Most of us are familiar with soft pretzels as a fast-food treat item, the kind of thing you buy at the fair or while you’re walking around a tourist town. Now, many of those pretzels are
actually pretty good (though usually drenched in things that are not so good for you!), though the flash-frozen and reheated ones can be rather dry. Here’s a homemade recipe for the same treat, and it’s surprisingly simple!
So Jocelyn may have been hoping her post on kolaches would prompt me to do the same, but nope, it’s hermuffins instead. I took one look at that post and thought, “Wow, has it really been so long since I made muffins? I want some!” Blueberry muffins were one of my first posts, but I hadn’t really done anything with muffins since then. I’d always intended to post more varieties of muffin, though, so here you go!
Kolaches are a traditional Czech pastry, kinda somewhere between a filled donut, a danish, and a sweetbread roll. Of course, they’re nothing like any of these :-). Though the ones I’ve
made here all have dessert and/or breakfast fillings (fruit flavors and cream cheese filling both fall into that category), you can also make kolaches that have sausage filling, potato filling, sausage or potato and cheese filling.
These muffins are quite tasty, and actually pretty good for you, especially in the world of muffins! Muffins are such a wonderfully portable and fast food, but, like many things that can be
called “fast food” (literally), the fast food industry has a tendency to bloat them up with extra simple carbs, sugar, fat, and overall calories. You don’t have to feel guilty, or bloated, if you want to eat these for breakfast, though, and you can make up a big batch at once for convenience. Enjoy!
| It’s hilarious, really: Hamburgers are yet one more thing I never cared for when I was a kid, but like just fine now. I don’t think it had anything to do with the burger itself; I just had a hard time eating a whole burger at once, which I was naturally expected to do, and I didn’t like so many ingredients appearing all at once on a strange and infrequent food. (I was a finicky eater; you may have noticed.) And I generally prefer chicken to beef anyway. But when my brother went on the gluten-free diet, and started eating beef patties or sandwich meats with “buns” made of two thick slices of cheese, I figured I’d better make some hamburger buns! 🙂 |  |
| When I think of these pretzels, I think of my friend Ginny. I don’t think I’ve mentioned her on this blog before, which is a shame, because she’s a great friend with a fascinating story: She’s among the many celiacs who get a false negative on the antibody test, but a positive genetic test. Long story short, when we met her she knew something was wrong with her, but had no idea what–and neither did any of her doctors. (We’ve all been there, haven’t we?) But the better my sister and I got to know Ginny, the more she would mention some of her symptoms, or we would mention some of ours, and we’d all start to get a little wigged out at how much we had in common . . . |  |
| The hilarious thing about all this is that I never much cared for tortillas when I was a kid. (Or dinner rolls, or French bread–okay, I liked that a little–or pizza; the list goes on!) Bread never felt like it was a big part of my culinary world until it was gone. Tortillas in particular were pasty, dense, and gross, and the fact that they were used to wrap up all sorts of squicky food I didn’t like sure didn’t help their case. It would be great to be able to look back on my early life with the foggy glass of the wisdom of years and say I didn’t care much for so many bready foods because deep down, I knew in my heart they were bad for me, nay, toxic to my very flesh! . . . but no. I was just a picky kid. 😀 Can blame at least part of that on sensory processing disorder, an unrelated malady that makes my family tick somewhat funny, but I just plain didn’t like tortillas. Tortillas were gross, and the things that went in tortillas were even grosser . . . |  |
Now, traditionally
, stollen is made with some candied fruits and is covered in either powdered sugar or a powdered sugar glaze. For obvious reasons, this does not work for people trying to live sugar-free over the holidays! I do have something to confess: I had no idea what “stollen” was when my husband began to talk wistfully of the bread his family made every Christmas Eve (I realized later that I had seen the commercialized version of it that is usually sold in Germany–a German professor brought one in–but I didn’t realize it was the same thing when Sean was talking about it). However, he quite liked the tradition his family had concerning this bread, so I thought I’d give a shot to making it.
This particular recipe is one of my better efforts in recreating pretty much exactly what Sean missed (and, for that matter, what I expect out of a good cinnamon roll!). They are not so syrupy as what you’ll get from the cinnamon roll place in your local mall, but quite frankly, having good fresh sweetbread makes it unnecessary to drown the roll in syrup. All that extra sweet is to hide how dry the roll is from being reheated so much. These are sweet and satisfying, and the cream cheese topping positively indulgent :-).
| This recipe started from one of Jocelyn’s, but it’s been transformed many times since such an auspicious beginning. The procedure for rolling them out is a little unusual, but it works well as long as you’re attentive to detail. From start to finish, it’ll take about 2 1/2 hours to make a whole batch of this dough. I highly recommend making a full batch even if you aren’t planning to eat more than a little of it right away, since you can just parbake the remaining crusts, freeze them, then thaw them out to use later. |  |
