Despite my great proclamations of being unproductive – and I really am with anything related to getting my shit together – it seems lockdown finally unleashed the BAKER CAT
in me and whilst I’m not gonna join the sourdough club- I live above a bakery, next to a bakery, across from a bakery so there really is no point – I’m still doing my fair share of baking and willing to share the better results and recipes with you. As always, feel free to adjust and as always, each and every recipe comes with a story. I’ve read somewhere that food bloggers write such long introductions to make it more difficult (for AI?) to steal their recipes. Well, steal mine all you like, I don’t care, I’m here to (over)share and maybe, hopefully, and upmost, for your entertainment. So Allons-y, vamonos, let’s head to the kitchen and travel back to a sweet treat from my childhood, a national treasure even. In the States, they are known as Harlequins, Half Moons, or Black-and-White-Cookies (editor’s note: they are not cookies), here we’ve known and grown to love them as Amerikaner. So I thought since I cannot hang out with my real-life Americans, I’m gonna bake myself some. Others bake their knight in shining armour, or, German idiom, sich seinen Traumprinzen backen, and quick question: why do we bake a prince of all people? So many royal duties. I prefer a knight. Quite more useful when in distress and also he’s gonna travel a lot, slaying dragons and such, and I need some alone time now and then. Perfect fit. Anyway, here I am, prevented from seeing my friends and baking new ones to hold and hug while. When we were kids, we always got to choose if we wanted an Amerikaner or a Berliner for coffee. Berliner are a some sort of sweet dumpling, fried and filled with jam, and have as many different names as buns or rolls have in English. Don’t order a Berliner in Berlin, that’ll lead to a lot of confusion. In Berlin you order Pfannkuchen, which down here in the south of Germany is the name for (Berliner) Eierkuchen, the lovechild of crêpes and American Pancakes, and if you mess them up you can just cut them up and serve them as Kratzete and pretend that was on purpose. Elsewhere, Berliner are called Krapfen which is not to be meddled up with Karpfen, because that’s fish and nothing you wanna have coated in sugar and filled with jam. Unless you get the Mardi Gras one with mustard inside. That could go well with carp. I hope you’re confused now, cause I sure am! So back to the Amis! Amerikaner are called Amerikaner in most of Germany. Apparently, as I learned during a thorough and intense research, that name was a no-go in the GDR (unsurprisingly so), so they referred to them as Ammonplätzchen, where Plätzchen equals cookies and Ammon is short for Ammoniumhydrogencarbonat, some specific baking soda used in the original recipe. Wikipedia says the name “Amerikaner” either derives from said tongue twisting soda, too, or from the typical WWI Brodie helmet because they have a similar shape. It is also starring in a Seinfeld episode as a metaphor for racial harmony (includes a manual on how to eat it, too!): So watch and then let’s bake against racism!
For 8-10 Amerikaner we need:
lots of patriotism, 50g soft butter, a Star Spangled Banner, 40g white sugar, 1/2 package of vanilla sugar, a pinch of salt, 1 egg, 125g plain flour (I usually like to use spelt but I am convinced that this one calls for wheat), 1/2 tbsp of starch, 1/2 package of baking soda (or, I guess, Ammoniumhydrogencarbonat) and 40ml of full fat milk. Which all goes into a bowl and gets whisked up until smooth and gooey. The texture should be less liquid than for example pancake batter but still batter-y and not dough, though.
If you follow the recipe measure for measure (don‘t be Julia), it should be perfect. Also, have the oven preheated at 180° Celsius. Also, always read the whole recipe from beginning to end first so now you don’t have to wait for the oven to be preheated. With the oven and our batter ready, we take a baking tin, put some parchment paper on it – pro tip: if you put a dash of water in each corner on the baking tin, the paper will stick to it. Parchment paper has a tendency to try and fly and flatter around. You’re welcome. Now, the well-equipped kitchen probably has a piping bag buried under other hardly ever used stuff in a kitchen cabinet drawer somewhere. The less well-equipped kitchen-owner does not have to despair – all it takes is a little plastic bag (like a ziplock bag but without the ziplock). Simply put it over a measuring cup and fill the batter into it. Pull up the sides and tie it up with a rubber band. Pull the filled bag out of the measuring cup, tilt it and cut off one of the bottom corners – et voilà, there is your improvised piping bag!
Pipe out 8-10 turds onto the baking tin, like the Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat, and then bake 13-15 minutes until golden.
Let them cool on a rack turned over and prepare the icing in the meantime. The traditional Amerikaner is covered half-half in icing sugar and chocolate. However, the sugar icing is compulsory and from there you may go anywhere – your imagination is the limit! Especially for or with kids, decorating with gummy bears or Smarties is the trick to become the favourite aunt. If you wanna stick to the basics, you’ll need approximately 150g of icing sugar and 2-3 tbsp lemon juice whisked up. It’s important that the mixture is thick and white. Spread it on one half of each Amerikaner (or all of it if you wanna decorate or have an all-white supremacy delicacy). For the other half, melt baking chocolate in a water bath and spread it with a brush or the convex bottom part of a teaspoon. Let them cool down and dry. Best before the nxt day, but stored in a ziplock bag (without holes and with ziplock this time) in the fridge, they‘ll still be soft and delicious the next day.
