Bear with me... this is my first post in Frog’s “scribble” format... so you will see it published and republished as I get my head around it.

Anne has a earthenware Gugelhupf mould (form?) and when we were last at the German Deli (Hansel & Pretzel – worth a visit if you’re within striking distance of Ham/Richmond) there were some at the counter.

“Ah, but we have the means to make this at home, we should try to make it ourselves”, thought I.

And so I did. (We didn’t feel too bad about not buying their cake, since we had also stocked up with all sorts of sausages and other German goodness).

I have cooked this cake twice (so far)... once at the weekend for friends, and because it was so splendid, again tonight for my work colleagues.

I needed a recipe, and the traditional recipes require a lot of Kartoffelmehl – starch to you and me – and I’ve not really cooked with starch, so I cowardly chose to follow the recipe below (which I found on the Interwebs, of course).

The form is glazed, but the batter is too sticky not to stick to glass. So you’ll need to protect it with a layer of butter, with flour (or breadcrumbs seem traditional) sprinkled upon it†.

This is, as much as anything a log of what I did – so I can reproduce at will! If you have a kitchen set up exactly like mine, you can follow the instructions exactly as I write them. Otherwise, they should be treated as kind of guidelines.

Equipment

• The Gugelhupf Form Itself

• A Kenwood Chef

• Either the plastic K Beater or the balloon Whisk... not sure which is better yet

• Bowl: a bowl capable of taking the 375 g flour

• Jug: a jug capable of taking 5 eggs and ½ cup milk

• Scales to weigh sugar then flour – they can be packed away after that

• ½ Cup measuring, well cup, really. Which can get put away after the milk goes into the eggs. TODO: get some left-handed measuring cups with the pouring lips to the right of the handle

• Spoons! Without which you’ll never be able to properly shift the batter, or scoop out ludicrous amounts of cocoa powder from the container

Ingredients

Method

Preheat oven to 190° C
Why do I always have to look at the bottom of a recipe to remind me to preheat the oven?

Grease the Gugelhupf form thoroughly† (to help release the cake from the form)

Mix butter and sugar
I tried to get a nice paste going there

Add eggs
The milk is in the eggs. When I whisked this the eggs seemed to curdle (which is odd ’cos there isn’t anything other than dairy and sugar in there).

I ignored that, assuming that the flour would deal with that.

Add baking powder/flour/salt
Already in a mixture waiting in Bowl, sifting it in also helps mix these ingredients. This is where the difference between the beater and the whisk comes in. When I whisked it, the batter came to a smooth paste – like “Angel Delight” (tasted like it too, once the chocolate was added later)

Add vanilla
Whisk it in

Add half of the dough into form
Two things wong here: (1) Unless I’m making it too runny: it’s not a dough, it’s a batter. That sounds like Tim being a bit pedantic, but it is a necessary distinction. Because (2) “half of” a dough is easy to measure. “Half of” a fluid batter in a round bottommed mixing bowl is significantly less so. So read this as: “Add a fraction of the batter (chosen so as to leave a similar looking fraction in the mixing bowl) into the form”

Mix remaining dough with cocoa powder
See... the original recipe now uses the word remaining. An acknowledgement that there is unlikely to be another “half” left in the bowl. Use the intended amount of cocoa powder anyway, since you want the Guglehupf to have the same degree of chocolatiness no matter how much batter is left

Place cocoa dough on top of the other dough

With a knife or fork go through the cake several times
I used a fork to scoop from the bottom to the top of the cake once, all the way round. Then repeated for a second lap (so in effect two scoops were done

Bake in pre-heated oven on 375° F for 60 minutes
That’s 190° C. Way too long... way too hot! I went to check my cake at 45–50 mins, and although the oven was preheated to 190°, it went down to 170–180 fairly soon. I want cake, not charcoal.

Test the cake for cookedness
Do the test with a needle or knife: Poke into the cake to check if it is done. If the needle is still sticky, the cake is not done. I used a bamboo skewer. I put it into the cake... and it came out sticky. I put it in again, and it was still sticky! Then I realised that since it’s made of bamboo, it will always be sticky unless the cake is capable of changing the very nature of bamboo. However, I could tell that the Gugelhupf was cooked by the fact that the batter no longer glued itself to the stick.

Let cool off

Take out of the form

Dust with powdered sugar
Here’s a thing: I went to the shops looking for “Icing Sugar”. Turns out that there are Fondant Icing Sugar, Royal Icing Sugar and at Sainsbury’s (which I guess caters for common sugar shoppers like me) [BLANK] Icing Sugar. Some time I should concern myself with what the difference is.

Version Control

Top Tips

These are things I figured out while making the cake. At least I should follow these hints.

† Grease the whole Gugelhupf with butter – in fact I used the “buttery spread” in the fridge, all I want is “glue”. Put in quite some flour: looking like ⅓ tablespoon? or so. Knock the flour round the outside circumference of the ’hupf by tapping the outside. Straight forward enough.

It’s getting the flour up onto the “cone” in the middle that’s the tricky part. Rather than tapping the flour round, get the cone horizontal, with flour accumulated above it, and hit it down the axis of the cone. By some weird function of mechanics, this causes the flour to come down the cone! [The same dynamic forces force the flour to come forward at the bottom of the outside edge, so watch out for it spilling from there]

References

The original recipe was from: “German World Magazine”. Although I’ve put my own ingredients into the, er, mix as it were. And found a place for the milk – which was either to slate the cook’s thirst or completely forgotten in the original recipe. Marble Gugelhupf Cake: GERMAN WORLD MAGAZINE

I found this on Kenwood’s site, since I was concerned that the whole thing would come out too heavy. What I ended up with was not a sponge. But for reference, if I want a sponge – I’ll likely use: Kenwood’s Idea of how to make a "Strawberries and Cream Sponge"