TWD: Mrs. Vogel's Scherben

I was really excited when I saw that Teanna, of Spork or Foon, chose Mrs. Vogel's Scherben this week. You know how some books seem to tend to open to certain pages? Well, my copy of BFMHTY opens to the picture of these scherben all of the time. They're so homey looking, and the picture reminds me of the Swedish rosettes that my great-grandmother used to make when I was little. I have (had) an open ban on deep frying in my kitchen (not that I won't eat fried foods, but for the mess and the smell, I'd prefer not to eat them in my house), so I was always a little apprehensive about this treat, too.

I really liked making these treats. The whole wooden spoon creaming of a tiny amount of butter and sugar threw me off at the beginning, but the result is a supple dough that's really fun to work with. Have I mentioned before how much I love rolling out dough? I love it. I would roll out dough all day long and be very happy -- it soothes me. I'd especially love to roll out this dough all day long because it's a really nice dough to work with. Really, for all of the fuss about deep frying (and I had quite a conversation with myself about whether or not to deep fry), these are a pretty simple treat to make. The only trouble I had was regulating the temperature of my oil. It climbed to 350 and then kept going, so I immediately freaked out and turned down the heat as I was adding my first batch of dough. Well, it's one thing to read or hear that the oil temperature will drop when you add the ingredients to be fried, but it's another thing to remember it in practice. The combination of lowering the heat on the oil plus the scherben sent my oil temperature plummeting, and then I had to get it back up again. By the end of frying the scherben, though, I had it fairly figured out, and frying the dough was pretty quick and painless.

In the end, these treats remind me a lot of other fried dough sweets:  sopapillas, beignets, and funnel cakes. I ate some and enjoyed them, but a few scherben are quite enough for me. Dudley, on the other hand, LOVED these -- he couldn't get enough of them. He paid these little fried treats one of the highest compliments I've ever heard him use. In Dudley's words, scherben are "a delicious gift to the world that I get to eat." He devoured a plate of these, and he was very sad to hear that there weren't any more. He said he could eat 1.2 million of these little fried treats. So, thank you, Teanna, for picking the scherben. I had a blast making them and they were most appreciated at my house! If you'd like the recipe for these little goodies, you can check out Spork or Foon. Teanna's blog is a favorite of mine. She's super adventurous in the kitchen, takes lovely pictures of delicious looking food, and the blog is so much fun to read.