christina's baking challenge: Prasselkuchen

well, to start off, i had never before worked with puff pastry dough nor have i tried to make crumbles on my own. i have watched my nan on countless occasions how she made the toping for her world famous plum cake, but that doesn't mean anything. but since i knew i could count on nan if some problems might arise and since making the crumbles was the most 'difficult' part in this recipe, i thought i should give it a try.

i bought a packet of frozen puff pastry sheets and let them sit in the fruit compartment of the fridge over night. when i opened the packet this morning, they were all no longer frozen and separated easily from their paper wrappers. they were already sliced and separated into very thin sheets so that i didn't have to activate my non-existant rolling pin. i just laid out the sheets on the baking tray and cut them in half. otherwise i wouldn't have managed to bake it all in one go.

next were the crumbles. i had to improvise again because i don't own a kitchen scale either (yeah, no rolling pin and no kitchen scale -- how do we actually cope?) and the recipe gave all the measurements in grams. lucky i own a set of measuring cups. here it was a bit tricky to get all the right proportions for the dry weight of the flour and sugar in relation to the wet weight of the butter. lucky i still had saved the phone joker and called my nan. she knew just what to do (add a bit more butter) and the crumbles started to ... well ... crumble.

crumbles

nan said the dough is just right when it doesn't stick to your hands. so that is how your hands should look like after you gave the dough a good whalloping. oh, and there's a trick how you can make some bigger crumbles if you like. cover your bowl with a lid and start shaking. the dough should sort of lump together to form pebble-sized crumbles.

but since i don't like my crumbles that big, i didn't shake the bowl for too long and when sprinkling them on the puff pastry dough i broke some of them so that the dough spreads more evenly during the baking period.

and that's that.

in the end i opted out of topping the cakes with glaze, though, because the crumbles were quite sweet already.

so, if you want to make your own Prasselkuchen as well, here is christina's really simple and easy to handle recipe. YUMM!