Paulchens FoodBlog?!

In the middle of writing up our first post Plate 2 Page assignment our ever so lovely Ilva announced on Twitter that Paper Chef, one of the eldest foodie challenges, is back to life.

She asked to join tho the deadline was super tight and so she convinced her partner(s) to move the deadline from Tue 7th to Friday 10th which gave us the opportunity to join in and play with these fun ingredients:
bread, lime, berries and chocolate.

If you are not familiar with the concept of Paper Chef it’s quite easy to explain:

Paper Chef follows the thought of TV competitions like Iron Chef or Ready, Steady Cook (the German version was called Kochduell) where chefs had to cook with a rather unusual combination of ingredients. Well this is what Paper Chef does as well.

4 ingredients will be announced at the fist whole weekend of the month and you have 7 days to cook something from it, snap a nice pic and write up your blog post. Submit your blog post to paperchef AT gmail DOT com. That’s it!

If you still need more information please continue to read here.

When I read the given ingredients of Paper Chef June 2011 I immediately thought I want to make a modern twisted version of a childhood favorite of mine:  Scheiterhaufen.

Scheiterhaufen is a very simply sweet course which is very popular in the region of Austria where I come from. Basically it is a layered bread pudding with apples and sweet bread or just ordinary rolls soaked in an egg-milk mixture topped with a meringue.

My Grandma used to make it for us children, cause with a rather large family (4 Generations under one roof) there is always some stale bread around…
Apples were always on hand too since we had quite a lot of apple trees in our garden. Every week we would get fresh eggs from our relatives who still grow chicken.

So for my modern twisted take on Scheiterhaufen the only thing I had to come up with was how I would incorporate lime, choc and berries to this all.
Not that bad at all: I decided to use blueberries and strawberries as top layer, add lime juice to the meringue and hide some white choc between the apples. Viola!

Since I was planning to bring it to work as a dessert I decided to bake it in individual serving dishes I normally use for baking cakes in the glass. Which makes them easy to store and bring along to say a picnic as well… *hint*

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Austrian Scheiterhaufen with a modern twist

Ingredients (four small servings)
180gr  rolls (stale) or brioche
250ml milk
3 eggs (2 egg whites for meringue)
60 gr sugar
pinch of salt
100gr grated white chocolate
300gr  apples
Some blueberries and raspberries
Whiskey or any other boosz to your liking, the original calls for rum
2 egg whites (see above) and about 10 gr powdered sugar for meringue
Butter for greasing baking dish

1. Cut brioche or rolls into slices. Mix milk with egg and two yolks, sugar, choc and a pinch of salt.
2. Peel apples, quarter and remove the cores. Cut apples thinly or grate coarsely.
3. Grease an ovenproof baking dish with butter.
4. Season apples with cinnamon. Place alternate layers of bread and apples into the baking dish and pour with the egg milk.
5. Press down everything, add some more milk if needed, give it at least half an hour rest.
6. place blueberries ans raspberries on to. Cover with meringue.
7. Preheat oven to 200 ° C
8. Bake for about 40 minutes baking, allow to cool slightly.
9. Dust with powdered sugar.

Suggestions:
When filling the glasses make sure you do not overfill them. You will regret it later – believe me. This will all get very bubbly once it is in the oven… Don’t use too much liquid either, you do not need to! Don’t forget the booze, srsly!

See? It really is very easy and quick!

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Verdict:
I could have used more booze! My good old friend Jameson whic I used for the plain rum the original recipe calls for was – to my taste – a little underrepresented.
Otherwise I loved the light tangy taste the lime gave to the meringue. The berries were a nice addtition and gave the dish an uncommon but likeable touch. I am glad I only added them on toop so I could have a taste of new and familiar in one dish. The chocolate flavor was – like the Whiskey – a little underrepresented. But was there every now and then.

Sweetheart loved it – I gave it to him as a dessert today and he gave me suspicious look when I handed him the glass, but after the first few spoonfuls he digged right in. When I told him he could save some for later he quickly looked up from his glass and shot an explicit NO! at me…

The glasses I used hold 500 ml  but I think you could easily use250 ml glasses too – especially if you plan to bring it along to a picnic or something.