Category — Desserts

Here is the promised third Czech Christmas Cookie. You can find a similar recipe in the December issue of Sauveur magazine, although they call it an Austrian cookie, which raised my blood pressure. Luckily there are bloggers out there who will correct these mistakes.

[Read more →]

This is our second Christmas Cookie recipe. My dad’s favorite: the buttery, delicious, and very delicate “stars”. They melt on your tongue. You could make them in any shape, but stars are our tradition, with a window for the jam to peek out from between the layers.

[Read more →]

There are a few differences between the Christmas season in Central Europe and how most families celebrate in the USA. The major one would be that the presents are brought by the baby Jesus, and not by Santa.  During the dark Orwellian times, the fashion from the Soviet Union was to bring in “Ded Maroz” (Father Frost), which was the comrades’ version of Santa. It did not work for many reasons, one being that December 6 in Central Europe is Saint Nicholas day, when kids eat themselves sick on candies brought by Saint Nick. For kids it was very hard to understand why would a man in red suit and beard coma back at Christmas and bring toys. Why he wouldn’t he drop off the candies and toys all at once? We needed another character.  So the concept of baby Jesus survived.

[Read more →]

It is here. It is exactly one year since we had the crazy idea to eliminate our free time and start this blog. Yes, I remember very fondly the time when we were playing with templates and arguing over what are we going to publish on our blog. Our mission was and still is to introduce Central European food to the rest of the world. We try to recreate Hungarian, Slovak, and Czech recipes in an American environment (more so now that we live in California). Our mission was very successful last year, because we reached hearts, minds, and stomachs of expats, a few second-generation immigrants and people who spent some time in Central Europe and miss the awesome food. Our mission for the next year will be to introduce this food to the uninitiated: people who have never experienced Central European food. We have some strategies in mind. No, kidnapping people and force feeding them is NOT one of them. But cooking for school picnics might be.

Since we started this blog I had the chance to meet amazing people with amazing stories and recipes of their own. They should start a blog! It is not that hard to do. And in the next year, I am going to show you how. I am planning to put together a few posts on how to start a blog and how to do basic photography and maybe video. I hope I can motivate you to start your own empire.

[Read more →]

Emperor’s Crumbs or császármorzsa or smarni or Kaiserschmarrn was our first recipe on this blog. I felt like revisiting it for three reasons: first, it is our name and signature recipe, so we should try it with American ingredients. Second, we are delighted to mention that we’re featured on The Hungarian Girl’s website and I don’t want to risk any mistakes! Most importantly, my mother-in-law had a birthday recently, and a decadent breakfast reminiscent of fancy Austro-Hungarian weekends was a perfect way to celebrate it. So I remade the recipe to serve 5-6 instead of the original 2. I also made it more “California compliant” and used less eggs and almost no fat, while keeping its outstanding flavor. It still tastes rich and delicious. If you want to know the background of emperor’s crumbs then check back to our first post and the old recipe.

[Read more →]