A piece of some German culture sounds good. Frankfurter Kranz is just one of those typical German cakes that everyone there will know of. I have always been that picky person when it comes to cakes. But with this one, I am always dying to have seconds. I have to give credit to my grandma's neighbor who gave me this recipe.
Here is the recipe
Ingredients
-6 eggs
-50 grams of sugar
-50 grams of powder sugar
-1 cup of eggnog
-2 packets of vanilla sugar
-50 grams flour
-50 grams of cornstarch
-1 packet of baking powder
-1 cup of sunflower oil
For the frosting
-375 gr of butter
-2 packets of vanilla sugar
-1 can of sweet condensed milk
For the assembling
-krokant
-berry, cherry jam
Instructions
In a large bowl beat the eggs and sugar. It is very important to have your hand mixer or whatever you are using on the highest speed. You can also do it without a machine. That was what my grandma's neighbor said. When that's done add powder sugar, flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and eggnog. The eggnog is very important, without it, the cake misses the special taste and moisture.
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It is important to mix the ingredients in one by one and let the dough mix really well. It needs to keep on stirring really well for at least 40 minutes. I would recommend doing it for 1 hour. You want the cake batter to be thick and creamy. Then you want to place it evenly in a ring pan that is greased with butter and has sugar placed evenly and stuck onto the sides and everywhere. Bake it at 175 Celsius for 40-50 min. Do not overbake it.
When it is out of the oven you can concentrate on the frosting. In a large bowl, you want to mix with a hand mixer the butter and get it really loosened up and then add the sweetened condensed milk and the vanilla sugar. Mix until it is creamy. It is not the thickest frosting there is out there so if it doesn't seem right don't worry about it. The next day you want to cut the cake into 3, 1 cut should be at the bottom and one more heading towards the top so that you have 3 even cake layers. Place the jam on the bottom layer. To much jam is not good, you don't want it to go to the sides of the cake and mess everything up. Then place the frosting on top of the jam and spread it out.
Put the middle cake layer on and this time just add the frosting, similar amount as to what you added before. And then you can place your last cake batter on and then focus on placing the frosting everywhere. If you see some of the cake through the frosting it is fine because you are going to place it in the refrigerator for 30 min to 1 hour. When you take it out you should focus on using all of the frostings and getting some in the middle, some on the sides and try to have the cake all white. When that is done take some krokant and place it on the cake. This might be very sticky and messy. A trick you can do is to place the krokant on a bread knife and then press the bread knife on the sides of the cake. Krokant is something that you can't buy in every country.
I know that you can buy it in Germany and you can make it homemade. I have never made it from scratch but you can look it up and do it yourself. The cake tastes better as the days pass by and the frosting and cake blend well together.