Sunday, August 28, 2011

Chocolate salami

Have you ever heard of the site www.foodgawker.com? I like to stare at it sometimes. It has a million pictures of people who cooked, baked or combined loads of different kinds of food. I was staring at it again for a while, which was when I stumbled on this recipe. I’d never heard of chocolate salami and it sounded really peculiar. Obviously you have to try it right?

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Ingredients:
100 grams biscuit
55 grams (milk) chocolate
38 grams butter
40 grams sugar
1 small egg
powdered sugar


1. Crush the biscuits. Don’t leave them to big or to small, about one to a half fingertip will do.
2. Melt the chocolate and butter over a low fire. When melted take it off the fire.
3. Add the sugar to the chocolate and butter and mix it in.
4. Beat the egg slightly before mixing it in as well.
5. Use greaseproof paper or kitchen foil to roll the mixture into a cylinder. If you’ve ever made sushi, it goes exactly the same way except you’re using a chocolate-biscuit mixture in stead of rice and foil in stead of sushi nori.
6. Leave in the fridge until set. This will take about an hour.
7. Roll the chocolate salami out of the foil and cover it in powdered sugar so it doesn’t stick. And done! Cut into slices to serve.

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I made one roll the day before yesterday and I cut it into slices to take pictures of it later, when I came back it was completely gone. I got compliments of the rest of the family that it was very delicious. So I was forced to make it again yesterday to be able to make pictures. Also my mom asked me if I could make more because she really liked it. Obviously I wanted to taste a bit more than just the edges I trimmed off myself too! Guess what happened next? My mom blamed the dogs for eating most of it and asked me to make another one. So I made the roll again today. There you have it! I made the same recipe three days in a row! It’s really easy and doesn’t take long either. You could easily change the recipe to your liking as well. Today I soaked raisins in rum for a while and added them to this recipe. You could also use white or dark chocolate in stead of milk. You can add different kinds of nuts, dried fruits or alcohol. You can even change the shape of the cylinder. I might use this recipe for the dessert table I’m making. I could easily turn make little balls instead and cover them in more chocolate and call them bonbons!

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Doughnut muffins with blackberries

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I felt like baking so I decided to make something from one of my cute books about muffins. After drooling over several delicious recipes I decided to make doughnut muffins, because it just sounded so delicious! I added the blackberries myself, because muffins without berries or chocolate aren’t really muffins. Here’s what I ended up with:

Ingredients:
275 grams self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
50 + 100 + 50 grams caster sugar
75 ml sunflower oil
150 grams (Greek) yogurt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 handful blackberries


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1. Wash the blueberries and drop them into the first 50 grams sugar until each blueberry is coated in sugar. Set them aside and leave them to dry.
2. Sift the flour, the bicarbonate of soda and 100 grams sugar together.
3. In a separate bowl add the oil, yoghurt, vanilla extract and eggs together and whisk.
4. Add the flour/sugar-mixture and mix until everything is thoroughly mixed. Try not to beat the batter any more than necessary as the muffins might be dry.
5. Line a cupcake tin with cupcake cups and drop a spoon in each case. Add a blackberry or two and add another spoon of batter. Repeat this until all blackberries are used and the cupcake wrappers are filled for about 3/4.
6. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius or 375 degrees Fahrenheit and leave the muffins in for about 16-20 minutes.
7. When the muffins are done and have cooled a bit, melt the butter in a small pan. Brush the muffins with the butter and dip them in the last 50 grams of sugar.

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There you go! Covered in sugar like real doughnuts, taste like doughnut, but have lovely extra berries in them like muffins and in the shape of muffins: these are definitely going to be made again! I made a cake tin full of them (12 muffins) and even though we’re with only 5 people at home of which a few say they’re on a diet, they were gone in a day! I felt bad I was only able to eat three.

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Sugar melon & peach juice

One of the things I learned in Greece was that I’m going to definitely need a juicer of my own one day. I think I stole the juicer there at least once every day and a lot of fruit to go with it! One of the things I tried out that went together surprisingly well was this recipe:

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Ingredients:
1 slice sugar melon
2 peaches


1. Throw through the juicer, mix in some ice cubes and done!

To everyone’s surprise sugar melon goes very well through a juicer. We didn’t try the watermelon, because basically it’s all juice, but perhaps that turns out really nice as well. We did use a lot of peaches since we bought quite a lot and combined them with apples and in this case sugar melon. Another recipes you’re going to have to try if you have a juicer is this one:

Apple and Carrot juice
Ingredients:
2 apples
5 carrots


1. Throw in the juicer, mix some more ice cubes in and more juice for another day!

If you don't have any juicer, you can always throw these in a mixer. It will end you up with a thicker juice. If you're very much against then you can always put it through a sifter. I'm guessing it wont really work with apples and carrots as they don't contain a lot of juice. In the worst case you'll have to buy apple juice and carrot juice and mix them!

Blackberry bubble juice

Here’s a drink I just invented a few hours ago and I’m already going to put on my favourites list. I really dislike drinking anything with bubbles, but this one I like. It’s sweet exactly the way I like it, it tastes like berries with a hint of lemon and it’s totally mine!

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Ingredients:
2 handful of blackberries (about 70 grams)
150 ml water
70-100 grams sugar
1/2 litre soda or sprite


1. Put the blackberries and the water in a pan and bring to boil. Squash the blackberries with a fork.
2. Add the sugar and stir until dissolved. Leave the mixture to broil for 5 minutes.
3. Leave the juice to cool. Don't worry about the juice being too sweet at this point.
4. Add the soda or sprite and done!

And there you go, a refreshing sweet drink for whenever you want (that being preferably the beginning of autumn when the berries grow)! It doesn't take up a lot of berries either, as we normally don’t get more than a hand or two off the bushes in our garden.
I reckon I can do this with any kind of berries, or even with jam heated up in some water and then with added soda. Imagine the possibilities! This is definitely a simple basic recipe that everyone should know about and perhaps everyone could think of themselves.

Cranberry twists

This is one of those recipes that I should’ve posted ages ago, but just haven’t got around to do yet. I tasted something from a supermarket called ‘cranberry twists’ and I really loved the way they tasted with cinnamon butter! So I decided I’d make some for myself. Since the bread looked dark, I decided on plain wholemeal bread, with dried cranberries in it. I’ve bought it a few times since, but they don’t always sell them, and when they do it’s not always like the first time I tasted it. They’ve made Cranberry twists with nuts, or just plain twists with nuts and at some point they skipped the sugar. So from now on, I’ll be sticking to my own recipe!

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Ingredients:
1 cup water
375 grams (wholemeal) flour
1,5 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar + extra
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon dried yeast
250 grams cranberries


1. Poor the water into the bread machine pan. Sift the flour over the water to cover it completely.
2. Add the salt, sugar and butter each in separate corners of the bread machine pan.
3. Make a little dent in the middle and add the dries yeast. Start the bread machine.
4. Add the cranberries after the first kneading cycle, or add them after the bread machine is done. When it is, take out the dough and push it back (add cranberries at this point if you haven’t already) and knead.
5. Cut the dough in 8 equal pieces and roll them out into long cylinders. Twist them a few times, lightly, so the twist is visible.
6. Warm some butter and brush it over the buns, then sprinkle sugar over it.
7. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius or 400 degrees Fahrenheit and leave the buns for about 30 minutes.

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There you go! Leave them to cool at least a little bit and eat them! I’ve used this same recipe to make buns with nuts and raisins as well, but most of all cranberries. Cranberries are definitely my favourite kind of berries when dried. If they weren’t so expensive I would just eat a package every day!
The picture’s I made are from the second time I used this recipes and show tulips / 'dinofootprints' rather than twists. I think I like the twist shape better. There was a huge bouquet of flowers on the table I made the pictures on, so I used some as decoration. Aren’t they pretty?

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Monday, August 22, 2011

Tsatsiki

As you might know I’ve been to Greece a while back and I’m going to have to admit that one of my favourite Greek dishes is tsatsiki. I’m not sure if it’s counted as a side dish or a salad or something altogether different, but I love it and that’s what counts. I’ve made it several times before, or someone in the family has done, but I looked up recipes and it seems we’ve been doing it wrong. We ended up with cucumber salad rather than tsatsiki. Hopefully the real Greeks won’t laugh at me! From the recipes I’ve found, basically here’s what you end up with to make real tsatsiki:

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Ingredients:
1 small cucumber
1-2 garlic cloves
250 ml Greek yoghurt
2 spoons (olive) oil


1. Start with grating the cucumber and draining all the juice from it.
2. Chop the garlic cloves.
3. Add all the ingredients in one bowl and done! Decorate with some basil leaves.

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A note on the garlic: the more garlic you add, obviously, the more garlic you’ll taste. Also try to keep in mind however that the longer you leave the tsatsiki (in the fridge for instance) the more garlic you will taste as well. I’m not quite sure how this works, but it works for every recipe with garlic in it!
I tried the tsatsiki again yesterday and added walnut oil. However, it really didn’t make a good match. I feel using any special oils will be wasted on tsatsiki, unless it’s perhaps garlic or basil oil. If you dislike the taste of the oil, just add more Greek yoghurt. I’m not entirely sure how much yoghurt I used the first time, but it’s somewhere between 250 and 500 ml. In case you don't have any Greek yoghurt at all, adding normal yoghurt with a few spoons mayonnaise will do the trick too.

Note: I've already been told off for my spelling! Apparently it's not tzaziki, but tsatsiki, although I've found translations of tzatziki and even tzadziki. The Greeks I know however didn't say anything bad about my recipe. They mentioned it looked good!

Friday, August 12, 2011

Quiche

I didn’t actually have a recipe for this, but I decided to cook and I thought a quiche would be nice and easy. The way I thought I could make one, was very easy. The quiche I made was a vegetarian one, or one with just vegetables, because I didn’t like the idea of putting any meat in at that moment. I’m not sure if I’m the only one on this, but sometimes I just don’t want to eat meat! So here's a recipe for a quiche, that is completely non-official and might not be anything like how people make quiches, but it's my own recipe!

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Ingredients:
7 sheets of puff pastry (or enough to cover a cake tin)
1 cheese sauce
Vegetables like mushrooms, leek, (spring) unions, spinach, bell peppers, tomatoes,
1/2 cup or 75 gram cheese
Salt & pepper


1. Line a cake tin with puff pastry.
2. Cook the vegetables with a bit of oil in a large pan. When cooked, drain the oil and any liquids out.
3. Fill the cake tin with puff pastry with the vegetables. Cover the vegetables in a layer of cheese. Add salt and pepper if preferred.
4. Poor the cheese sauce over the vegetables and cover the cheese sauce with another layer of cheese. Decorate with parsley and basil.
5. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius or 360 degrees Fahrenheit and leave in the oven until the top cheese layer turns golden brown and the puff pastry ‘puffs’. This should take about 20-30 minutes.

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Note on the cheese: just like with the sauce a matured cheese is preferred above younger cheeses. If you use a younger cheese you will barely taste any cheese at all, so stronger cheeses like parmesan or cheddar are preferred.
Note on the sauce: make sure it is thick enough! My sauce ended up a slight bit runny so when I cut the quiche it started dripping rather than staying exactly in place. If you are using the recipe for cheese sauce I posted then make sure to use more flour and cheese and add less milk!
Other notes: If you’d like to add some meat to it I’d suggest ham, bacon or minced meat. You can cook these as well beforehand and then add them chopped and mixed through the vegetables or as a separate layer.
All in all, I didn't do so bad right? Except from needing loads and loads more cheese, it was awesome! I'm proud of me! Enjoy!

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Sauce of million uses

Here’s a sauce after a recipe from my mom, which she referred to as roux sauce. My mom makes a lot of lovely sauces on a whole scale of different meals and she finally told me her secret! I needed the sauce for a Quiche I decided to make. I thought I knew enough about quiches so I could make one without a recipe. Click on the link if you want to see how I did it! It was really very easy, this sauce might’ve been the hardest thing about it and you’ll notice it’s laughably easy once you start.

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Here's the cheese version of this sauce used in a quiche!

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
1-2 cups milk


1. Melt the butter in a pan and add the flour spoon by spoon to make a thick mixture. In the meanwhile warm the milk in a separate pan.
2. Add the milk little by little until you have a thick but runny sauce.
3. For a cheese sauce add: 75 gram (1/2 cup) grated cheese and stir in.

Note on the cheese: matured cheese is preferred above younger cheeses. Personally I’m really not a fan of matured cheese, but if you use a younger cheese in this recipe you will barely taste any cheese at all or end up using a lot more cheese. The stronger parmesan cheese is a really nice option for this recipe.
I used this sauce for a cheese sauce so far, but you can add anything you like. Think of different herbs and spices, peppers, cheeses. The milk in the recipe is easily replaced with cream for an –obviously- creamier effect. Suggestions I found on internet to use in the sauce are curry powder, dill, nutmeg, cheese, and not to forget: salt & pepper. I’ve even seen a recipe that asks you to leave unions and cloves in the milk for an hour beforehand and then use it. None of them really sound bad actually!

Monday, August 8, 2011

100 posts!

100 posts! I can barely believe it! That means I’ve posted at least one hundred recipes since I first started! Which also means I’ve become slightly addicted to it in the meanwhile. Also, I’ve gotten a lot better at cooking! Not to mention I’ve gotten better at posting and taking pictures or blogging in general.
I’ve thought of making this post a special one, like baking myself a happy birthday pie, but I decided against it. Especially since I’m going to be real busy soon with a dessert table I’ve been planning on. Also I currently lack motivation and inspiration for something totally awesome. So I decided it would be nice to show you what’s behind the food you see in the posts. Like the recipes for instance: anyone interested in the books I own? I believe I’ve said I’d post something about it before.

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Let’s start with my bunch of books! I have my books spread out over two shelves and they’re both stacked pretty full. Not to mention the books I have down stairs and all the other cookbooks that belong to my mom (she might own 3 shelves full). It's funny how you can definitely notice my precious book shelf and my dont-really-care-as-long-as-they're-there shelf. I picked some of my favourites to show you: (left to right, starting at the top)

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Handboek Inmaken – Catherine Atkinson & Maggie Mayhew
It’s a book about jams, jellies, relishes, chutneys, pickles and every other way to store fruits and vegetables. I mentioned it before in a post about lemon jam. I haven’t actually used a lot of the recipes from this book, but I just love the looks, layout and explanations given in this book.
Cakes & Bakes – Good Housekeeping
This is a book with a bit of everything: a few cakes, a few cupcakes and a few cookies. Since this books is English it sometimes calls for a lot of ingredients like maple syrup and bicarbonate of soda, which are a lot harder for me to get here. I love this book mainly because I got it from a dear friend. Recipes like the chocolate mousse bombes and carrot cake came from here!
Bread – Christine Ingram & Jennie Shapter
This is a wonderful must-have book for everyone that enjoys baking breads or buns (and even cakes!). It starts with a whole section of breads around the world with a short explanation on every bread. Then it has a section for breads baked by hand and another section for the bread machine. It ends with cakes that you can make with your bread machine. Apart from just recipes this book also describes a whole lot of utensils, ingredients and their effect when used, what problems might arise and how to fix them and –very handy- how to convert bread machine recipes to recipes by hand and the other way around. I seriously never want to do without this one anymore. Recipes I used from this book include Yoghurt bread and Mocha Panettone (including about all my other breads really).
High tea party – Susannah Blake
I believe this is one of the first real baking books I bought. This book is also one of the most lovely books I have. It describes a few themed tea parties and all the recipes you could use that are tuned to that theme. The pictures are of the kind that would make anyone drool and jealous (I wish I had those skills, I wish I had those teacups, I wish I had that food!!!). This book inspired me to do a lot more baking and ended me with a love for tea parties. The post Little lunch is inspired by this book.
Bak recepten – Veltman
This book is another everything-in-one book, but this book has a lot more of everything. It has sections for cakes, pies, muffins, cupcakes, cookies, tray bakes, desserts, bread and scones. On top of that it has a list of problems and instructions at the start of every section. So a perfectly fine book!

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I’d also post something about all the kitchen utensils I own. I don’t believe I have a lot, although probably more than the average household and probably quite a lot for someone my age, but I believe I need about all of them. I mean, no one can do without a mixer right? How about knives, spoons and baking trays? See? I NEED each and every one of them. Maybe take out a few cutters and stencils, but still. How about I post something about that around 200 posts, maybe 150? Or what about posting something about the history of the blog? The blog has changed a lot since I first made it! Anyway, let’s focus on all the recipes I need to catch up with for now again.

Sweet black rice with bananas

I bought glutinous black rice a while back because I wanted to try it out, but I never actually looked into how it was made. So the first time I made black rice it turned out as a bit of a failure: some of the grains were still hard and it just didn’t taste right. This time I decided to look up how exactly one prepares black rice. That’s when google becomes your friend and you just type ‘prepare black rice’ and click the first link. It worked! I came up with this site which basically said you had to leave it in water overnight (as usual with glutinous rice) and just cook it. I could’ve thought of that. Then it mentioned cooking it with coconut milk, bananas and pineapple. I hate pineapple really so we scratched that. I had coconut cream laying around and enough bananas to last a lifetime, so there we had a new recipe to add to my blog!

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Ingredients:
1 cup of black rice
2 cups water
2 cups coconut milk or cream
4 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon butter
3 banana’s


1. Leave the rice in a bowl of water overnight. If you realise you’re a bit late you can still soak it in water till up to about 3 hours beforehand.
2. Bring the rice with the water, coconut milk and sugar to boil and then leave to simmer about 20 minutes.
3. In the meanwhile bake the bananas in butter – or turn them into a warm banana mush.
4. When the rice is cooked (it shouldn’t be tough) mix in the banana’s and serve!

To my and my families surprise it tasted lovely! It was more a dessert than a side dish and it tasted better warm than cold. I’m definitely going to make this recipe again and again and again. If I remember to make it on time, it’s really not hard either.
The black rice I used was a dark kind of purple, towards black (hence the name I’m guessing). It gave the water a lovely colour and I’m thinking of bathing Easter eggs in it at some point. I’m pretty sure you’ll end up with nicely coloured eggs.
I didn't have time to make any pictures, but I managed a quick shot! I hope you enjoy making and eating this recipe! Do try it!


Note: I'm on 99 posts! I feel like I have to post something special next now!