Here’s something you don’t see all the time on today’s ultra-slick cooking blogs. A confession: sometimes, things don’t work out as planned.
For Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) this year, I decided to make one of those fabulous checkerboard cakes I’ve seen all over the Internet. Sure, they sell special cake pans to make them, but that’s just kitsch, right?
Special pans: Who needs ‘em, amIright?
Anyway, all the pans do is let you mix and match the bits and pieces a little more easily. Surely, I can do that on my own, at home, with nothing more than my own ingenuity?
Nope.
You can’t really see from this picture how wonky and falling-aparty these cakes really were. But don’t take my word for it… you can see the whole thing coming together (and/or falling apart) in this delightful real-life video
One of the things I missed most when I started keep kosher was JELLO. Ooey, gooey, jiggly jello. Mmm, mmm, good. And totally, totally not kosher.
A few years later, I discovered a REAL and delicious brand of kosher gelatin, which we used to buy often enough in Toronto to keep me happy.
However, here in Israel, there’s no such thing, just the insipid brands of kosher jello, which are based on vegetable gel and don’t – in my limited experience – set up properly to a shiny crystal-clear texture.
So I’ve started playing with real gelatin since we’ve been here, because it’s cheap and plentifully available – and, as I think I’ve commented before, mysteriously pareve. There are two kinds; the red package is meat-source and the blue is fish-source. From bad experience in Toronto, I’ve found that fish gelatin gives a weird tangy taste to everything you use it in. This would probably be fine in a citrus-themed dessert (as shown on the box), but definitely not fine in a chocolaty dessert, or, perhaps, a strawberry one.
For me, the only real flavour of Jello is strawberry. Happily, I have discovered a not-too-hard way to make authentic-tasting strawberry jello right here in Israel using an all-important Secret Ingredient…
Kool-Aid!!!
Okay, sure, you can’t buy Kool-Aid locally here in Israel, at least, that I know of. In Canada either, for that matter; I searched in vain when I was there in March, but they’ve gone over to those “water-flavour” drops which are pre-sweetened artificially. Ugh.
Speaking of “artificially” – you can use this method to make delicious all-natural jello as well. I have made jello before using ONLY strawberries, when they’re in season (you can’t get fresh strawberries out of season here). I boil them in a heavy-bottom dutch oven with a little sugar until they are completely soft and surrounded by delicious, bright-red strawberry liquid. Yum!
But this time, I really, really wanted the artificial strawberry taste I know and love so much.
You know that feeling? When you’re expecting something really, really good in the mail?
Like a tasty treasure-trove of Starbucks instant coffee from your sister Canada? Because there IS no Starbucks in Israel, only Aroma, which isn’t nearly as good? (okay, only Aroma, and Greg, and Roladin and Maafah Na’aman, and a million other chains, which is fantastic, but they are NOT Starbucks)
Here it is: The bean snob’s guide to delicious quick-cook, no-soak beans.
Do you love beans? Or do you just put up with them?
For years, in Canada, we were hooked on canned beans. We put up with them, even enjoyed them, if they were seasoned heavily enough.
Blah. Never again.
Here in Israel, I’ve become a beany snob.
(nothing delicious can come out of here…)
Canned beans may be easy, but they are also mushy and worse than flavourless – they’re tin-flavoured. Here, canned beans practically don’t exist, so we don’t have any choice. And the great news is that from-scratch beans are tastier, too. By which I mean they taste like something. As opposed to a tin can.
When you love baking as much as I do, you become an evangelist.
After we moved to Israel, and our whole lives were topsy-turvy, the only time I felt like things were at all “normal” were when I was making bread. Those breads were rudimentary at first – hey, we didn’t even have an oven. But they kept me grounded.
I was so ecstatic when all our possessions arrived, including my gorgeous cast iron loaf pans, plastic dough bucket, and other beloved bakeware, accumulated over the years. It was time to get my hands floury and really start baking again.
I love how centered and grounded baking makes me feel, but can’t help wondering why other people seem to think it’s hard, or complicated, or just not something they have space for in their lives. We all have time and space to make bread. Sure, it takes a while, but very little of that is active prep time. A bread that takes 36 hours from start to finish may have less than ten minutes of actual stirring, kneading, mixing and forming loaves.
What other food do we have that prepares itself in the background the way bread does, while we go about our daily lives? Set it, forget it, and it only gets better and better.
Here are five myths that keep people from baking… and the reasons you can happily ignore each and every one of them.
Myth #1: “Use warm water.”
Where it came from: When you buy yeast, it’s in suspended animation, sleeping in its little packet. Adding water wakes it up and starts doing its job – chewing up the flour and burping it out into tons of tiny air bubbles. Burping is good. Burping takes time, but it goes faster when things are a little warmer.
Reality check: Warmth may give an artificial boost to your dough, but you’ll get way better results with time instead. Start your breads a few hours earlier, because then, in addition to burping, they’ll start breeding, and while burping is good (see above), breeding is VERY good. Yummy, too. Whatever you do, don’t use HOT water. Some people read “warm” and think, “the warmer, the better.” In particular, never use water that’s hotter than what you'd enjoy being poured over a sensitive part of your body. I’ll let you imagine any sensitive part you want. Don’t gauge temperature with your hands, because their skin is much less sensitive.
Myth #2: “Yeast is yeast.”
Where it came from: I honestly don’t know. I guess all yeast LOOKS alike, in that it’s a powdery beige substance, but does it do the same thing when you add it to your dough? Nope.
Reality check: You will usually get better results with Instant Yeast. The kind that you mix right in with all the other stuff. I used to grab the packets of “traditional” yeast because hey, isn’t traditional better when it comes to baking bread? I was wrong. Instant yeast has a higher ratio of live yeast. It simply works better. That said, just as with Myth #1, time can fix this one, too. Even the lousiest, deadest yeast packet probably has some some living yeasts inside. If you use lousy yeast, just add time and you’ll still get great results.
Myth #3: “Punch it down.”
Where it came from: Again, I’m not sure. Did dough once sneak up on someone and attack them from behind? If not, I have no idea why someone decided it needed punching.
Reality check: If your dough is wet, it may benefit from a quick “strech n’ fold” operation, but otherwise, it doesn’t need punching down. And what kind of message are you sending to those yeast? They’ve been working hard for an hour or two, burping air bubbles into your dough, and then you come along and destroy all that hard work. “Sheesh,” you can almost hear them saying. “Now we gotta start that burping all over again.” Eventually, your yeast will get discouraged, so no punching.
Myth #4: “You can bake great bread in a hurry.”
Where it came from: You can, sort of. Google it and you’ll find a ton of ways to get tasty bread fast. I have a few standbys that I use myself. But the very best breads, the ones you’ll remember forever, while not difficult (see the next Myth), do need a minimum time investment.
Reality check: This is why I admire the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Dayidea so much. They say, basically up front, that the time thing is non-negotiable. You must set aside a couple of hours up front for the convenience of mind-blowingly delicious, air-filled bliss in 5 minutes or so later on. A couple of hours is nothing. Try rising your dough overnight! 36 hours! Try sourdough and keep your dough alive for years and years!
Remember the Dr. Seuss book, On Beyond Zebra, in which a young boy discovers the delightful creatures that lie in the alphabet, just past the letter “Z”?
In the places I go, there are things that I see That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
Same thing with bread. Once you try long-risen bread, you will not want to go back to the 45-minute stuff – except when you’re in a hurry.
Myth #5: “Baking bread is hard.”
Where it came from: They have diplomas in baking. My sister has one – she’s a professional bread baker. She had to learn all kinds of math, and science, and pass a food safety course. You must have to know a ton to bake bread, right?
Reality check: If they could do it in Ancient Egypt, you can do it today in your home kitchen. (Just don’t try to build pyramids!) Bread baking is high-touch, but not terribly high-tech. Like any other new craft, it won’t come naturally at first. But even when you’re learning, you can’t mess it up, I promise. The only situation I can imagine where your bread would be terrible is if you add too much salt. Otherwise, what have you got? Either a) flatbread, b) not-quite-salty/flavourful-enough bread (add salt! drizzle with olive oil!).
Sure – your breads may LOOK weird sometimes…
… but don’t be afraid to play around and start making your own. You’ll be so proud to show off what you create.
Enjoy!
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Many social media people have been worried over the last few days: apparently, if you Google “Israel,” you get all kinds of dire, terrible images.
This post is my attempt to fix that.
So why is the word “rogelach” in quotes up at the top? Because if you just google rogelach (or, as I did, rugelach), most of the recipes you’ll find involve cream cheese, and possibly milk and butter. It seems that us pareve people are in the minority when it comes to rogelach.
And because dairy does such incredible, delicious things when it lives inside a dough, these can never be truly “real” rogelach. But they can be a tasty, rogelach-shaped puffy cookie on your Shabbos table (or any other day of the week’s table), and some weeks, it just doesn’t get better than that.
I started with regular leftover challah dough. If you need a recipe, you can try my Reliable Challah recipe.
If you happen to have leftover dough sitting around, you may find these so easy you’ll wonder why people bother going out to bakeries to buy them in the first place.
You will also need some filling ready. My standby chocolate filling recipe is below, and takes about 30 seconds to mix up.
1. Roll our your dough into a circle. Mine were pretty thin, because I prefer more filling and less dough.
2. “Shmeer” it with chocolate filling. You could also add chocolate chips at this point, or almond paste, or anything else you like inside.
3. Cut it up like a pizza. I cut it in half first, then cut each half in half, and do that once more, to get 16 roughly even-sized pieces.
4. Starting at the outside, roll up the pieces, one by one.
5. Transfer each finished “rogela” to a baking pan.
6. Bake about 15-20 minutes at 350-ish (my oven here is only approximate; it’s turned to a notch below 200 Celsius) until lightly golden brown on top, as seen above.
In case you need one, Here’s my Standby Chocolate Filling recipe, which I have used from everything to hamentashen to kokosh to rogelach and beyond. The corn starch gives this a little bit of body, so it doesn’t just turn flat during the baking process, which happened with every previous filling recipe I tried.
STANDBY CHOCOLATE FILLING RECIPE
Unless you are feeding an army, use the half recipe!!!
Full Recipe (a ton – too much for most things)
Half Recipe (a lot – enough for most things)
3 cups sugar
2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 cup corn starch 2 cups cocoa approx 2 cups oil – but don’t dump it all in!
1 ½ cups sugar 1 cup powdered sugar
¼ cup corn starch 1 cup cocoa
approx 1 cup oil – but don’t dump it all in!
1. Mix in bowl. No mixer required, just stir it around until evenly mixed.
2. Store in fridge until ready to use. It will thicken slightly in the fridge, but will still be spreadable.
Optional: For Almond-Chocolate Filling, I added ground almonds and roasted cinnamon when I made this once and it made the filling taste special and less generic.
Enjoy! And please share this around to prove that there are still great, DELICIOUS things happening here in Israel.
Quit kvetching. At least, that’s what everybody says when I blog about the problems I’ve had baking here in Israel.
Which, just to recap, range from teeny tiny oven in small, hellishly-hot kitchen, to weird fake ingredients (tzimkao, vanillin sugar), to things that are missing altogether or wildly expensive (maple anything, corn syrup).
Fair enough; you’re more likely to be successful in your aliyah if you adapt quickly and learn to savour the wonderful foods that can be found here, rather than moping about what you miss from “back home.” In truth, I don’t even say the words “back home” because this IS home.
But one thing I’ve found myself missing – heaven help me! - is the taste of s’mores. Particularly the delectable S’mores Bars in this pareve recipe. Cleverly, these bars recreate the gooey goodness of s’mores in a versatile dessert-bar form. After searching for a perfect “s’mores dessert” for a whle, I finally discovered this recipe and have now made it many times over the last few years… (you can peek at them in this post if you scroll down)
Almost everything about the recipe was perfectly do-able in an Israeli kitchen… except the graham cracker crumbs which make up a large percentage of the dry ingredients (by replacing some of the flour with graham cracker crumbs, you recreate the taste of the cracker part of the s’mores without compromising the delectable cookie dough texture).
Happily, although graham crackers are nowhere to be seen, my husband brought home two hard-to-find imported American pie crusts before Shavuos. I let him bake his cheesecake in one, but I already knew what I would do with mine… S’mores Dessert Bars. Especially because he brought home two jars of real American-style marshmallow fluff in the same haul.
Mmm… graham. Mmm… marshmallow.
Goodbye, crust!
There’s not even a WORD for Graham Cracker in Hebrew. Or, for that matter, pie. (The closest I’ve found is Pashtida, which is not at all the same.)
This imported crust, bought specially from our local “trayfe” supermarket (so-called because they have many trayfe products, so you have to look carefully for a hechsher) is labelled: Baked Tachtit (bottom) for “Pie.” (in Hebrew, פאי).
So after all the effort of importing the crust, sourcing it, buying it, and (for my husband) shlepping it home intact… it felt more than a little sacrilegious smashing it up into little teeny morsels.
But smash it up I did – and I’m glad I did. It was delicious!
And no, they’re not both cheesecakes… although one is; a special all-Israeli cheesecake for which you can find the recipe a bit further down. And okay, both are dairy-based; sorry to anyone who can’t have dairy at this very milky time of year…
(In fact, since I started to write this, my husband decided to make a classic North American lemony cheesecake, deapite my predictions of doom that it wouldn’t work with Israeli cheese… so we may end up with three cakes.)
With all of my dooming and glooming about baking in Israel, I was happy to receive a recipe from my ulpan teacher on Sunday night which she guaranteed would work with Israeli ingredients – given that she’s never baked it anywhere else. I figure as an old dog making aliyah, it’s time for a new trick… with cheesecake.
Except, except, except… her cheesecake doesn’t have a crust. Heresy! I couldn’t bake a crustless cheesecake. Honestly, I was about to pour it into the pan (#26, according to her instructions, which took some measuring, because I’d never heard of this size before), when I broke down and decided I simply couldn’t do it.
Hence, a last-minute, Lotus biscuit crust. If you have never had Lotus / Biscoff / Speculoos biscuits before, you must. I was already dreaming of them before we got here, having read on several baking sites that they are simply delicious. Indeed, I found a copycat recipe a number of years ago and tried to recreate them, but really, they were nothing like the real thing.
(Trust me, this is a cookie people love so much that they made it into a spread. So if you’re eating a biscuit that isn’t a Lotus, you can “convert” it with a dab of spread!)
Anyway, we had a bunch here, but the catch is that they’re individually wrapped… which meant individually unwrapping about four dozen of the things to make a crust in my #26 pan.
Crumble, crumble, crumble…
…Crust!
As you can see in the picture above, the cake was already completely mixed. Like I said, I was about to pour it into the naked tinfoil pan, but simply couldn’t do it. So the cheese part waited while the crust baked.
… Baked crust!
At last… time to pour the cheesecake stuff in. Waah! Even without a crust, this would barely have fit in the pan. Maybe I did something wrong…? But I sampled a bit to make sure it was yummy before slipping it into the oven, so I think it’s okay.
Here’s the recipe.
Lucky for you, I have transcribed it below so you can try it out yourself without needing to squint through my Hebrew handwriting.
But what about the second cake?
It wouldn’t be Shavuos without an old cake, a familiar family friend. And the most familiar of all is my Grama’s Neapolitan Cake. Which sounds all hoity-toity, unless you think of it (as I do) as “pudding-cookie cake.” Really – it’s just pudding and cookies; it really is that simple.
STEP 1: Take four HUGE cookies:
STEP 2: Slop some pudding onto them… and sprinkle with toasty almonds so it doesn’t look like so much something a child made:
Wah-la!
For the full Grama’s Neapolitan Cake recipe, click here.
And for the “new” cheesecake recipe from my ulpan teacher Galya… well, read on.
ALL-ISRAELI CHEESY CHEESECAKE FROM MY ULPAN TEACHER GALYA
(if you try to make this outside of Israel, your results may vary)
Cheesecake Ingredients:
750g gevina levana / white cheese (I used 2 tubs, 1 500g and 1 250g)
Looking for pictures to go with a blog post about Israel’s Independence Day, coming up this Tuesday, I discovered a beautiful “new” (to me) challah tradition: the Yom HaAtzmaut Challah.
According to the note that came with the picture, there are a few explanations for the unique design of the challah:
“The center of the special holiday meal is a challah made of twelve parts, which reminds us of the 12 tribes, symbolizing the unification of all parts of the nation and in memory of ancient days.”
The shape of the challah is also reminiscent of a crown… intentionally so. And, of course, there are charming little flags poked into every single segment to top it off.
The photographer says:
“We have adopted the custom of baking a special Independence Day challah from the Pri-Chen family who lived in the village. We've passed this practice to the next generation and it’s been accepted as part of our regular Independence Day meal. The late David Pri-Chen z”l wrote a special song to be said before eating this challah, and the photo shows this song in his handwriting, on the holiday table.”
The song ends with the blessing that King David will accept his crown and renew his kingdom, and we will all stand like brothers together, here in the land.
May this festival of Kacholavan (blue and white), our first in Israel, be a sweet and peaceful one, a crown for all of bnei Yisrael.
![image_thumb[3]](file:///C:/Users/Mommy/AppData/Local/Temp/WindowsLiveWriter-429641856/supfiles895F60/image[11].png "image_thumb[3]")
Trust me, this is a cookie people love so much that they made it into a spread. So if you’re eating a biscuit that isn’t a Lotus, you can “convert” it with a dab of spread!)
