How Old Bread Turned into a Delight
Once upon a time, beyond nine mountains and nine rivers… but no! We will indeed tell you about a fairy-tale transformation, but the whole story did not take place in a fairy-tale realm, rather in our own Prague 13, during the school cooking competition Owl Bowl, also known as the Mayor's Spoon.
In the hands of the children from Mohylová Elementary School, several transformations of ingredients took place, from which you might not have thought of cooking, because they might seem inferior or unappealing, into excellent dishes.
Let's tell the story of old bread that transformed into a fruit cake. You probably know various stuffings, spinach or nettle, which are traditionally made from old bread cut into cubes, but it is less well known that old rolls, buns, bread, Christmas bread, or other types of pastries can be processed as the basic ingredient of a sweet fruit cake. When we were preparing at school for the competition, we baked the cake several times and each time it was a little different and yet excellent.
Transformations were brought by life itself: we used such baked goods that had hardened at home, and it was different each time. We were very happy with the experiment, which showed us that we can use cubes of dark bread, including crusts, in the basic cake dough, which creates a beautiful marbled texture in the cake base, and it doesn’t reduce the excellent taste of the cake at all. Further variation in the recipe was suggested by the competition organizers, who gave us two cups of yogurt as a mandatory ingredient. Originally, we planned to soften the cubes of old bread and rolls in a mixture of milk and egg yolks, but the new circumstances led us to the idea of trying a “softening mixture” of yogurt and egg yolks.
And the result? The cake was even more liked by all the cooks than the training ones from school! Long live the changes that life brings, and that help us keep discovering something new.
So come and enjoy it with us and try baking the cake yourself, the recipe is here:
INGREDIENTS
4 older rolls / slices of bread / other pieces of pastry;
half a packet of vanilla sugar;
80 g of sugar;
2 eggs;
200 ml of milk / 2 cups of plain yogurt;
Cinnamon;
half a cup of crumble;
drained plums and apples from a compote
METHOD
Cut the older pastry (bread) into cubes and put them in a bowl, drizzle with egg yolks mixed in milk (or plain yogurt).
Add sugar and vanilla sugar, cinnamon.
Whip the egg whites into a foam and fold into the batter.
Put the batter into a baking pan greased with butter (oil) and sprinkled with flour.
Arrange the apples and plums on the batter.
Sprinkle with crumble.
Bake in the oven at 180°C. Bake until golden, approximately 35 minutes.