right up. Definitely serve warm and with vanilla ice cream." - Miriam

Sticky Toffee Pudding
Adapted from David Lebovitz
Adapted in turn from Sweet! (Da Capo) by Mani Niall

For the toffee sauce:
2 cups (500ml) heavy cream
1/2 cup (120g) demerara or muscovado sugar (or another dark brown sugar)
2 1/2 tablespoons golden syrup or molasses
pinch of salt

For the pudding:
6 ounces (180g) pitted dates, snipped or chopped
1 cup (250ml) water
1 teaspoon baking soda
optional: 1/3 cup (40g) candied ginger, chopped
1 1/4 cups (175g) flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
4 tablespoons (55g) unsalted butter
3/4 cup (150g) granulated sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 350F (190C) and butter an 8 1/2-inch baking dish.

2. Make the toffee sauce-bring the cream, demerara or turbinado sugar, golden syrup (or molasses) and salt to a boil in a medium saucepan, stirring often.

3. Lower heat and simmer, stirring constantly for about 5 minutes, until the mixture is thick and coats the spoon. Pour half the sauce into the prepared baking dish and place the mold in the freezer, and reserve the other half for serving.

4. To make the pudding, in a medium saucepan, heat the dates and water. Once the water begins to boil, remove from heat and stir in the baking soda. Add the ginger, if using, then set aside, but keep it slightly warm.

5. In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

6. In the bowl of a standing electric mixer, or by hand, heat the butter and granulated sugar until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs, then the vanilla. (Don't be alarmed if the mixture looks a bit curdled.)

7. Stir in half of the flour mixture, then the date mixture, then add the remaining flour mixture until just mixed. Don't overbeat the batter.

8. Scrape the batter into the prepared baking dish and bake for 50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with moist crumbs attached.

9. Remove the pudding from the oven, and let cool slightly before serving.

Serving: Spoon portions of the cake into serving bowls and douse with additional warm toffee sauce. Whipped cream or vanilla ice cream are good accompaniments, although I enjoy it just as it is.

Note: To make the pudding in advance, bake the cake without the toffee in the bottom. Let cool, then cover until close to serving time. Poke the cake about fifteen times with a chopstick. Distribute half of the sauce over the top, as shown in the photo, cover with foil, then re-warm in a 300F (150C) oven, for 30 minutes.

*To be clear, Miriam has always cooked, and loved food, she just lacked grocery stores and all cooking implements for a little while there, and so the obsession couldn't take hold with the same rigor.