Fast-tracking the "Aprikosenkuchen"--an American Mistake with a German Recipe

Many German recipes require time and patience--and I have almost none of either. But apricots are in season and I love that stuff you can get at the bakery, usually with plums, a kind of long square tart, fruit set into dough, sweet but not too sweet, occasionally topped with whipped cream. Looks easy. I bought a quantity of apricots, made sure I had butter, eggs, sugar, dry yeast, milk, and flour. I also imagined, when I rose at 6:45, that I'd be washing down delicious tart with my coffee by around 7:30.
To do so, I would have had to get up around 4:00 a.m.
Oh, like a real baker.
Yes. 

There's the part where you dissolve the dry yeast in warm milk and mix it with the already prepared butter-egg-flour-pinch o' salt-sugar mix. But after that you're supposed to let the bowl cool its heels in a warmish location for another 45 minutes. Then there's the rolling out of the dough, after which it gets to rise, in the pan, for another 20 minutes (while you're whipping up the pudding of your choice to apply with the apricots).

I was very hungry indeed, also in a hurry--American traits. No, maybe just New Yorker traits. I gave that dough fifteen minutes (during which it did seem to bubble up a tad), then said, "ready or not, here I come" and hoped, idiotically, for the best. Poured it onto a buttered pan, schlonked in the apricots, baked for around half an hour. 

It was edible, gentle reader, but just barely. If I hadn't been absolutely starving, I would have said the unrisen dough had a gluelike texture. Whipped cream would have been a good idea, if I'd had any. 

But that whipping of the cream, even with a mixer takes time, too . . .