Sourdough Surprises: Monkey Bread drove us bananas! / Sourdough Suprises: Monkey bread, il pane delle scimmie che ci ha fatto perdere la testa

It’s the 20th and Sourdough Surprises is back. As always I am delighted to discover a new bread kind, and what bread! I must admit this has been a great hit among my new official recipe testers: Flavia (go and take a look at her work here, she’s an amazing photographer and graphic designer) and her studio buddies Daniela, Micha and Alessandro not to mention Antonio, Flavia’s boyfriend, who devoured 3 and a half out of 4 monkey bread balls she had taken home. I must admit I was quite skeptic, not being a huge fan of overly sweet things, and was a bit scared only looking at the shape and fierce fatness of this very special bread.

Spiced Baumkuchen, a layered cake for Daring Bakers / Torta albero speziata per i Daring Bakers

The January 2014 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Francijn of “Koken in de Brouwerij“. She challenged us all to bake layered cakes in the tradition of Baumkuchen (tree cake) and Schichttorte (layered cake).

I admit it, when reading Baumkuchen on this month’s Daring Bakers pdf’s document for just a slight moment I had the illusion we had to bake the Polish version (Secakz)
of this cake common in Northern Europe regions such as Germany, Austria, Hungary and funnily quite popular in Japan too. Scrolling down to read more, excited and quite scared, I won’t deny my relief discovering that Francijn choice’s had fallen on the German version of this sweet loaf.