Austrian pumpkin seed cake

Polish: pestki dyni
Spanish: pepitas (de calabaza)
Catalan: llavors de carbassa
Venetian: megołete
German: Kürbiskerne
Italian: semi di zucca
French: graines de potiron
Hungarian: sütőtök mag
Estonian: kõrvitsaseemned
Lithuanian: moliūgų sėklos

Styria (Steiermark) in s a region of Austria, where pumpkins grow and where people have many creative ideas how to use pumpkin seeds. I guess they must be all very healthy cause pumpkin seeds are helpful in combating many diseases. So Styrians not only cook pumpkin soup but also bake bake pumpkin seed cakes and cookies. Here is a great example: Kürbiskernkuchen, pumpkin seed cake.

100 gr pumpkin seeds
100 gr flour(*)
4 eggs
60 gr icing sugar
40 gr sugar (or vanilla sugar)
1 tablespoon rum
a pinch of cinnamon
1 tablespoon baking powder
100 gr white cuverture (or simply white chocolate)
25 gr coconut fat (copha)
(optionally: 1 tablespoon pumpkin seed oil)

1. Beat yolks with sugar and whites with icing sugar. Grind pumpkin seeds (possibly in coffee grinder)

2. Sieve flour with baking powder, cinnamon and ground seeds. Add rum. Whisk yolks with icing sugar and whites with crystal sugar (vanilla sugar). Add yolks to the flour, stir well (**) and add well beaten egg whites. bake about 30 minutes (or until the surface of the cake becomes golden) in 180C oven.

3. Prepare the icing: melt chocolate with copha (and pumpkin seed oil) in a double boiler. When icing is homogeneous and still warm, while the cake is already cool, you can start covering thr cake with a spatula. Don't be afraid of oil in the icing - it will only give a green colour to the icing.

(*)Many people use other proportions by taking less flour than pumpkin seeds but then, the cake won't grow and can be difficult to cut. But you can experiment and add only 50 or 75 gr flour.

(**) Plus, I have to tell you that the cake, instead of oily seeds, is quite dry. A good idea would be to add 1/2 cup (pumpkin seed) oil, maybe just after adding yolks to the flour, to make it a bit more moist.

Austrian apricot dumplings

Polish: morela
Armenian: ծիրան
Albanian: kajsi
Tajik: зардолу
Kannada: გარგარი
Greek: βερικοκιά
Chech: meruňka
Mongolian: чангаанз
Kurdish: mijmij / qeysî
Uzbek: o'rik

I don't know any recipe how to prepare prunus armeniaca in Armenian way... (suggestions more than welcome!) but for sure, one of the most delicious ways of eating apricots is Austrian Marillenknödel in Butterbröseln: apricots hidden in creamy dumpling, cooked and coated in roasted breadcrumbs. Attention! This dough is different than the one in strawberry dumplings recipe! That dough was more fluffy, light and very delicious but unluckily didn't form solid balls after cooking. If visual effects are important to you, choose this dough ;) (In Poland, Germany and Slovakia similar dumplings are prepared, but with potatoes as one of the ingredients of the dough. I will post some recipes for them soon!)

see also: Austrian strawberry dumplings

dough
200 g flour
250 g Quark (in Austria: Topfen) or fresh cheese curd of 20% fat
4 tablespoons semolina
1 egg
100 g butter
a pinch of salt
a bit of flour

filling
8 medium apricots (fresh!)*
8 cubes sugar* (the best would be brown)
50 gr butter + 1/2 cup dried breadcrumbs
powdered sugar

1. In the evening prepare the dough: combine all the ingredients and leave in the fridge overnight

2. Wash apricots, cut slightly just to take the seed off. Put 1 cube sugar into each apricot (if you don't have them, take 1 teaspoon sugar instead of each sugar cube, but never use honey! It will flow away and you will be unable to close the apricot in the dough)



3. In a pan, bring water with a bit of salt and oil to boil. Divide the dough into 8 equal portions (dough balls should be about the size of apricots - see picture above), form balls and roll them. Cover each apricot with a dough "pancake" and roll well in yur hands until you get lovely shaped balls. Put into the saucepan and cook 12-15 minutes.

4. Put dried breadcrumbs and butter (you can add a pinch of cinnamon too) into another pan. butter should melt and breadcrumbs should fry in it until golden. When dumplings are ready, drain them well and put into the pan with breadcrumbs and butter. Move the pan this way so that the whole dumplings are covered with breadcrumbs. Put on the plate and sprinkle with powdered sugar; you can serve them with cream or vanilla ice-cream.

* of course you may have bigger or smaller apricots... the main rule is: so many sugar cubes as many apricots you have. I also suggest to not take the huge, apple-sized apricots. Walnut-sized are perfect.

Austrian strawberry dumplings

Polish: truskawka
Romansh: fraja
Faroese: jarðber
Croatian: cvijet
Cornish: sevienn
Chechen: ts'azamash
Yiddish: סטראבערי
Quechua: Muntipuquy
Nedersaksisch: Erebeie
Azeri: çiyələk
Guarani: yvapytã
Occitan: amorsa
Schwabisch: Bräschdleng
Punjabi: ਸਟਰੌਬੇਰੀ

Strawberries are the most beloved fruits in Poland. The season to buy and eat them begin in may and ends in june. This time if you are at the market, you will only smell the delicious aroma of fresh juicy red strawberries. They are cheap and we buy tons of them and freeze, to use them later in the wintertime when we start missing summer. Today I made strawberry Knödel basing at some Austrian recipes. We make those dumplings in Poland too, they are even called similarly (knedle) but made basically from flour pastry and not from soft cream cheese (German: Quark, Polish: serek homogenizowany), like Austrians use to do, and almost always with plums and covered with breadcrumbs fried with butter.

see also: Austrian apricot dumplings

400 gr quark / creamy curd / serek homogenizowany
150 gr flour
50 gr breadcrumbs
50 gr butter
1 egg
1 spoon vanilla sugar
1 teaspoon lemon zest, finely chopped
frozen strawberries, about 1/2 kg (fresh would be even better, I guess)

1. Beat butter with a mixer until soft and creamy. Separately, beat egg with vanilla sugar

2. Combine quark with flour and breadcrumbs

3. Mix butter, quark-flour-breadcrumbs and egg, add lemon zest. Let cool in a fridge for 1 hour

4. Form little balls in your hands (Wash your hands in water often to be able to obtain lovely balls) and put a strawberry inside each of them



5. Cook in salted water 15 minutes on a low heat

Sauce:
the rest of strawberries (you should have about 1 cup of them)
1 cup cream / sour cream / yoghurt
eventually powdered sugar to taste



Mix all the ingredients. Sauce is cold and Knödel warm. Tastes really good!