Mandelhörnchen

The German recipe is here.

Category:  Other / Small baked pieces
Main Ingredients:  Marzipan, powdered sugar aka confectioner’s sugar (Ger., Eng.), (planed) almonds
Notice:  Simple, fast

Mandelhörnchen without milk and Backpulver (Ger., Eng.)

9 to 10 pieces

200 g raw Marzipan
150 g powdered sugar
50 g starch
1 white part of an egg
100g planed or rasped almonds (see here)
50 g apricot confiture
50 g dark glaze or frosting (an example)

Preheat your oven on 170°C. Put paper on the baking plate.
You make a dough from the raw Marzipan, sugar, starch and egg-white. One can use a powered machine for this. Or bare hands and feel the flinching of the raw Marzipan …
Put the almonds on a plate.
Partition the dough with a spoon (“abstechen” is the German terminus technicus), roll it in the almonds, make it a rope-like thing, put it on the baking plate in the form of a Hörnchen – a small Horn*.
Put it in the oven for around 10 minutes, they should be yellow.

Prepare the confiture, make it real hot, add a little water. Put it over the ready baked Hörnchen.
Heat the chokolate glaze and paint their ends black, hear them laugh.

It doesn’t get any simpler. You can use bought raw Marzipan or produce it yourself. One can use raw Marzipan with saied sugar and Rosenwasser to have a more sophisticated basis.
If you are good you have them prepared, the kitchen cleaned, and the Hörnchen eaten within an hour, no traces left. :) “Hörnchen, was für Hörnchen? Ich krieg’ nie irgendwelche Hörnchen …”

*  Cf. GRIMM, WB, vol. X,  Sp. 1822, who distinguishes four different meanings of the word: corniculum, 1) small horn on animals (…), 2) small instrument in form of a horn (…), 3) a piece of bakery in form of a small horn in Hassia (also in Thuringia and Saxony), 4) small flurry animals, kind of Eichhörnchen – LGS!

*

Pamps de luxe

For actual and given reasons – my readers mostly think of meatballs, see comments on this entry – we will dive in the culinary section now: Cooking for Idiots.
As a student you better learn to cook. That is more than just “make it hot” (“Es gibt Reis Baby!“). May late friend Ralf lived from the Gorengs, Nasi and Bami the twisted sisters; hell: the deep frozen thing of course – he would never have used fresh ingredients! He was a man of style, no bloody tv-cook!
Others did not make a fuzz and simply cooked the can and let it go with the first gin of the day. My friend Ramses specialized in red beans, chilly con carne: A “burning desaster in garlic” and pretty good excuse to down A LOT of really cold beer. We loved it. Start Saturday evening with the preparations, awake from coma Sunday afternoon.
KB specialized in – how do yacallit? Small potties where you put in meat on a stick with a burner … forgot the name. He tried to give the picture of the planet system on the floor of his room, a bit smelly but very nice.

Me found out the hard way that you put rice in cold water first (2+1) and afterwards set it up on the oven. It’s not noodles you throw in the cooking water, ya’ know. After having cleared the basics (meat not necessarily HAS to be burnt on the outside, everything becomes soft when cooked long enough!) I found myself more often engaged with the preparation of some kind of “Bologna”-sauce. The mashed-tomato-pulp was called “Pamps” and that’s why I write about “Pamps de luxe”.
Sauce Bologna‘s main ingredient is mincemeat, hash. For best results half-n-half is used: pure pork is too fat, pure beef is too dry. It should not be resting in the butcher’s place too long and be properly roasted. Anybody can throw a pound of minced meat in the pan, roast it, ad pamps and call it a wonder. That is how I started, but not what I do today. You can even
renounce the meat and make a true pasta-sauce – one has to start with simple things and keep it simple. Some imagination about “how will it taste” helps. I am far away from what real cooks can do – develop an idea of a taste and then try to reach it. I do what has to be done in the kitchen, if need be I feed some people fast, but sometimes there is enough time to cook – and that is the main ingredient: Time.
Onions, tomatos, mushrooms – at least the champignons I use mostly – they all bring along and consist of a lot of water. That is good, because so the food will not burn, but this level of humidity needs to be adjusted carefully – that is cooking. “Pamps de luxe” starts simply enough with onions in oil, ad sliced carrots (if done by hand, when done by a machine they are very thin and all the same, equalized, then later), push it all to the side and throw in the meat, roasting it; ad pamps: it comes in different variations, as “Passierte Tomaten” what is a kind of fluid, as sliced and cooked tomatoes and as peeled tomatoes as a whole. It is also a good idea to have a tube of “Tomatenmark” at hand. Let it cook. Ad garlic as much as you want, use spices, what is growing in the garden or on the windowsill. It goes with ananas, nuts and a little cream – but beware the cream can coagulate and spoil your cooking. For the white variant I mostly use cocos-milk. If the pamps is to be eaten with rice it can be a little more “watery”, if to be used with noodles or pasta a little thicker will do.
The original pamps is thick, with rice and burning through the pot’s bottom. It separates men from mice. “de luxe” is more civilized, with cream and sweeter.
It is all about playing: Enjoy!