Baking in Berlin: Attempt #1

I usually do a lot of baking and cooking over the summer but didn't really have much time with our move to Berlin. So after not baking for over two months, it was time. We were going to a friend's place for dinner which gave me the perfect excuse.  I wanted to bake something I knew well and something easy as we were pretty busy that day.  So I went to an old standby that I know from memory:  Chocolate Cherry One-Pan Cake.  However, I couldn't find almost any of the items I needed, so I had to make do with some substitutions.  It didn't come out at all like what I normally make, but was still pretty good.  I've listed the recipes here.

Original Version (I don't recall where I go the recipe from originally, and I have made some alterations to it.)

Berlin Version

1 can cherry pie filling 1 can strawberry pie filling 1/4 cup sugar 1 bag chocolate chips 1 dark choc. cake mix butter Grease bottom of 9x13 pan. Pour in pie filling.  Sprinkle sugar over top.  Pour chocolate chips over sugar.  Pour dry cake mix over the chips.  Slice butter into thin pats and put across the top.  Bake at 350° F.  After ten minutes check and make sure butter covers the top.  Add more if needed.  Bake for another 20-30 minutes until it looks set and is bubbly on the sides.

1 jar of pitted cherries 1 jar of Rote Grutze (berry compote) 1/4 cup sugar 1 box of French chocolate torte mix (because it was the only one that didn't need to have milk added so it was the most like what I've used before) butter Grease bottom of larger, thinner pan.  Pour in Rote Grutze and cherries (without the juice).  Sprinkle sugar over the top.  Pour dry cake mix over the sugar next.  Slice butter into thin pats and put across the top.  Bake at 180°C.  After ten minutes check and make sure butter covers the top.  Add more if needed.  Bake for another 20-30 minutes until it looks set and is bubbly on the sides.

Berlin Version- cross section so you can see the lack of layers

This cake was much thinner than I am used to, even taking into account the larger pan size.  Apparently the chocolate chips (I didn't see any and only later thought about getting chocolate and chopping it myself) keep the layers separated a bit.  This cake became one thin chocolate cherry mush instead of a layer cake. Final verdict: good, but not the same.

Small Town Berlin

The Spree

Berlin has about 3.5 million people.  When it takes 45 minutes to get halfway across the city, I count that as big.  A bit bigger than where we moved from (maybe more than a bit).  However, I find that Berlin sometimes feels like a smaller place. 

For one, things close here on Sunday. It is hard to find a grocery store or any shopping that is open on Sunday.  I thought that it was rough in the South, but Berlin wins.  However, they aren't opposed to voting on Sundays apparently.  It's not so much a day to go to church as a family day.

What I have found more striking is that I run into people I know.  I have twice run into a man from T's work on the U-Bahn.  Of course we all work near the same stop, but I don't leave work on any schedule.  The other day on the way to work I passed a colleague who was biking to work (I was walking to the U-Bahn).  I didn't even know she lived near me.  And later that same morning I sat on the U-Bahn right across from a different colleague.  That puts my count of running into people commuting to work at 6.  Again, we are all going to the same place, but for the most part we are coming from different directions and at different times.  The craziest instance of how small Berlin feels is when I came to our courtyard and heard someone yell "Hello."  No one else was near me, so I looked although I didn't know who they may be talking to.  It was a woman who works at a cafe near where I was taking German classes before work started.  I had been in several times.  It is a 30 minute train ride away.  Apparently we're neighbors.

I imagine big cities like Berlin to feel big.  Like you won't know anyone unless you are going to a specific place or meeting someone.  I sort of like that it can feel small here sometimes.  We are working on spending time at our favorite cafes to be regulars and this will make Berlin feel like a small town as well.  But that is all in our little section of the city and not as we travel across it.

Or maybe it's that the people we know in Berlin are just so similar to us.  I mean, we did run into friends of ours from Berlin in a restaurant in Baltimore, a city none of us should really have even been in!

Not Just Ice Cream

This was one slice (ein stück) that I cut into 2. 

I feel that I am letting those cake-over-ice-cream-eaters down if I don't mention some about the cakes here.  Afternoon is not only ice cream time.  It can also be cake and coffee time.  Can't really go wrong with either choice in my book.

The cakes here can be huge.  I am not one to share a piece of cake.  In the US, it may happen because I made the mistake of eating too much at dinner.  Here it is because sometimes there is just no way.

I haven't seen anything like what we call German Chocolate Cake.  Which is a little sad, because chocolate and coconut are so good together.  I was happy to find Schwarzwald Kuche though (Black Forest Cake).  As you can see in the picture it was a good size portion, but it was so much lighter than what I'm used to that I was able to eat it.  Notice how thin the cake layers are and that it's cream not icing in between.  Also note the raspberry cream cake in the back. 


I feel that there is a lot of cake exploring to do.  So many types to try.  So many things to learn for baking purposes.  Yes, of course, it is just for research to tell you and for expanding my baking repertoire that I will do this!

Be a Berliner, have some cake and coffee today!

Slowing Down in Berlin

Random Picture of Berlin

We are eating out people.  We love to try new types of food and also different restaurants.  We also eat out because it is convenient when we bring work home.  In Charlottesville, VA we got to know a ridiculous number of places to eat for having lived there for only four years.  These are the options we are used to:

1. Fast food.  Not usually an option we take as we don't like most of it. (20 minutes)
2. Take away/Semi-fast food (like Panera or pizza).  This is quick enough that it saves time from cooking when we are busy working. (20 minutes)
3. Going to a restaurant and ordering and eating quickly, again because we're going back to work. (1 hour- maybe even 45 minutes)
4. Going out for a nice leisurely dinner.  This is the type where we have no plans, we may be hanging out with friends, we order a bottle of wine and we sit even after they have given us the bill. (1.5-3 hours)

The Slow Movement would approve of Berlin.  Here are the main options:

1. American fast food.  Why are we going to eat McDonalds in Berlin?  We aren't. (0 minutes)
2. Take away/Semi-fast food.  The options we go for here are Doner Kebab (Gyros), Falafel, or Pizza.  You can actually sit at most of these places if you want.  If you stay, you pay when you get up and tell them you're done.  They sometimes have wi-fi and don't care if you stay. (20 minutes- several hours)
3. Cafe/Restaurant.  (Of course this is a huge number of places, so this is an over simplification I'm sure.)  First you walk in and seat yourself anywhere that doesn't say "Reserved".  In some places they may take 20 minutes to get you a menu (not because they don't see you, but because you are talking) and in some places it is on the table.  We've waited up to 40 minutes before ordering without it being an issue.  They bring you the bill only when you ask.  They sometimes bring you wine or an after-dinner drink after you pay.  They never make it seem that you should leave.  (1.5-5 hours)

This has had several major impacts on our eating out. 

We are working on finding our favorite Kebab and Falafel places in Berlin.  We have a long way to go and love it enough that we eat them at least once a week. 

Cafes and restaurants aren't always as expensive as their US counterparts so we go to them even more frequently.  We have tried to go to a place and get out in an hour and the closest we got was an hour and a half.  This is often a result of us asking for the bill and taking a while to get it.  Wait staff in the US love for you to leave.  More people=more money.  In Berlin, we have stayed at countless places for 4 hours.  For example on Friday we went out for Indian food with some friends.  We arrived early at 7:45pm.  We left at 12:30am after asking for the bill.  Yesterday we ate dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant and left 2 hours to eat.  We ended up being late!  Today we went to brunch at 11:30.  We ate and then stayed and did some work (they have wi-fi and are officially a "reading lounge") and left a little after 3.  (Admittedly, we do this in the US in places we can, but there are fewer places that allow it.)

I am the first to feel bad for taking a table for too long.  But there really is no incentive to leave here.  We are the odd ones when we are in a hurry.  Then we leave before people who were there and finished eating when we sat down.  Actually even when we take a "long" time for us, we are still quick for here.  And it seems when we ask for the bill too early they forget more often and we have to ask again. 

This makes Berlin a great place for me.  I can use to slow down a bit (or a lot).  It will also teach me to leave more time if we have somewhere to be later, because if you sit somewhere that you don't order at the counter, it's going to be a while.

The Kitchen- A Blank Slate

Renting an apartment in Berlin can be a little like buying a new house where they have only finished the exterior.  While this means that you get to design your apartment exactly how you want it, it also means that you are picking out lighting fixtures and kitchen sinks.  And this all involves some handy-work that I didn't plan on learning about until months and many paychecks after we bought our first house when we wanted to change some things.

The most interesting thing was the kitchen as it is quite important to me.  I love to cook!  I used suitcase space I had to bring recipes here (I also scanned a bunch as computer space takes up less room) and also packed measuring cups that aren't in metric (which you can also buy here apparently).  I was a bit excited to pick out everything in the kitchen, but the kitchen I really have planned costs more than what I'm willing to spend on a place we may live for only 3 years.  So we picked things based on economy as well as function while also picking things we don't hate.

This also meant not hiring IKEA to put all of our things together.  We thought at first it was a language barrier when we told them we saw the sink could be on either side of the counter it was in and they told us we could just change it later.  What about the hole for the faucet?  Ah, not a German/English problem, we don't realize how much work is involved.  We had to cut the hole for the sink.  So the first thing I ever drilled was a hole in the sink to put the special faucet cutter device into.  Can't just move the faucet over. 

 We also realized while putting thinks together that we had more boxes than we thought we should have.  The oven looks like it's put together, but it isn't.  We had to build the shelf it sits in and also install the stove part on top.  I'm just glad they required an electrician to wire it all in!

Now that we're up and running (enough at least for now), I'm ready to start cooking.  If only I had all of our kitchen gadgets!

The first thing to mention about Berlin and Germany as a whole is that people here LOVE ice cream.  Which means I fit in perfectly.

If you are trying to eat dinner at 5pm, stay home and cook because many of the restaurants have their ice cream menus out still.  Oh and don't try to get ice cream after dinner.  Especially if you ate late like people here.  Most ice cream places are closed by then.  But don't worry, just eat it first.  It means you won't have to worry about being too full after dinner.

It seems between 2-7 is snack time: coffee and cake or ice cream.  And if it's a sunny day out, the streets are full of people eating ice cream.  And the ice cream is so good.  Maybe not Italy-good, but hey, I haven't been there yet.  I just hope this ice cream eating doesn't change after summer!

This is ein Karamell Becher with Schokolade und Karamell eis (ice cream).  I ate it in the park with my book surrounded my tons of people doing the same.  Ah Berlin, I knew I liked you.