Someone gave me the gift of Herman today. Herman is a friendship cake that you cannot buy but you can give away. “Herman grows slowly but surely because of special yeasting process and it takes days before you can eat him,” say the instructions that accompanied my container of doughy goo.
Herman appears to be the edible equivalent of a chain letter. I have instructions on how to ‘feed’ and nurture Herman for the next 9 days (with flour, milk and sugar) until I divide my yeast grown mixture into 5 and give 4 away to friends together with instructions. On day 10 I feed Herman some more tasty ingredients and then I get to bake him into a cake!
I can’t wait. I’ll keep you posted.
But I can’t help wondering who the heck is Herman… How long has he been going from friend to friend… and how does this yeasting process stop him from going off…
Day 3 and I’ve been stirring my Herman cake mixture for the last few days. Tomorrow I feed him flour, milk and sugar…
All Herman needs is a bit of feeding and stirring to make him grow
Just cover with a tea towel and let the yeast do the rest
Day 7 and I’m still happily stirring my Herman cake mixture, but it has definately grown. 1 more day of stirring then it’s time to feed Herman again and divide him into 5 and give him to 4 lucky friends.
Day 9 It’s time to feed Herman today for the final time then divide him up to give away. Then tomorrow I’ll be baking him…
Day 10 After dividing my Herman mixture and giving my Herman babies away to 4 hesitant friends, it’s time to bake my Herman friendship cake. After adding the final selection of ingredients to the mix, Herman appears to have become a nutty gooey mess but there’s plenty of it so all looking good.
Herman is ready to cook
My baked Herman cake - ready to share with friends
Baking Herman proves a complete success, I even had a little mixture left and made a couple of Herman cup cakes to use it up. The Herman recipe I used involved adding chopped mixed nuts and grated apple which gave it a textured, natural and not too sweet taste. I suspect you can add all sorts of things to the Herman mixture though. The final mark of approval came after taking my baked Herman cake to share with colleagues at work – which seemed to go down well.
I can’t help but feel though, that it would be really interesting to track the chain of Herman and find out whose cake tin your Herman offspring will eventually end up in…
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Another story I heard about Herman is that it started in Northern europe as an easy way to have some sort of bread in a time there were no refrigerators. That may be true an thus also the story about the amish keeping it alive or start it in America.
The easy way to start a Herman: 2 cups of Flour, 2 cups of milk, 1 cup sugar, 1/3 cup warm water and 2 Tb or 2 pkgs of active dry yeast. Mix the sugar with the water and leave it to stand for about 10 minutes. Then add the rest of the sugar, the flower and the milk. Stirr it and start at day 1.
I used diverent types of fruits in Herman and each herman I made tasted delicious. For instance 3/4 bananas, a fresh pineapple, mango, abricot, cherry’s etc etc. After baking you can also freeze the cake for about 3 months.
Thanks for the info on how to start a Herman mixture, and also the tips about the different fruit to add – that’s great! I’m still intertested to know, why the name Herman?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Thrifty30something. Thrifty30something said: Day 3 for my #Hermancake, tomorrow he gets fed. Currently he is still doughy goo http://tiny.cc/tey4d [...]
I miss our Herman. He got a bit hard to take care of, as we know very few people with whom to share him. So we let Herman go
but he made nice cake so I may try starting a fresh Herman from scratch. According to that Wikipedia article, you can freeze Herman, so there was no reason he had to go 
(((((
I think this Herman cake seems to originate from Amish Friendship Bread where people pass around the starter yeats mixture which is then added to with milk, flour and sugar until it’s ready to be baked. But this article on Wikipedia suggests there is no evidence for it being started by the Amish people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_Friendship_Bread so not entirely sure where it started from!