Hermanni

Hermanni
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

This is Hermanni, a living cake that has been in our care for the last 10 days. My version was in the end spiced with banana chunks, hazelnuts and hazelnut chocolate pieces. Tasty! But I must admit that the principles behind this kind of chain letter cakes escape me — the dough is distributed from friend to friend, fed with sugars and then divided and fed again. And eventually you can put it in the oven and bake it. And eat. Supposedly it gets its yeast directly from the air or something?

Author: frans

Professor of Information Studies and Interactive Media, esp. Digital Culture and Game Studies in the Tampere University, Finland. Occasional photographer and gardener.

2 thoughts on “Hermanni”

  1. I suppose a small starter amount of yeast comes with the dough you get from someone. Over here it seems to be more of a kids’ thing, our daughters have got one at least a couple times from their friends.

    I wonder how would dough from natural yeast work – like those Belgian beers?

  2. Yeah, it might be that without the original “toot” (is there an English word for ‘taikinajuuri’, anyone?) there might be some not-so-kind micro-organisms that could take over the dough, rather than the benevolent ones. Wines and beers develop into right kind of stuff also naturally only in environments that already have those yeast strains floating around, I suppose.

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