First kiffel display – Photo: L. Weikel
Kiffel Debrief #1
Yes! I finally managed to make my first-ever batch of Hungarian kiffels, aka “Aunt Grace’s Kiffels.”
I’m totally puzzled by this experience. The recipe, first of all, is decidedly incomplete at written. There is no mention of adding flour gradually – and by hand, nonetheless. This potentially game-changing detail was only conveyed orally. (OK, in a text message from one person and an email from another – but the salient point remains, nonetheless, that this detail was not included in the recipe itself!)
First Impression
My primary hope as I jumped right into Phase Two of this effort was that this should be fairly straightforward. Phase One entailed creaming the butter and cream cheese, adding flour, rolling that mixture into little balls, and then “chilling them overnight.”
Surely Phase Two, which only consisted of rolling out the little balls on a powdered sugared board, filling each with ½ tsp. of filling, baking them the requisite minutes, and then dusting each with another coat of powdered sugar sounded, again, pretty darn straightforward and, dare I say, easy.
Wrong!
I couldn’t have been more wrong. First of all, the little balls of dough essentially became pellets of iron as they chilled innocently in my refrigerator. Good grief. I could’ve more easily loaded them into my old neighbor’s musket (thinking of you, Earl) and done serious damage to intruders than I could effortlessly roll them out and fill them with filling.
So here I was. I’d set up my living room as a miniature assembly line, with tray tables set up where I would roll, fill, and load onto the cookie sheets. This enabled me to create the kiffels while watching a sci-fi series with Karl (The Expanse on Amazon Prime – it’s good!) instead of being relegated to the kitchen, where I have no counter space anyway.
I know I’m going to be sore tomorrow from stooping over the tray tables. It took a considerable amount of weight and pressure to roll out those iron balls! And I just never seemed to get the knack of creating a rolled out ball of any consistency. Each and every one was a study in avant-garde artistic expression.
They may have effused artistry (if you looked at them with only one eye, perhaps) – but I assure you, they were irritatingly labor intensive and actually, in a word, ugly.
They did not harken back even remotely to the kiffels I remember of my youth. Nor did they resemble my youngest sister and her husband’s efforts over the years to produce kiffels just before Christmas.
In fulfillment of my commitment to full frontal honesty with my wonderful readers, I offer you this photo of the very first batch’s arrival from the oven. Not a pretty sight:
First ever batch of kiffels (poppyseed filling) – Photo: L. Weikel
Christmas Cat
As can also be seen in my main photo at the top of this post, I did reach a point where they at least looked somewhat remotely like kiffels. They don’t look half bad adorning the Christmas Cat plate.
But I assure you, due to the shocking labor intensity required of me, I only ended up baking about three dozen. And I only used poppy seed and sour cherry preserves as fillings. I’m feeling a major yearning for the sugar/cinnamon/crushed walnut topping that goes into them as well – but have to date found no one who definitively maintains that part of the recipe.
I may have to improvise.
Why Puzzled?
You may be wondering why I stated early on in this post that this experience has me puzzled. That’s because the recipe is literally only one simple paragraph long. I assumed it was easy – and therein lay my folly.
I’ve felt an unspoken intimidation whenever I considered baking anything of Aunt Grace’s. I believed with all my heart that my baking could never be as good as hers. So when I started challenging myself a couple years ago with baking “Aunt Grace’s cake” – and discovering that, with just a little practice I could make a pretty terrifically yummy cake – I got cocky. I thought the kiffels would naturally be easier than that magnificent cake.
But I was wrong. The kiffels are crafty. And I will not rest until I figure out how to fill them with that elusive nut mixture.
Until then, it’s Lisa vs. kiffels.
(T-700)