TWD—Mrs. Vogel’s Scherben

TEANNA (name in all caps because I think she’s awesome!) from Spork or Foon? chose this week’s Tuesday’s With Dorie recipe for our lil’ group.  She chose Mrs. Vogel’s Scherben (pages 157-159 in the book).  What in the world is scherben, you ask?  I’ve made them now and still don’t really know.  Dorie calls them cookies.  They are NOT cookies.  They are just a simple dough, cut into small pieces and fried.  It’s fried food!   I don’t really hardly ever eat fried food.  But since I’m in this group, I had to play along.  Besides, I was intrigued.  Are these really good?

  

Well, consensus after everyone ate this for Family Home Evening tonight was that they are pretty good—it’s fried food!  Really, we weren’t sure what to think of them.  So everyone kept eating another and another to see  what we really thought.  Are they the greatest thing ever?  No.  But they were fun to munch on and a little dangerous to have around because they were too easy just to keep popping in your mouth.

“Hey, Katrina, some of those are round,” you’re thinking.  Why, yes, they are.  Just thought I’d be a little different. (And we liked how puffed up the round ones got.)  And “wow, you got so many more than I did,” you complain.  That’s because I doubled the recipe.  The second batch I made, I added some cinnamon, a pinch of cloves and 2 tablespoons of crystallized ginger to the dough.  The ever-so-kind Mike, at Living Out West recently sent me a big ol’ bag of crystallized ginger because I’d mentioned on here that it is near-to-impossible to find here in these parts.  How totally nice of him.  (Thanks again, Mike!)  So for fun and a little kick, I thought I’d spice things up a bit with some of these. 

I doused those (and some of the regular batch) in cinnamon and sugar.  Some I just dusted with powdered sugar and others I made a mixture of powdered sugar and a little cocoa. 

This is the plate of ginger-spiced scherben.

“Plain” scherben with cinnamon and sugar.

  

“Plain” scherben with powdered sugar and cocoa powder.  And the best thing we had with these—though the photo looks like, sorry, a pile of poop—was some whipped cream with cocoa powder.  You know, I’ve mentioned a number of times that I don’t really like whipped cream very much.  (I, shhh, prefer Cool Whip.)  But this little addition of just a little cocoa to the cream was awesome.  Loved it!)

So there it is, scherben and poo whipped cream! ;)  Sorry.  I’m done now, I just didn’t realize the picture I’d taken of it was so horrible until we’d eaten almost all of it.  What about a drizzle of chocolate ganache, or just some for dipping?  Ooh, I gotta make these again, ‘sides, I hear they’re pretty good baked.  But thanks, Teanna, for the very fun, super easy pick this week!  Now what to do with the big pan full of oil I’ve got sitting on the stove?  Check out everyone else’s scherben this week over at the TWD blog.