I recently was the lucky (?!) recipient of a portion of Herman, for those of you not in the know Herman is short for Herman the German Friendship cake, a sort of foodie baking equivalent of a chain letter. Basically you start off with a section of a fermenting sourdough kindly given to you by a friend or in my case, work colleague, which you then love and nuture for 10 days, stirring and feeding until its ready to be incorporated into a cake batter, they are loads of recipe variations in fact Herman even has a website. The key point being once the sourdough is ready to be baked with you split your batch and pass on to friends and so the cycle goes on. Everything you need to know is on the website.
I choose to bake the basic recipe that came with Herman which is basically a apple, cinnamon and raisin variant. There are also bread variants on the website so I might give one of those a try too.
Any body want a slice of Herman ?
I had a Herman at Christmas time, still have pieces in the freezer,. The chocolate version is good and I read that you can freeze the starter, read it after I'd got fed up and run out of friends who bake!
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