Apple Strudel...Fail?

The family came over last night for Sunday Supper - and since we just got back from the river cruise and I've been talking so much about all the delicious food I wanted to experiment on them :)

I made stroganoff over rice like we had in Prague - googled a bunch of recipes and thought I'd found one that seemed similar but turned out it wasn't nearly as good as it should have been...so I'm not even sharing that recipe and will keep working on it. For dessert I made the apple strudel recipe that I posted about here, it also wasn't as good as it was at the demo where I watched them make it (Dave actually asked "did you follow the recipe they gave you on the ship?" like I used a completely different recipe haha! Yes, I followed exactly!) but only Dave and I knew it wasn't like the kind we had in Europe - everyone else at dinner enjoyed it so I decided to go ahead and post this anyway. It tastes really good, but I'm calling it a "fail" because it is not what we had while on vacation, since everyone else gave it a thumbs up I want you to make it and decide for yourself.

I haven't made very many videos - it's much harder to talk and work at the same time. Brooke makes it look so easy! But here I am making the strudel:




A couple changes I would suggest: it needs more sugar in the filling. Maybe when I figured out how much brown sugar I needed by weighing it versus the recipe calling for 1 3/4 oz I did the calculation wrong? Whatever, add a little more than 1/4 cup for sure. The dough seemed a little tough to me, maybe I didn't roll it out thin enough - get it super thin. I think it would also be nice to sprinkle with cinnamon sugar before baking, the top of the crust was a little dry.

I just made a copy of the actual recipe when I posted it before, it's in metric and ounces so I weighed everything to help make it easier for you to make this - hopefully I calculated it all correctly! I'm retyping it again with my amounts:

Ingredients

dough:
 12 1/4 oz flour (about 2 3/4 cup)
1 T. oil
1 T. melted butter
3 1/2 oz (100ml) lukewarm water (I used a glass measuring cup that has ml's on the side to measure)
pinch of salt

filling:
1 1/4 lb tart apples, peeled cored and sliced (about 5 or 6 apples, I used granny smith)
3 1/2 oz melted butter (one stick)
3 1/2 oz biscuit breadcrumbs (I used graham cracker crumbs, just shy of 1 cup)
1 3/4 oz light brown sugar (1/4 cup packed)
raisins, cinnamon, chopped nuts, lemon juice, rum (all optional)

Directions:

Peel apples and cut into thin slices. Gently brown the biscuit crumbs in butter. Combine all ingredients for the filling together.

Mix flour, salt, oil and lukewarm water and knead together with the kneading hook on the mixer for approx. 10 minutes until the dough as become smooth and elastic. Roll the dough into a ball and brush with butter. Using a sharp knife, cut a cross at the top of the ball of dough and then leave to rest at room temp for 2 hours, wrapped in cling film.

Sprinkle a table cloth evenly with flour. Roll the dough out as thinly as possible on the cloth. Place your hands, stretched out flat, under the dough and draw the dough over the back of your hand so that it becomes thinner and thinner. You will know the dough is ready when the pattern on the table cloth is recognizable through the dough, or when you can ready newspaper print through it.

Fill and roll the strudel together, being sure to use the table cloth to help you, by raising the end with the filled dough just enough that the strudel begins to roll on its own accord. Grease the apple strudel with melted butter and bake in preheated oven at 400' for 30 minutes, or until golden brown.

Makes 6 servings

resting dough

I can read my note thru the dough so I thought it was thin enough,
after baking it though I think it needed to be rolled out even more.

before baking the strudel

Travel Log - Prague

When the river cruise finished in Nuremberg we had a 3 day extension in Prague - hey, we came this far, why not? It took about 4 hours to get there by bus, and I have to say it wasn't a bad trip at all. The countryside is very pretty (also we left really early in the morning so the first part of the trip everyone is taking a nap!) and for part of the drive we were on the German Autobahn - most of the Autobahn doesn't have a speed limit so people are driving super super fast, fortunately the bus couldn't go super super fast so I didn't have to worry about that haha. How fun it would be to drive as fast as you can go and not worry about getting a ticket! We made one stop at a McDonalds - as you can imagine it was very different than our Micky D's, you could get pastries and donuts! Nice. And the sign out front said they had a "relax room" instead of a restroom - I laughed.

Old Town Hall and Astronomical Clock
in Old Town Square. It's a busy place!

Petrin Tower - a mini Eiffel tower on a hill
about 30 minutes walk outside of town 

view from the Charles Bridge

Prague is a beautiful city - have I said any place isn't beautiful on this trip? It's filled with things to do and see, it's safe, and very walkable (still got the cobblestones tho, flat shoes people!). The Old Town Square was close to our hotel so we used that as sort of a base, the roads leading away from the square were filled with shops, cafes, fabulous architecture...limitless! I really can't even list everything we did - I'll just show you lots of pictures - there's the Charles Bridge, the Astronomical Clock, the Old Town Hall which looks like something out of Disneyland, the Prague Castle, the Petrin Tower (which looks like the eiffel tower, I have no idea why they have a mini eiffel tower...), churches churches and churches of course - although our guide said that 80% of czechs claim to be atheists, not that they don't believe but they won't belong to any groups, church, etc. after living with Communism for so long. They don't want to follow anything or be told what to do. Interesting right?

Czech Crowns - the coins
are confusing! It was shocking to
get a bill for 1162,00 but then
realize that's like $40. 

locks on the bridge to symbolize a couple's
love - you put on the lock and throw the key
into the river. The guide goes "look, a couple
have combination locks instead of a key,
that's the Czech way - keep your options open"
HA!

changing of the guards at the castle requires a selfie for sure.

these statues are called "creepy babies". yep, they are.

just a man and his girlfriend. I'm thinking
he lost a bet? I'm hoping he lost a bet...

on the bridge there is a statue, people
line up to rub one side or the other - left side
means you'll return to Prague one day, right
side is for luck - we touched both sides. 

the John Lennon wall - full of ever changing
graffiti and personal statements. pretty cool. 

Keeping up with our vacation eating schedule we pigged out all around Prague! Once again, the food is SO good. I had a couple of my favorite meals here, I'm including a bunch of food pictures for you. Food is inexpensive, wine and beer are great, people are not exactly friendly and outgoing but they are pleasant and all of our servers were nice. I'm going to work on recreating some of the dishes we experienced and if they turn out I'll share them with you in future posts. One I especially want to try is "stroganoff goulash" which was sort of a beef and mushroom gravy over rice, the really interesting thing is it has chopped up pickles in it - weird but so so good.

Trying the Trdelnik - a coiled cinnamon bread thing either filled with ice cream (which none of us liked)...

...or just eat plain, everyone liked it plain best. 

another goulash - this one quite a bit spicier served with crunchy potato pancakes and bread dumplings.
not my favorite thing but it's pretty, and very filling! 

cauliflower pancakes and smashed potatoes. I loved this dish. 

check out  how my chicken and veggie skewer was presented - how great is this presentation?!

one of my most favorite meals - "stroganoff goulash".  This is so so so good,
I will be trying to perfect this recipe for sure.

it's not all about goulash and dumplings - there's fantastic ice cream too!

We hired a driver/guide to take us about an hour out of town to Kutna Hora, there are a couple beautiful churches there and also a small chapel decorated with human bones! Yep that was creepy and I could have done with out, but the guide said "hey, you gotta see it once but you won't go a second time" haha. Look it up if you want to see pics and read about it.

on the sidewalk outside of the bone church -
it's just inlaid stones so not as creepy as the
actual chapel!! 

That's the end of our vacation and my travel log for the river cruise and Prague - hope you enjoyed! I highly recommend this trip if you can make it - if not, at least you've got a feeling of what our days looked like and how beautiful these cities are.

St Barbara Cathedral, and the gang

Travel Log - Regensburg, Germany

Regensburg (according to my handy ship info paper that they delivered every day) is the oldest city on the Danube and so it seems fitting that they also have the oldest restaurant in the world (that part I looked up on Wikipedia to see if it's a truth or just boastful talk haha!) called the "Historische Wurstküche zu Regensburg"  ("Historic Sausage Kitchen of Regensburg").

Historic Sausage Kitchen. This building has been
 here since at least the 17th century.

The menu is in German so it was sort of a crap shoot figuring out what to get, we struggled for a bit before the very nice waitress who spoke pretty decent English came to our rescue.  I ordered the potato soup and was given the choice to add sausage links to the soup if I wished. Sausage links in my soup? Well why not since we were at the historic sausage kitchen after all. I loved it -  seriously the food on this trip has been amazing, not a bad meal anywhere! They have tons of choices of sausages obviously, these were small finger-sized so having 2 in the soup wasn't crazy or inappropriate (haha!). Side story - apparently someone somewhere sometime (seems I might not have been paying enough attention to a boring tour guide) regulated that these sausages had to be a certain weight and small size; Sunday Mass was 5 to 6 hours long so people were hungry when they got done but they weren't supposed to eat meat so someone somewhere came up with the idea to make these small sausages finger size and thin so they could slip them thru keyholes in the door, that way no one knew they were eating the sausages. What can I say people, it's not my story - I'm just passing on the medieval gossip (or the parts I remember anyway) ;).

a sample of the menu, thankfully we had some help translating. potato soup is the first thing listed...

...and it's delicious!

After lunch we took a tour to the Danube Narrows and the Weltenburg Abbey. Unfortunately we had to travel to the Narrows (the river cuts thru the mountains and literally is at it's narrowest here, the long ship can't go thru - we got on a small ferry boat to see that part of the river) by bus (ugh) so our (lame) tour guide held us captive and took us by the Befreiungshalle (means "hall of liberation") a large domed building built to commemorate Bavaria's victory over Napoleon - it's being refurbished (which is very common everywhere we went on this trip - scaffolding is ever present) so you couldn't actually go in it and it wasn't even part of the tour but since we drove out of the way to see it (or not see it) then we didn't have enough time at the Abbey to try the beer that is famous world round because the monks make it right there and have won all kinds of awards for it. This is why I say the guide was lame LOL. I don't like beer so really it didn't matter to me but I'm being indignant on behalf of everyone on the bus who wanted to drink it (ahem, Dave) hahahah. Enough with the history info - back to the cruise...

Liberation Hall - see what I mean? 

so we did what anyone would do when standing in front of a giant domed building
looking over amazing views of the city behind us - took a group selfie of course. 

our bus shows the route we were taking on the Danube, Dave is pointing at where
we were on the map - Budapest is the dot above the naked woman's head.
don't ask why there is a naked woman taking a shower on the side of the bus.
no one has the answer. 

notice anything wrong with this picture haha? I don't know if it's a typo or how they spell "drink" there!

 rock formations on the Danube Narrows remind me of an Alaskan glacier

stained glass windows at St. Peter's Cathedral installed in the 14th century!

That night on board the chefs prepared a "Taste of Germany" - different sausages (naturally), spreads, pretzels and bread, along with tons of other stuff. Yum. I'm really starting to wonder when I'll be hungry again after this cruise - I'm full all the time! But it's so good! Afterwards there was more singing and dancing, and a mean card game of 31- we "bet" with yucky wasabi peas and at first we thought the loser should have to eat the pot of peas but since I lost first and wasn't about to eat them we changed that rule. 

"taste of Germany"

don't let the smiles fool you -  they're ruthless.

how could I possibly lose since I had the "stopper"?

Travel Log - Passau, Germany

Passau was our first stop in Germany - they have 3 rivers that meet in the city so the first instructions we were given is to make sure that if you asked someone how to get back to the boat you specified what river you're on, good tip haha. We went on a guided walking tour in the morning and had the best guide (Andrea), she was very knowledgeable but also entertaining; something I learned on this trip is that there is one thing that makes the biggest difference when on a tour - getting the right guide!

There's the kind of guide that knows a lot (and tells you all of it) so you feel like you're in a lecture and hoping there isn't a test coming at the end, and then there's finding out the important things you want to know about a place and still be entertained! Andrea would give us info with names and dates and then go "but you don't have to remember any of that - just remember this..." and give us a solid piece of interesting history. Nice. Don't get me started on the last tour guide that spent at least 30 minutes pointing at a genealogy tree from like the 15th century and describing each person in succession. I was trying very hard to not roll my eyes at her. Back to Andrea.

Andrea and her Drindl, bow on the right :)

She's a great storyteller - one of my favorites was about the way they tie the bow on their dirndl (their "traditional" dress which apparently has been out of favor by everyone except for during Oktoberfest but is starting to become popular again): Andrea was wearing one for the tour and explained that you can tell a woman's status depending on where she ties the bow - if it's tied on the right she is married or taken, in the back she is a widow, on the left she's single and dating, in the middle she's a virgin (she loudly whispered "there's not many that can tie it in the middle"). Then she changed the subject to drinking beer, how much Germans love their beer, how drinking too many beers leads to thinking you are a very good singer, and if like her you drink too much beer one night you might enter the beer garden (a bar) with your bow in the middle but leave with it tied on the side! She was laughing when she said it so I'm pretty sure it was a German beer and Dirndl joke LOL!

I didn't look it up but this appears to
be a white Mallard? Unusual (to me anyway!).

this is now being used as a boys school

Can't remember the name of this church but
it's my favorite, totally different than any
other on this trip - so calm, simple
and serene. I took pictures of everything from
the color scheme to the light fixtures hoping to
be able to channel this feeling in my house! Love.


We (no surprise here) toured some churches, walked around town, went to an organ concert at St. Stephan's Cathedral where they have the largest cathedral organ in the world - beautiful. Although I have to say I had the biggest distraction in front of me during the concert -  watching the woman in a pew ahead of us repeatedly fall asleep, droop over almost touching the person next to her, then when a super loud organ chord played she'd jerk straight up only to immediately droop over asleep again! In the afternoon we had free time and spent it (to the "joy" of the hubbies...) walking around town shopping :). 

For lunch we went to a super cute outdoor restaurant in the rain (the patio was covered with umbrellas), the guys had schnitzel but I went for cheese spaetzle (sort of a noodle/small dumpling thing - I googled it and think the name of this dish is Käsespätzle) and it was like having the best mac and cheese ever. I died. It was SO GOOD!!!! Anyway, back to the cruise...

cheesy spaetzle. omg.

That night on the boat we decided that things needed to be livened up, enough with the "love boat" background piano music and no one dancing...so we made a list of songs for the piano man to play (Mr. Zoltan was a good sport - unfortunately someone wrote the "chicken dance" on the list and that was the first one he played - all of the non-Americans on board just stared at us HA!) and off we went to round up others to dance. Cathy started a Conga line and sure enough talked everyone in the lounge into participating. Even Danijela and Rad our bartender/dance teachers got involved. So much fun!

Cathy and Rad

Travel Log - Austria to Passau

The next couple days on our cruise was a little simpler - we had a morning stop in Krems, Austria which is one of my favorite places on this trip. A cute little village with tons of old world charm complete with beautiful old doors and flower boxes in the windows. Much slower and quieter here - we walked from one end of the city to the other stopping in little stores, eating gelato, and one fun find was a store front that sold apricot liquor, schnapps, filled chocolates, etc. The business has been family owned and operated for 5 generations and the day we visited was the first day of their apricot harvest for the season so everyone was busy. I wasn't sure how much room I'd have in my suitcase to bring some back so just bought a small bottle of apricot cream liquor and some chocolates - yum. (Yep, we got to taste everything before deciding - fun!). Then back on the boat to continue cruising towards Germany, it was a very scenic trip and I took a few pics from our veranda - I enjoyed the lazy afternoon cruising by the small villages and castles tucked up on the hills while the cruise director pointed out interesting sights along the way.  What a nice day. 

this cat peeking out the window box, awww.

walking into town we went thru a tunnel filled
with graffiti - and look what I found! No, I might be
crafty but I did not do this artwork haha!! 

I love this picture of Cathy... 

...and I love these doors too!

Krems

my lazy afternoon on the veranda

street sweeper in Krems, I've never seen this before!

view from our room

check out the castle on the hill in the background. I'm tellin' ya -
there's no shortage of old castles and churches in this part of the wor

Later that day there was an apple strudel demonstration - they pulled up a couple volunteers (I didn't get my hand up quick enough!) and we watched while the chefs helped them prepare the strudels. I'm including the recipe and a couple of pictures if you're interested in trying to make it - didn't look hard at all. The best tip I got from watching is they rolled the dough out right on top of a flour dusted white tablecloth, then after filling with apples they used the tablecloth to help roll the strudel up into it's shape and then roll onto the baking sheets - good idea.

this isn't the strudel they made on the ship, we had it in town though and since I didn't take a picture of
the finished product on the boat I figured I'd at least show you what it looked like (without the lattice
decoration on top!). 

rolling up the strudel using the tablecloth

brush with butter before baking

Dave is allergic to nuts so needed to be especially careful with his food choices this trip since it seems there are nuts in just about everything. So they gave him a small card at check in that he was supposed to bring to all on-board meals to remind the waitstaff of his allergy. (Naturally he didn't carry the card and made me do it for him) Anyway, they would show him the menu everyday and talk about what he could and couldn't have and then usually made him a special dessert that was nut free. So after the strudel demonstration everyone was invited up to try a piece and Dave walks in from outside (he didn't watch the demo) and goes up to get a piece and the head waiter swoops in and takes it from him saying "no no that has nuts, you can't have it" and basically slapped his hand - HA! He was so bummed I said I'd make it for him without nuts so he can at least try it at home.