Goodbyes...

Come tomorrow, I will have to say goodbye to my beloved office number 2919. As much as I'm looking forward to my new job, this is going to be hard. My team and especially my "roomies" have grown so dear to my heart. We had a whole lot of fun - and a whole lot of cake! My boss even got me a baking book as a farewell present! So I went home and put it to use straight away. Well, that's one plus side of goodbye: you can say it with cake. And, after all, I'm staying within the firm and I'm only moving up one floor. But still... I'm surely going to miss the team!

Apricot Cake

(slightly adapted from Heissgeliebtes Backen by Annemarie Wildeisen & Florina Manz)

600g apricots (or rhubarb, apples, plums or berries...)

4 pieces of zwieback (is there an English word for that?!)

200g soft butter

180g sugar

2 sachets vanilla sugar

1 pinch of salt

4 eggs

200g flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

100g ground almonds

4 tablespoons orange juice (I used apricot juice)

icing sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Line a 26cm diameter springform pan with parchment paper and grease the rim with butter.

Wash the fruit and cut into pieces. Put into a bowl. Put the zwieback in a plastic bag and crunch it up with a rolling pin until you have finely ground crumbles. Mix with the fruit and set aside.

In another bowl, mix butter and sugar, vanilla sugar and salt with an electric hand mixer for about 5 minutes. Then, add one egg after the other, beating for about 1 minute after every egg.

In another bowl, mix flour, baking powder and almonds. With a ladle, add to the butter-sugar mixture in several additions together with the orange juice. In the end, add the fruit. 

Fill the dough into your prepared springform pan and bake for about an hour. If the top of the cake begins to get to brown, cover with aluminium foil.