I’ve never been to Hungary, but it’s on my bucket list of places to visit one day. I was born and raised in Welland. Both parents were also born and raised in Welland and spoke Hungarian fluently. Both sets of grandparents (Breitenbach- my mother’s maiden name. Toth is my dad’s name) were from Hungary. My first speaking language was a combination of Hungarian and English. I forgot most of my Hungarian when I started school. I still understand some of it although it’s dwindling quickly as there is nobody around me who speaks it My dad is 90 and loves that I’m trying to make some of the favourites that my grandmother and mother used to make.
I love Hungarian food and, in particular, the baking. A local bakery, called The Budapest Bake Shop, in Niagara-on-the-Lake Ontario Canada sells the most amazing chimney cakes. I had never had them before! Well, being the frugal Hungarian that I am, I came to the conclusion that I could make them way cheaper than I could buy them. And I wasn’t about to invest in a big fancy rotisserie type oven to make them. I did some research (Google is great for that) and came up with a combination of different methods that I was willing to try. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. The one I settled on was THIS ONE! The only thing I substituted was the 30 g fresh yeast. I used 7 g of instant yeast that I dissolved in the warm milk. Once the dough was mixed, I let it sit for a good hour to two hours.
My better half drank the beer that supplied me with the 6 tallboy beer cans. What a trouper!
While I was waiting for the dough to rise, I covered the cans with aluminum foil and then oiled them. I think next time I’ll need to oil them a bit more because some of them were hard to push out of the baked dough without breaking the spirals.
Once the dough was at least doubled in volume, I rolled it into a big rectangle with the dough being about ½” thick. I then cut it with a pizza cutter into strips that were approximately ½” wide.
Then I spiraled them around the can, overlapping a bit, all the way down. Mine used about 4 strips of the dough for each can. Repeat with the other cans. Gently roll each can so that the spirals kind of flatten out a bit and stick to each other. Then brush oil on the spiraled dough. Stand them on a cookie sheet.
The next step was to roll the unbaked chimney cakes in the topping of your choice. You can Google the different ones to use. I used 1 cup of ground walnuts mixed with ½ cup white sugar and 2 teaspoons of cinnamon. I put the mixture on another cookie sheet and then rolled each cake into it and used my hands to fill in the empty spots. You might need to brush a bit more oil on to make the walnut/sugar mixture stick.
Then I place them all on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet and baked in my oven for 20-25 minutes at 350F or until golden brown.
I pushed the foil cans out of them when they were still warm. And the result was amazing. I got 6 huge chimney cakes out of this recipe. These were time consuming for me as a first timer but I’m sure I’ll be making them again. Maybe next time I’ll try smaller, skinnier cans so that they aren’t so big.
