Take a bite and you’ll first taste the thin crust and custard-like topping. The slightly sweet crust is moist but not soggy. The rich, sugary topping has a consistency somewhere between custard and scrambled eggs.

This initial flavor is sweet and pleasant, but incomplete. Then come the cherries. As you chew, tart, tangy cherries reveal themselves, their sour juice melding with rich sour cream and butter to create a balanced, creamy-but-sour, fruity taste that is light, refreshing and insidiously addictive.

My family loves the taste of cherries, and hunklich has long been our preferred showcase for this fruit, the recipe having been passed down through the Transylvania-Saxon side of my family (the Gottschlings) for generations.

In that time, we’ve learned that hunklich rewards patience, precision and planning in its preparation. Thoroughly draining the cherries before adding them to the mix is essential if you want to keep the crust from becoming soggy. Taking time to properly and carefully fold is the difference between a light fluffy egg topping and a dense, sodden mess.

I’ve also learned that it’s best made by hand, with help from good friends.

One of my fondest New Years Eve’s was spent with my sister and a few of each of our close friends at my house in Virginia. We all loved to cook, so as part of the festivities, we prepared the food for our New Year’s feast together: first my family’s traditional New Year’s dinner of pork roasted on a bed of apples, butter, and sauerkraut; then, for the vegetarians present, a meatless version of a Greek friend’s family pastitsio recipe, Greek lasagna with walnuts and spices replacing the traditional beef; and finally, for all to enjoy, my first attempt at hunklich.

I did not (and still do not) own an electric mixer. During the initial stages of the recipe, as we prepared in parallel the various parts of the recipe, this fact did not seem important. Then we arrived at whipping egg whites.

I know now that whipping egg whites with a mixer is a breeze, a task as light and airy as the result. Sans mixer, though, whipping egg whites can take quite a while, and requires real manual effort.

So, having no mixer, for the next 45 minutes everyone in attendance came to the kitchen, stood in a circle, and passed the bowl of egg whites around, talking and taking turns whipping.

It was a good group of people, and everyone participated, chatting, laughing and enjoying the company. The whipping broke the collective ice and provided common ground, making for great conversation both at the dinner table and afterward.

Making hunklich made that evening, and I heartily recommend homemade hunklich and a “broken” mixer any time you have an amiable but diverse group of people over for dinner.

Ingredients:

• 1 box of roll mix (with yeast)
• 6 eggs
• 1/4 cup of butter
• Sugar
• Salt
• Either 2 14 oz. cans of tart/sour cherries, drained, or fresh tart cherries
• 1 pint (16 oz.) of sour cream

Recipe:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. If you are using canned cherries, empty the cans of cherries into a colander to start the cherries draining.
3. Melt 1/4 cup of butter.
4. Separate 2 egg yolks (saving the whites).
5. Beat 2 egg yolks, then mix together with the melted butter from step 2, 3 tablespoons of sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
6. Add lukewarm water to make one cup.
7. Dissolve yeast from roll mix (using a wisk) into the yolk mixture.
8. Add the yolk mixture to the roll mix, mix the dough to a common consistency, then roll the dough out to fit a large jelly roll pan (you can grease the pan or not, depending on your preference). Make sure that the dough is pressed up to the top of the edges of the pan. This should result in the dough being spread evenly and relatively thinly across the bottom and up the sides of the pan.
9. Place the well-drained cherries evenly on the dough.
10. Mix 4 egg yolks, 1/2 cup of sugar, and 1 pint (16 oz.) of sour cream.
11. Beat 6 egg whites to froth.
12. Fold the yolk-sour cream mixture into the egg whites.
13. Pour the whole mess over the cherries.
14. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

Serving Notes:

• Serve hunklich at room temperature or lower.
• Make sure to let it cool after taking it out of the oven.
• Hunklich’s flavors improve over time. If you can resist, it is worth letting it age so you can sample it over a couple of days.

To start with, this software would allow a reporter to:

• Create a repository of sources that would include contact information and a history of interactions with details about each time the source was contacted.
• Facilitate the creative process for coming up with story ideas, including storing and categorizing story ideas, angles for each story, questions you want answered, notes related to the story, facts needed, and sources you want to use.
• Make possible tying existing sources from your source repository to a story.
• Include a calendar and the ability to schedule future interactions with sources, then capture what happened when you talked to the person or visited the institution.
• Keep a record of contact with sources that includes any notes or voice recordings made as a result of the contact.
• Allow for versioning of writing as you draft and refine articles.

This core functionality would only be the beginning, though. Reporters work together with other journalists as often as they work alone, and so this program would need to be extended so that it will allow multiple users, then groups of reporters, each with their own private sets of data that they can share as they choose, so lots of people all over the place can use this system to share sources and work together on stories.

The software would allow for multiple groups, and allow reporters to be assigned to any number of groups. Each user and group will have its own separate set of information, and group-level access controls (features that ensure that only the members of a group can access that group’s data) will be a fundamental part of the software so people only have access to information for groups to which they belong.

Everything in this system would be able to be categorized using a common taxonomy. Everything. People, groups, bits of reporting, sources, appointments between sources and reporters, to do lists. Some of it might not get categories assigned at first, and some tables would never have a category assigned to them, but at a data level, every entity in the system would have a place to be assigned categories, to make finding related things easier so you could more effectively re-use information and manage resources.

Once reporting functionality is implemented, then one would want to start adding user roles for editors. First you would create the distinction between the reporter user-type and an editor, followed by work flows for editing, approving, fact-checking, and releasing stories. The editor would be bound by group access rules, and so would have to be a member of a group to edit that group’s stories, and would be subject to the same kinds of control over access based on group membership as reporter users are.

After implementing a basic editor, one would then start to introduce different editor roles, like copy editor, editor-in-chief, and head group editor. Editors would be assigned to groups, and would have a separate role in each group. An editor’s role within each group would define what editorial tasks he would be authorized to perform, and an editor user could have different roles in different groups.

Because some stories could be of a sensitive nature, all data in the system will be stored in a secure database. Because you would want sharing to be easy if you decided to share information with others, though, the application would be built so all data could be exported in XML documents that could be shared, compressed and archived. If there are standards for XML that fit the kinds of data we are exporting, we would use them. For data that doesn’t have a standard dialect of XML, we would do our best to make something flexible and comprehensive and start working to create a standard.

One would need a way to control what exactly you include when you, say, release a story – all sources, all reporting, all reporters, all revisions of story, and all angles considered, for instance? Or just all sources, all reporting, and the latest revision of the story. With this kind of a system, publishing a story could become more than just outputting the finished article and related items you have attached. It could be configured to send all the information in the system on the story, including the sources and the audio files of each interview.

To share, you would need a way to make the software aware of other installations on other computers, over the internet, so that collaboration between systems is a built-in option, even if the owners and operators who decide to work together did not originally plan to collaborate.

Organizations that run this software would be able to carefully and thoroughly control how and how much their systems interact with other installations of the software. If you are getting reporting help from an environmental group on a story, for instance, you could give users on their system membership in a special group that can submit reporting data to your system, but is not eligible to submit copy or edit. You could limit their involvement to one story on your system, or only to the activities of a certain group. You could allow users on a system to edit and have access to a source list, but not change, add to, or revise the basic reporting.

For these types of collaboration, you would also provide pre-defined profiles that capture common ways for systems to interact – remote reporter, rewrite man, story editor, group or desk editor, etc. You would also build in workflows for defining which external systems are allowed to interact with your system, and what they are allowed to do. Reporter Joe Smith on system A, after his newspaper enters into a partnership with your news service, could be enabled as a fact-adder on your system (system B), for instance, so he could either log in and add reporting notes or use his log-in to authenticate a connection to your system over the internet that would allow him to transfer facts, notes, or sources from his system (A) to yours (B).

The systems will communicate between installations using the XML that is the system’s import/export format. They will send the XML using HTTPS, or encrypted HTTP sent over Secure Sockets. External systems will authenticate themselves via SSH certificates. Each organization that has an installation of the software will manage trusted certificates entirely on its own, so they have total control over external access, both incoming and outgoing, at the connection level. Any system that is not authenticated will not be allowed to communicate with the software.

The software would be open source, and would be free to use and simple to install. This makes starting one of these news groups inexpensive, and the included workflows allow you to depend on the software for some of the traditional startup difficulty of putting internal processes in place.

Environmental groups could set up information gathering networks that could leverage members’ reporting to create quality content using only a few editors who would fact-check and manage the submission of reporting and possibly a pro at pulling facts together into a story.

Freelance writers could create online networks that could pitch and cover stories as a group.

Newspapers that ran this software could ramp up distributed networks of reporters to cover big stories that are playing out across a large geographic area, and if they wanted to start working together on reporting, that could be arranged too.

I mean, it could happen…