Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Sweet and Hot: SHNECKENING FOR BEGINNERS (a visual aid)

Every year for eight or nine or so years now, my generation of my extended family have been gathering in the holiday season to perform the Schneckening.  “Schnecken” is german for “snail,” but that’s as far as the escargot analogy will take you.  These aren’t bits of mollusk and phlegm broiled in enough garlic to hide the fact you’re eating garden pests - they’re yeasty treats with praline-brickle topping and lots of sugar and raisins rolled up inside.  These are what the family matriarchs made for special occasions - and only for special occasions, because they’re so labor intensive.  How labor intensive?  Let’s take a look:

Muffin pans must be prepared with melted butter, sweetened corn syrup,

and brown sugar - with a few pecans tossed in for giggles too. 

Dough must then be made, which consists mostly of butter - with some flour, yeast, and eggs (plus a few extra yolks for good measure). 

Then the dough rises - overnight, in the fridge.  So everybody goes home and meditates on cinnamon swirls for about 12 hours.  When we return to the traditional schneckening location, my cousin Diane’s kitchen, we -

roll out the dough

until it’s thinner than a pie crust.  Then it’s sprinkled with cinnamon sugar (and raisins and crushed pecans),

rolled into a fat spliff,

and cut into 12 portions (one of which might be both the ends put together to make up for their anticipated lameness as individual free-standing pastries.) The dough spirals are then placed in the muffin trays, and another measure of melted butter is poured over each of them, just in case we don’t think they’re rich enough yet. 

These are then covered and left to rise in a warm place for 30 minutes or so, till they’ve about doubled in size.

The trays are then baked for about 12 minutes or so, give or take whether or not we remembered to turn on the timer. 

Once they’re done, the most challenging part of the process is to get the searing hot pans to the cooling tables and to flip them over so quickly that all the gooey melted sugar, syrup and butter at the bottom of the pan just drools down over and into the now-re-oriented pastry. 

By the end of the process, we’d made schnecken for our entire continent-spanning clan.  This year, we made three batches instead of our typical four; the decrease in quantity was offset by an significant increase in quality, especially in the work of my young cousin Bex, whose schneckening put my own to shame.

We got home sunday afternoon in serious sugar-shock with enough treats to send to my mom, dad and sister, plus some to take to work for those who put up with us on a daily basis, and one or two for breakfast.  That is, breakfast on a day when we want to glue our teeth together with sugar before our eyes are completely open.  Actually, that sounds pretty good right now. 

As always, the schneckening was a lengthy process, but a great deal of fun and a really fulfilling bonding experience.  I got to catch up with little cuz Sam, now just over a year old and wonderfully good-natured; my cuz Diane got to tell us about her most recent horrifying bike accident.  More than that, though, it seemed to reaffirm my place in the cosmos and in the tree of life.  The spirals of the schnecken spin inward, to my soul, and outward, to the wide world.  They are the nexus between inner space and outer space.  Plus, they’re loaded with butter.  No complaints here.

(Today’s post brought to you by the letters D, S, and L, which now represent how fast my home connection is.  Dang those photos loaded fast.  This should be fun!)