What is a Konditorei?

I suppose you might ask this question.

This is what Wikipedia says about Konditorei:
Konditorei is the German word for a confectionery shop. A Konditorei is like a little café and it normally has a wide variety of pastries on offer. In Germany and Austria it is a very popular custom to go to a Konditorei to have a cake and some tea or coffee mid-afternoon. Cakes vary from creamy cakes to apple strudel.

I would call it a pastry shop which usually also is a small cafe. They do sell confections at a Konditorei, but the focus is more on pastries and cakes.

I think I do not have to explain what a bakery is. But maybe I should show you what an Austrian bakery sells. If it is just a bakery, only bread, rolls, and similar items are sold.

This pictures shows what is typically sold in an Austrian bakery. Most breads are rustic and Austrians actually do not eat much of the fluffy kind of bread that comes in a bag from the supermarket, if at all. Austrians also like Sourdough Rye Bread. I guess it is because they grow a lot of rye since it is easier to grow in Austria's colder climate.

Back when I was still living in Austria (about 13 years ago) there were still some small bakeries selling just what you see in the picture. These bakeries were usually handed down from one generation to the next. Since only bread and alike is sold there, they are fast disappearing. Most bakeries are a combination of a bakery and a pastry shop (Konditorei) and also a small cafe. You can sit down at small tables, sip your coffee or tea, have a piece of pastry to eat and read the newspaper, or meet a friend for Kaffeeklatsch, which is an informal social gathering for coffee and conversation, or gossip....


This pictures show what is typically sold at a Konditorei. Here you can see all kinds of Danish on the top and fruit slices in the middle and on the bottom of the picture.


Oh yes, and cookies, of course. Austrians bake cookies that are more fancy than the American drop cookie and usually more labor intensive. Nuts are a main ingredient in a lot of cookies, especially almonds and hazelnuts.


And cakes, of course. Most Americans are familiar with the famous Austrian Sacher Torte. But as you can see in this picture, there are a lot of other cakes sold as well.



This is a typical shop that is a bakery (Baeckerei) and pastry shop (Konditorei) all in one store.

Since I bake bread and pastries as well as cakes, I call my kitchen a Bakery & Konditorei with hopes that I will actually be able to open a real one some day....

Whole Grain Sourdough Rye Bread

I made two kinds of Sourdough Rye Bread to find out which one would taste better. This one is a 50% Rye Hearth Bread which I baked on a pizza stone to give it a rustic look. Though it tasted excellent, I still would like to improve the texture of the bread. It is, like pretty much everything else I bake, 100% whole grain and that makes it a little dense. It is a big improvement over other rye breads I made before though.



This is my second version of rye bread and is called Three-Stage 70 Percent Sourdough Rye. Here you see the loaves rising on a cookies sheet. I used the Detmolder Method of Rye Bread Production which builds the sourdough slowly over 2 days to make the culture strong and healthy. This method is supposedly used by professional bakers in Austria and Germany and I must say that when I tasted the bread it immediately reminded me of my childhood. It tasted exactly like the rye bread I used to eat as a child in Austria.



The two breads in comparison. On top the "Austrian" Rye Bread and on the bottom the 50% Rye Hearth Bread. I am still not totally satisfied with the results, so back in the kitchen I will go and try to improve the recipe.

Cupcake

I made this cupcake for Prabhupada's Appearance Day. It is a basic Vanilla Cupcake with professional Buttercream Icing and toasted sliced almonds. This is the first time I made this particular icing. I had to make a sugar syrup first, whip it into my egg substitute and then add the butter. I must say that this icing was way too rich for me. It tasted too much like eating a stick of butter. Maybe when using a real egg it would come out different. Since I do not have that option, I'll probably never find out....

OREO Birthday Cake

Since the local cake lady is out of town I was asked to bake a birthday cake. The birthday girl wanted an Oreo cake with vanilla and chocolate layers and fillings plus the Oreo cookies on top, so I made her a four layer cake. I got the inspiration for this cake from the internet. I used buttercream icing and the sides of the cake were decorated with chocolate cake crumbs on top of the icing. I do not know how it tasted and have not gotten any feedback yet. I think it looks pretty good though.

Here you can see the top of the cake.

All packed up and ready to go.

This was my test batch. This one does have chocolate ganache icing. It tasted very good.

Janardan's Birthday Cake

This is the last birthday cake I made for my family. This one was for Janardan.

Janardan did not like that the writing on this cake turned out to be purple instead of blue. I do not use anything artificial for my family, so natural food coloring it had to be. I got blue natural food coloring from Ward's, but since it is made of blueberry concentrate, it turned out to be this color when I mixed it with the icing. I found another brand of natural food coloring the other day and I will see if it will work better.

Here is a close-up of the cake. It was a carrot pineapple cake with cream cheese icing. I guess it was too healthy because the kids weren't really crazy about it but the adults all liked it. There was not a crumb of cake left when the party was over, so it could not have been so bad. Actually, I got a lot of positive feedback for the cake.

More Birthday Cakes

I made this strawberry cake for my husband 3 years ago.

This one looks pretty good, doesn't it?

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Looks like I ran out of frosting for this cake....

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One month later another birthday. I tried the same recipe again and this time it came out all right.

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More birthday cake pictures to be posted ...

Birthday Cakes

Here are some birthday cakes I made for my family.

The pictures were taken with an old style camera
(not digital) and I scanned them in. Looks like
the quality has suffered quite a bit.



Janardan's second birthday. Gosh, time flies. This photo was taken 5 years ago!

This cake is called Mille Sfoglie and the layers are made with puff pastry, which I made from scratch. The fillings were Chantilly Cream, which basically is whipping cream with sugar in it and Creme Patisserie, which was in this case Vanilla Pudding with butter in it. The cake is decorated with pistachio nuts. It was a very rich cake, actually too rich for my taste.

Here is a close-up of the cake.



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Next is a cake I made for my birthday almost 5 years ago.



I do not remember exactly what the cake was made off. Looks like a two layer
cake with Chantilly Cream and toasted sliced almonds as a decoration.

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Marisha loves strawberry cake. In fact, every one of her birthday cakes had to be a strawberry cake so far. Here is one I made when she turned 5, that would be 4 1/2 years ago.



And here is a closeup of that very same cake.



I got the recipe for this cake from a professional baking book. It was complicated to make. The bottom is a cake layer and the top half is Strawberry Bavarian Cream. I used agar agar instead of gelatin. It tasted very good.

More birthday cake pictures to come....