Ingredients: 4 pudding packets, 4 whole eggs, 2 dl (0.8 cups) powdered sugar, 2dl (0.8 cups) oil, one baking powder packet (12g)

The ingredients for bábovka. Crucial is the donut-shaped pound cake baking form. In Slovakia, the form has grooves on the outside, as shown.

Combine the oil and sugar. Whisk well.

Then add the eggs and baking powder. Also add the pudding. To make the dual-layer pound cake, mix in two vanilla puddings with half the oil mixture, and two chocolate ones with the second half.

Grease the baking form and dust with flour. Pour in some vanilla mix.

Then add the chocolate dough. Alena did not specify this in her recipe, but I am guessing that the chocolate layer was topped off with more vanilla to make the outside white.

Bake on 375F – 400F for about 30 minutes. Enjoy!

I also found an interesting article talking about bábovka traditions in the Czech Republic. And for more of Alena’s recipe’s, check out apricot cake.

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Yesterday I baked my first-ever cake. It turned out delicious. The name of this cake is bublanina, which means, roughly, bubbly cake. It is a light and fluffy coffee cake filled with your choice of fruit. I used blueberries, but feel free to substitute whatever you have at hand. The recipe comes from mimibazar.sk. Another variation on this recipe, one found for instance on varecha.sk, calls for the whites and yolks to be separated from each other, and the whites whipped into “snow”. I didn’t do this, and the cake still turned out great.

The recipe I used specified to bake the cake for 25-30 minutes at 350F. I found I had to bake mine little longer, about 40 minutes. Also, I converted the amounts into cups (volume measure). This is generally not a good idea when baking, since 1 cup of sugar will weigh more if the sugar has settled. It’s better to instead use a kitchen scale and weigh the ingredients, at least until you get a feel for the consistency of the batter. Anyway, let’s start baking. This is a really easy cake (koláč) to make.

Besides these ingredients, you will also need 500g (3 1/3 cups) of flour.

Start by cracking the eggs (vajcia) into a large bowl and adding 400g (about 3 1/3 cups) of powdered sugar (práškový cukor). Also add oil (olej) and milk (mlieko). I also gave it a tiny bit (the cap’s worth) of vanilla extract (vanilka).

Whisk the ingredients together until everything gets mixed thoroughly. Then add 500g (about 3 1/3 cups) of flour (múka) and 12g (2 tablespoons) of baking powder (prášok do pečiva). Add a tiny bit of baking soda if you have any (I didn’t). Mix well and pour into a medium-sized deep baking pan which you first greased with butter. Also sprinkle flour into the pan before pouring the cake batter.

Then add your favorite fruit (ovocie). Blueberries (čučoriedky) are really popular, and so are cherries (čerešne). I figured the berries will sink down during baking but they didn’t, at least not enough. So I recommend you push the fruit in slightly, just enough for the dough to cover the tops. Otherwise, your cake may turn out like mine, with the fruit on top, instead of distributed more evenly throughout the cake. Bake until the sides no longer stick to the pan and a toothpick (špáradlo) stuck in the cake comes out clean. Check the cake (koláč) in few spots to make sure it is indeed baked through.

Top with powdered sugar (do this by holding a finely grated strainer above the cake and pouring sugar into it while shaking the strainer). Enjoy with coffee (káva) or hot chocolate (kakao).

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If you have visited Slovakia, you surely came across little slightly-curved mini baguettes called rožky. These baked bread rolls are a HUGE part of Slovak cuisine. I have no statistics to back this up, but I suspect Slovaks get at least half of their bread in the form of rožky (plural of rožok). In this recipe, I show you how you too can bake them at home. The recipe is based on an article on SME.sk, titled “Bake your own bread rolls, everyone can do it!”. Very true, indeed. Baking these bread rolls is really easy, and you don’t need any fancy bread machine.

Here is all you’ll need: flour, milk, oil, yeast, salt and sugar.

Combine all the ingredients in a container. Knead the dough by hand, or with a food processor with attached dough hooks. I have this handy mixer, so I used that a bit. But I don’t know if it was really easier on my hands. The hand-held gizmo produced quite a bit of torque which my wrist had to compensate form. So, if you are planning on doing much baking and cooking, you should get a stationary dough mixer, like the one shown in the video on the SME recipe page. The dough is done when it becomes smooth and elastic.

Let the dough rise, covered, for about 2 hours, until it doubles in size. I placed it in a warm oven; this worked great. Form the dough into a loaf and cut it in half.

Take each half and roll it out into a circle about 4mm thick. Make sure to flip the dough while rolling to get it smooth on both sides. Cut the circle into four sections. You can use a knife, but if you can find them, get one of these dough cutters. They work great! Now, let’s make rožky using the following four-step process. First, grab the triangle by the “ears” and stretch them out a bit. Fold the ears over. Second, tuck the long end over and roll up. Third, continue rolling with the palm of one or both hands. Fourth, there really isn’t a fourth step. Just finish rolling and place the tube onto a greased baking pan, the tail piece down.

Let them sit in the baking pan for about 20 minutes, so they rise again. I gave the rolls a little bend too, to make them look more like rožky you would find in a bakery shop. In the mean time, preheat the oven to 375F. Bake in the middle for about 20 minutes, until they turn golden brown. Ah, there is nothing like home-baked bread! Slightly crunchy on the outside, yet fluffy on the inside.

Next make some Parisian salad to go with them.

If you compare my rožky with those you will find in Slovakia, you will see that mine are much more twisty-looking. I am not sure why this is – and since this was my first time ever trying this method, I have not yet had a chance to experiment. The issue is that the individual layers should have fused together. Since they didn’t, I suspect my dough was tad too stiff. I wasn’t very precise with the measurements, so perhaps I had just a bit too much flour, or slightly too little liquid. I will report any findings – I will definitely be baking these again. And in the mean time, feel free to share your experiences by leaving a comment.

Update May 11th, 2010

I figured I give rožky another try, and boy, did this second batch turn out great! Although still not as pretty as you would find in a bakery, the taste was amazing! Lightly crunchy on the outside and fluffily soft on the inside.

The main thing I did different this time is that I let the tubes rise an extra time, about an hour, before baking. You can see how they doubled in the photos below. I also let the dough rise overnight in a fridge, but I don’t think this made any difference. Turns out, you can make the dough the night before, let it sit overnight in the fridge, and in the morning have dough ready for baking.

Here you can see how much the dough increases in size.

I baked them for about 15 minutes at 375F. Although you can’t tell from the photo, these rolls are about twice the size of the ones from the first batch. The baking sheet is much larger.

One great thing to do with these rolls is to top them with butter and jam and make a quick mid-afternoon snack.

Update January 16th, 2011

And one more update. This time they are looking much more like the way they are supposed to. It’s partly because I let the dough rise for over a day, not on purpose but because of various social commitments that got in the way of baking. These were nice and fluffy. By the way, If you have to let the dough rise for a long time like this, you can sprinkle flour over the top to keep it from drying up, and also place it in the fridge to slow down the yeast activity and to prevent the dough from going sour.

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An indispensable part of the Slovak kitchen are lokshe (lokše, lokša singular). They are thin pancakes made out of potato dough that are baked on a hot plate or an ungreased frying pan. They are kind of like Slovak tortillas. These will be found on any Christmas table! You will also find them offered at Christmas markets held in just about every town during the holidays. Today I am again at my grandma, so I watched as she prepared a batch. Follow the following easy steps to prepare this delicious and cheap Slovak treat at home.

Start by boiling unpeeled potatoes (zemiaky v kožke, potatoes in skin). Don’t boil them all the way, just long enough so that you can stick a fork in part of the way. Remove the skin, and grate them.

Then add about a cup of flour (múka) and a dash of salt (soľ). Work into dough.

Transfer onto a floured board, and roll into a tube some 2-3 inches in diameter. Cut out individual slices about an inch thick.

Then take each piece and transfer onto a floured section of the board. Sprinkle more flour on top. Pat it down a bit with your fingers and roll out with a short back-and-forth motion until you have a pancake some 1 or 2 millimeters thick.

Then bake on an ungreased frying pan, hot plate, or, like my grandma did, directly on her wood burning stove (šporák). Bake each side for few minutes, until they look done – they’ll get dark spots. Grease one side with oil (olej).

Fill with sauerkraut (kyslá kapusta) and roll into a pancake. Or, fold over and over again to make a little sachet.

I also convinced my grandma to try them filled with raspberry jam (malinový lekvár) and topped with poppy seeds with sugar (mak s cukrom), the way I had them in Bratislava on New Years. They are delicious like that, although my grandma wasn’t quite sold: Chutia ako palacinky (They taste like crepes) she said. Yes, the traditional way is to eat them with sauerkraut or cabbage.

You can also eat them plain. They are great like that as a light snack with tea or coffee. Lokše are typically eaten on Christmas after the traditional helping of kapustnica and fried carp. Lokše are also eaten on Good Friday.

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I spent the day after Christmas visiting with my grandma Therese (starká Terka). She lives in a little cottage in a village some 30 km away from my hometown of Banská Bystrica. I was there just in time to watch her make three of the most typical home-baked sweets: tvarožník, makovník, and orechovník (farmer’s cheese cake, poppy seed roll and a walnut roll). These three baked goodies share the same leavened (fermented) dough. In this post I show you how my grandma prepares the dough. For the recipes for the cakes, see the following posts, or use the links above.

Start by combining about a cup of milk (mlieko), about 4 tablespoons of sugar (cukor) and a pack of yeast (droždie). My grandma used a cube of fresh yeast. In America, I would substitute one packed of the “rapid-rise” dry yeast available in baking section.

Whisk the yeast well and set it aside covered for few minutes. Whisking is important since it aerates the mixture and makes the yeast more active. For this reason you also need to place the yeast in a warm place. My grandma placed it in her slightly warm oven. At home I just leave the dough on the counter, but start off with a luke-warm milk. To make the dough, pour about 8 cups of flour (múka) into a large pot. We used half of this 2lb bag.

Then add a pocket of baking powder (prášok do pečiva) and about a handful of sugar (cukor). Baking powder is similar to baking soda in that produces bubbles that help the dough rise, but unlike baking soda, it also contains some drying agents. As such, it is less active and makes the dough rise less. Also, it doesn’t not require the addition of an acid to become activated.

Then add about a shot of oil (olej) and the yeast mixture once it has risen (after about 10-15 minutes). Note: my grandma doesn’t use eggs when making leavened dough. She said that dough becomes tough if an egg is added.

Add bit of water (voda), and work the dough with your hands until it no longer sticks to the pot. Add more water as needed. This is the “art” part of making dough.

Form the dough into a bun and evenly dust the top with flour. Then cover the pot with a cloth, and set aside to let rise in a warm place for an hour or two.

Starká then used this circular motion to scoop the dough out and place it onto a wooden board dusted with flour. Form the dough into a bun.

Then use your hands to flatten the dough. Lightly grease it with oil using a baking brush.

Then fold the dough over, flatten out with hands, and grease again.

Then again fold the dough over. Form it into a uniform bun and cut it into two or three pieces. Each of these will become an individual cake.

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