Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Owl cookies following ‘The Legend of the Guardians’

Sometimes you come up with something nice you want to make, but can’t decide on how exactly. Then someone gives you a brilliant idea, another someone comes up with something more brilliant and suddenly you’re set off to make cookies after a movie you’ve seen. Sounds familiar? It doesn’t to me, except that just this once, that’s what actually happened.
It started with just wanting to bake, then finding a recipe for cookies that I liked. Then finding these cute turtles, and wanting to make something cute too. Mix in a crazy person that watched the movie ‘The Legend of the Guardians’ with you and was smart enough to make the link, and sudenly you get this fireworks of ideas on how to make owl-shaped cookies.
Then you start making it, and notice it’s a pain in the ass and takes quite some screw-ups and practicing before you can even make anything decent. You fail. End of story!

Photobucket

That doesn’t mean the cookies didn’t taste nice and some of them miraculously didn’t end up looking like owls anyway, or that I’m not going to share the recipe!

Ingredients:
180 gram butter (softened)
185 gram sugar
50 gram dark chocolate
50 gram milk chocolate
2 spoons cacao
4 spoons milk
1/4 spoon vanilla extract
270 grams flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder


1. Mix the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer. When thoroughly mixed, devide into three equal portions over three seperate bowls. (You can also weigh 1/3 of the butter and sugar and mix three times.)
2. Melt the dark chocolate with 2 spoons milk in the microwave. Do the same with the milk chocolate and 2 spoons milk, in a seperate bowl.
3. Poor the melted dark chocolate into one of the butter-mixtures. Add a spoon of cacao and mix everything in.
4. Poor the melted milk chocolate into a different portion of butter-mixture and add a spoon of cacao. Mix this as well.
5. Use the 1/4 spoon of vanilla extract in the last portion of butter-mixture and mix.
6. Use 90 grams flour and 1/4 teaspoon baking powder in each portion. Make sure to sift when needed. Mix every portion again. (While making sure you dont get any of the dark chocolate portion into the white or milk chocolate portion. Try to keep it seperated.) All the portions should be kneadable by now. If not add more flour.
7. Take a hand of the white portion and roll it into a cylinder/tube-shape. Make another, smaller, tube of the milk chocolate portion. Place them against eachother.
8. Now take a bit of the dark chocolate portion and roll it into a tube as well. Flatten it until you feel you have the right length/height for the wings. Then place it against the white portion, while making sure you dont go on or over the milk chocolate portion.
9. Roll everything gently. Just make sure everything sticks together and gets the shape you want, don’t overdo the rolling!
10. Cut slices off your roll and place them onto a baking sheet. It should look a bit like an owl. Keep practicing if it doesnt (getting mine to look reasonable took forever!).
11. When you’ve used up all three mixtures, preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (350 degrees Fahrenheit). Leave the cookies in for about 8-15 minutes and done!
12. Almost forgot the decoration! Use chocolate, or foodpens to draw eyes, beak and feathers on!

Photobucket
My owl evolution: first fail -> second fail -> third attempt -> last attempt

You can variate the three portions by not using chocolate, but leaving everything white and using foodcolouring to get three different colours. Or make extra and colour them to all colours of the rainbow and make some sort of rainbow twist cookies. If it’s sort of roll-able you can do it!
Personally I never really like cookies since I think they’re so dry. My grandma however loved these and kept eating them every time we were and weren’t looking. Next time I’m making them more simple though. Making owls was a fun challenge, but I want them to look a bit better next time! Plus, I think rainbowcolours sounds awesome.
Enjoy!

Photobucket

Photobucket

Rejoice! Cranberries!

I promised a post about cranberry jam, jelly and sauce ages ago, like about when Christmas ended. And, being slow as I am, of course I still haven’t posted anything. Until now! Because now, finally, you are reading the post about cranberries! For the christmas dinner I made cranberry sauce, which is really just a thinner sort of jam and lasts less long. Jam is, well, just jam with pieces of cranberry in it. Jelly is verry jelly-like in a sort of way that it doesn’t have any bits or pieces in it. I promised all the recipes, so here are all of m!

Cranberry Sauce
Ingredients:
3 mandarins/clementines
250 gram Cranberries
100 gram sugar


1. Zest the oranges and squeeze the juice out. Add both into a small pan.
2. Add the cranberries and the sugar and heat it over a fire.
3. Keep stirring until all the sugar is dissolved, bring to boil then lower the heat and let it simmer for 15-20 minutes. Make sure to stir every few minutes. The cranberries should start popping and falling apart then.
4. Add more sugar if you feel the sauce is not sweet enough. Add more water/orangejuice if you feel the sauce is too sweet or too thick. You can also add spices or alcohol at this point. Done!

Admittedly I lost the recipe I used. I believe I took it off a site and just never saved it or so. But I remember using mandarins and I’m pretty sure I used nothing else. I’m also fairly positive I got the other ingredients right (I checked with other recipes), so you shouldn’t go wrong with it! I don’t think I made any wonderful pictures of it, but I remember it being delicious! I tried it on about everything I had and even used it days later on bread with brie! I must’ve added way more sugar than it called for, since it lasted so very long. That is, until I ate it all. I doubt it lasted a week overall.

Photobucket

Cranberry Jelly and Cranberry Jam
Ingredients:
450 gram cranberries
225 gram sweet apples
1/2 orange
30 ml water
500 gram (gelling/jam) sugar


1. Zest the orange and squeeze the juice out into a pan. Cut the apple with peel into pieces.
2. Put the cranberries, apple, orange zest and juice and water into the pan. Put the pan over a fire and bring to boil. Keep stirring and lower the fire. Leave the fruit to simmer and boil for about 20-30 minutes. You’ll notice the mixture is ready when the apples are unrecognizable and the cranberries are split and fell apart.
3. When the mixture looks a bit like jam, turn the fire off and leave it to cool.
4. Once the fruit is slightly cooler push it through a strainer (sieve or sifter, I don’t know what it’s called!). This will seperate the juice (for the jelly) from the thicker mixture (for the jam). Put both into seperate pans.
5. Add half of the sugar into each pan and heat them both up while you stir to dissolve the sugar. (If you’re a very thorough strainer you might want to add some water or orange juice to the thick jam-mixture. You can always add more sugar to either.)
6. When the sugar is dissolved and the jam and jelly start boiling, leave to boil for about 5-10 minutes.
7. Turn the fire off and scrape off any foam from the jam and jelly. Poor both into jars and seal them. Voilà!

A note for the jelly mixture in particular: you can poor the juice into a measuring cup, once you know the amount of liquid you have, you will be able to read the amount of sugar needed on the package of the sugar. This might be more accurate.
On another note, appearantly spices or some strong alcohol (think vodka, brandy, port) tastes really nice. You can add these at the start or when you add the sugar.
Last note: it’s delicious! I think I managed a bit over one jar for the jam and one for the jelly in the end. I kept both opened in the fridge and unfortunately they didn’t last very long. The jam was gone in no time, but as I don’t actually eat jam or jelly very often and none of us do, the jelly stood there for about 2 months till I decided I should throw it away. I believe I didn’t use any gelling/jam sugar, which might also explain why it didn’t last extremely long. I should do this a bit better next time. Also, I decided jelly isn’t my thing. It might be really nice for on cakes, but when you just want something on bread, it needs to have some real hardcore fruits in it!

The last recipe comes from a new cooking book I have called “Preserving”. It has loads of techniques and recipes in it from jams, jellies, relishes and chutneys to pickling, sirups, pastes, marmelade and even tomato ketchup! I didn’t have anything like that yet. I used a recipe called ‘Lemon paste’ for my Lemon & cream filled cake, but I think when I post it I’m going to call it jam, or jelly, perhaps even sauce would do. Just not feeling the paste, you know?

Photobucket
Half jam, half jelly on one of my sisters home-made wafers. Real dutch wafers that is! Perhaps she'll be so kind to post some time.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Rich fruit cake with whiskey

Now I’ve finally posted another cake I made for my grandmother’s birthday, but I still haven’t mentioned the last one. I've made a Chocolate cherry ckae with fudge frosting. I've made a Lemon & cream filled cake. Last but not least: here comes my secret recipe cake! It’s really just a rich fruit cake with whiskey, but it’s still my secret recipe because I’m so proud of it and love it! (And it's nice to have a secret recipe.) I could eat that cake all day really!

Photobucket

Unfortunately this time, for some reason, the middle collapsed. As you can see on the pictures the almond in the middle was probably lower than half of the cake for some reason!

Photobucket

Well, as I just wanted to post the pictures and don’t actually have much to say, this post ends here! Is this the shortest post I’ve ever made? Or at least the one with the least writing in it?

If you think you can beat me and my cake please do tell! In the meanwhile enjoy some pictures of this cake made a while ago:

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket

Lemon & cream filled cake

A week or more ago I made cakes for my grandmother’s birthday and after my post of Chocolate cherry cake with fudge frosting, I haven’t said a word about the other cakes! Shame on me! Especially since my mother loved the Lemon cake I made with it. Perhaps I should call it “Lemon & cream filled cake”. I suppose that describes it best out of all the brilliant ideas I’ve had. So let’s start with that one.
The cream I used on the inside was a bit runny, so I should definitely improve that next time I make it. This didn’t give a problem though, because I used the same shape I used with my Valentine’s cream-filled cake, so it was nicely trapped inside. However, if you want to make the cake and put the filling between two layers, do make sure it doesn’t get too runny.

Photobucket

On a note: the cake I used is just a simple sponge cake (and fat-free). I posted this before in my post about Whipped cream cake!

Ingredients:
- Cake
- Home-made lemon jam
- Filling
- Whipped cream (with sugar and foodcolouring)


Let’s start with the cake!
1. Cut the cake in half if you want the filling in between, or if you’re using a special cake pan like in my case just take both sides with the ‘inside’ facing up.
2. Spread a rich layer of lemon jam on each half and then dump loads of the filling on top.
3. Quickly put both halves on top of eachother (be quick and be precise and try not to be messy with this – it takes some luck).
4. Finish the cake with whipped cream or even some extra filling on top and decorate it!

Done! Next: how do we make that filling? I thought I was being original with this, but to my surprise I used almost exactly the same sort of filling as I did for the Valentine’s cream-filled cake. So here goes again!

Ingredients:
- 500 gram cream cheese
- 2-3 spoons of milk
- A few drops yellow food colouring
- 1/4 spoon vanilla essence
- 250 gram powdered sugar


1. Put the cream cheese in a bowl and add a spoon or more milk to make it less thick. If your cream cheese is already spreadable and mixable, don’t bother with it.
2. Add the vanilla essence and food colouring and mix it in well.
3. Then start with the powdered sugar and add as much as needed until the filling is thick enough to spread!

There you go! You’ve got the filling now as well. Now to the last part. Not sure how to make the whipped cream? Here goes:

Ingredients:
- 250 ml whipping cream
- A few spoons (powdered) sugar
- A few drops yellow food colouring


1. Beat the whipping cream until it is thick.
2. Add as much sugar or powdered sugar as you like to sweeten the cream. I believe I used a few spoons of both.
3. Devide the cream into two equal portions and mix in the food colouring into one of the two portions.

Done again! Now pipe and spread it on the cake and add as much decorations as you like. I used some flowers I made a little before then when I was experimenting with Royal Icing. I actually haven’t posted that cake yet (oh, I’m so slow! Terrible!), but it was just a lot of experiment! I forgot Royal Icing would get so hard, but I made a lot of nice leaves and flowers and random dots that I can use for decorations now.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the cake! And I hope to post more pictures, also of the inside, as soon as I have to make this cake again!

Photobucket

(Te)Maki sushi time!

I know I’ve posted something about sushi before (remember?), but I can’t say they were the best pictures ever. Not that I can say I’ve made any much better now. Anyway! Somehow I felt inspired to make sushi again and since I had accidentally said I might want to make some and people kept nagging me and buying ingredients, I couldn’t exactly say no anymore.
Making sushi is one of the easiest and time-consuming things ever. You start off with rice and a rice-cooker and some magic. Then you make sure you have a whole table all for yourself and put a cutting board right in front of where you want to sit. Then you take the rice and put it on one side, take sushi nori leaves for on the other side and at last you fill the whole table with all the ingredients you can find. Then you sit down to start!

Photobucket

Now what could we put in these sushi’s then?
- Sweet fried egg
- Cucumber
- Paprika (bell pepper)
- Smoked salmon
- Crabsticks
- Chives
- Sesame seeds (garlic flavoured)
- Mayonnaise


Or other things that I hadn’t used this time like: tuna, tomatoes, egg salad and I don't know what! Be creative, google ‘sushi’ and stare at pictures for inspiration or just open your fridge! At least that’s what I do!
In case you are wondering on how to make Sweet fried egg:

1. Lightly beat around 2-3 eggs and then beat in 2-3 spoons of sugar.
2. Fry.

It’s really not that hard if you’re capable of not burning food. Also, a note on the mayonnaise, if you don’t like it, don’t use it. But I love to put some mayonaise on the rice before I put anything else on, especially when I’m using crabsticks! On another note: don’t ask me where I got garlic flavoured sesame seeds. It goes really nice on chicken, but it makes the sushi taste like garlic (and sesame) quite a lot as well (which is a nice thing). I’ve also got wasabi flavoured sesame seeds, but haven’t actually used those much. Perhaps I should use them on buns some time soon.

Photobucket

Ever heard of Temaki Sushi? It’s almost the same as Maki Sushi (the ‘normal’ rolls cut in little pieces), only this time you turn it into some ice-cream cone looking shape and eat it out of your hand. It’s WAY better that maki sushi when you’re just making something for yourself. I made some for myself with crabstick, cucumber, egg, chives and lots of mayonnaise. Doesn’t it look delicious? It makes me want it all over again!

Photobucket

Don’t forget some soy sauce or wasabi sauce when you eat them! Enjoy!

Photobucket