Yesterday was my birthday! Happy Birthday to me! It was quite the hectic day but it was a great one :)

I made grophens.

By myself  :)

Grophens are a delightful bready thing that has been passed down through the generations from my ancestors in Austria. I know of only one other person (other than those in my family) who gets to have these made for him once a year… and his grandma makes them. I haven’t tried hers yet but she’s from Austria as well so I’m sure they’re pretty similar.

B likes to say that they’re kinda like a doughnut. I just like to say they’re amazing.

B likes to eat his plain or with jam on top. I like mine with melted butter and sprinkled with lots of sugar. Or I put them in a sandwich bag with sugar and cover them completely ;) amazing!

I thought that I would fail at this recipe…

You see, my mom is the only who ever made these and my sister is the only one who ever helped her. I know, shame on me for not helping! They both insisted that it was way too difficult for me to handle by myself and even laughed at me when I said I was going to attempt to make them.

My mom always had problems with the dough rising and I realized that it was because 1) we lived in Wisconsin and 2) the house was never warmer than 55 degrees. You read that right, 55 degrees, in Wisconsin! I think on Christmas she turned it up to like 57… once. I probably didn’t need to do this but I put my dough in front of a space heater. And it rose quickly and without any problems!

My next freak out sesh came when I had to knead the dough. It kept sticking to my cutting board really, really bad. Like scrape it all off with a butter knife bad. But I guess it didn’t matter cause they turned out so incredibly delicious!

We have so many of them to eat that I will probably be wearing sweatpants for the next 2 weeks!

I told B that because I made these successfully,  I now consider myself a real housewife. He didn’t even smile. S’ok though cause I’m still beaming inside!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 and is filed under the food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.