Pinwheels with Irma!

Cooking in Germany continues to be a noteworthy experience.  Today was particularly exciting as I had the opportunity to cook with a culinary marvel who also happens to be one of my most favorite people- Irma!  Irma used to live outside of Boston and when I moved to the city after college, she and her husband Brian took me in and let me live with them until I found an apartment of my own.  While I was there, Irma taught me how to bake bread with yeast, the best way to cook mushrooms, how to make a chocolate ganache, and many other scrumptious tricks.  One of the great things about Irma's cooking is that it never requires measuring cups, and in Germany where everything is labeled in millimeters, a measure-less recipe is exactly what I need!

One problem- Irma now lives in Austria.  True, we are in the same time zone, but we still have a substantial distance between us.  So, we decided to cook together over Skype!  Basically, it was like an interactive live cook show starring Irma!  

She gave me permission to share her measure-less recipe.  So here you go!

Pinwheels

Ingredients:

Flour

Butter

Sugar

Quark (or ricotta cheese if you are in the US)

Fruit Preserve 

Powdered Sugar

Lemon Juice

Set your oven to 175 degrees Celcius.  Ok I lied.  Welcome to my world Americans!  Now you get to do the temperature math.  And then I promise everything else will be easy after this.  

In a bowl, dump about about a cup of flour.  Now take your butter out of the fridge and while it is still cold, cut it into little chunks and plop them into the flour bowl. 

Use your fingers to squish up the butter chunks and mix them with the flour.  Keep doing this until it's all pretty evenly distributed and the flour looks kind of like wet sand.  

Add a little sugar to the mix.  Maybe like a 2 tablespoons or so, depending on how sweet you want your cookies to be.  

Time for the secret ingredient: Quark!!  It might also be called Topfen depending on whether you are in Germany or Austria.  Don't worry Americans, I have a substitute for you.  Just use ricotta cheese.  Add about 2/3 of a cup.  

Now with your hands, knead it all together until it seems like everything is pretty well mixed. 

Once the ingredients are mixed together and you have a nice little ball, roll it out on the counter until its about 1/8 of an inch thick.   Irma used a rolling pin.  I didn't have one so I just used a tall drinking glass.  Sometimes you just have to work with what you've got. 

This is an actual screenshot from Irma's computer during our Skype Cooking Session.  You can see her with two of her children in the small screen on the top right. 

Cut the dough sheet into squares.  Maybe 2 x 2 inches each. 

They don't have to be perfect.  Cut little diagonal lines in the 4 corners of each square.  

Now take a glob of your favorite fruit preserve and plop it in the middle of the square.  I used raspberry which can be a little runny.  Irma advises apricot since it is a little bit thicker, but it's up to you.  

Irma's live demonstration for how to plop the jelly glob using two tea spoons. 

Now take one corner from each of the 4 little slices you made in the dough square and pinch them together in the middle around the jelly glob to make a pinwheel.  

It should look like this. 

Grease your cookie sheet a little bit, and spread out your pinwheels.  

Stick them in the oven for about 15 minutes.  

While they are baking, make a little lemon glaze.  Whisk together about 2 tablespoons of lemon juice with about half a cup of powdered sugar.  If it is kind of soupy add more powdered sugar.  You want it to be more on the globby side so it will drizzle without being too runny.  

When the timer goes off, take your cookies out of the oven but leave them on the baking sheet while you drizzle your lemon glaze over them.  Once they have cooled a little bit (like 5 minutes maybe), you can take them off the cookie sheet so they don't get soggy in all the overflowing jam and lemon glaze.  

Take a picture!  They are really pretty!

Oh.  And eat them!  Yum!

Skype baking session success!  Thanks Irma!

The other fun thing is that Irma has also written a blog post about this experience.  In addition to being a terrific cook, she is a very talented photographer.  If you'd like to see her pictures and read her rendition, click here.