Help finding Lemon Raisin Guegelhupf Recipe?

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Old_Country_2323 on 5 Dec 2024 at 19:42

Hello! I've been looking for a recipe that we lost when my Oma died. She used to make a lemon raisin Guegelhupf with a thicker/darkish crumb coat, which she would sprinkle with sifted powdered sugar. The inside of the bundt-shaped cake was yellowish, and the raisins were juicy. This did not seem like a very sugary recipe, but it was divine. I've been looking for something like it out in the world while traveling or online, and nothing quite matches. 

I don't know the exact origins of the recipe. She lived in a German/Italian settlement of Yugoslavia (northern Bosnia), and during WWII went to Germany, then Austria, then here. It could have been from any of these places. She just called it Guegelhuph, and it was always perfectly the same.

Any ideas?

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Debra Wink on 6 Dec 2024 at 07:42

I can't post it here, but there is a recipe on page 96 in Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss. She describes it this way:

Gugelhupf, an old-fashioned yeasted cake studded with raisins and fragrant with lemon peel, rum, and copious amounts of butter, might be my favorite cake in this entire book. With a wonderful yeasty, buttery crumb and an enchanting old-world fragrance, this Gugelhupf is as good for dessert as it is for breakfast. I like to think of it as the Northern cousin of Italian panettone.

With 5 eggs and 150 grams of butter, the crumb is probably yellowish. The lemon peel is in the form of grated zest and the raisins are hydrated with dark rum. In addition to eggs and butter, it is enriched with sugar and whole milk. If this sounds close, try looking it up at your local bookstore or library.

Best of luck in finding the right one,
dw