I have fond memories of baum kuchen from a trip to Germany my family took when I was a kid. It translates to “tree cake” in english. It’s cooked in a special machine with a spit where layer upon layer of batter is cooked into a cake with concentric circles like a tree. It’s covered in a hard chocolate shell. It’s the best cake I’ve ever had.

My sister Anika has tried to replicate baum kuchen with her baum kuchen spitzen. Honestly she has had much better results than I have, I should have asked her for her recipe before setting out on my own. But I did get a layered effect and I think my mini cakes look pretty cool, even if they don’t really taste like true baum kuchen. But honestly I don’t think you are going to get true baum kuchen at home unless you can get that crazy spit cooker thing. Here is the base recipe that I used.

This is the icing that I used but I don’t think I’d use it again, it was just too rich and it didn’t set as hard as I would have liked but I’ll post it for reference.

My mother used to make this great German dish called milk rice. It’s a really simple rice pudding and it a really tasty breakfast when cold cereal isn’t going to hit the spot. I didn’t remember how she made it and it was too early in the morning to call her and ask so I did a quick search for a recipe and realized that all of the milchreis recipes took too long and didn’t use precooked rice. I had some left over rice from a stir fry we made a few days ago so I made up my own recipe. Here it is (all measurements are approximate because I was just eyeballing).