Quick & Easy salad 2: Tomato & Paprika style

I’ve just mentioned my Chicken and mushrooms in crème fraîche sauce-dish (which needs a fancier name really) and said something about making two other dishes in those 30 minutes. Here’s one of the others. It’s a really simple salad, which unfortunately I can’t really call simple salad anymore since I already have a salad named that way. I’m going to anyway though. This is my Simple Salad 2: Tomato & Paprika style!



Ingredients:
Handful cherry tomatoes (I counted 6)
1/4 yellow paprika
1/2 mozarella
Chives

1. Just cut everything in desired size.
2. Do mix before eating.
3. Yeah, that was it really.

Tadaa! I’m so brilliant at writing salad recipes! Maybe I can try making money out of this, I know people have! If you want to make it a bit fancier throw some salt & pepper into it somewhere or add a salad dressing or even some oil. Isn’t it great? Anyone can be a master chef like this.
P.S. Do mind your fingers when cutting.

Chicken and mushrooms in crème fraîche sauce

It´s been a while since I´ve posted something (again), but this time I have a good excuse! I moved to Belfast to study here for half a year. It´s awesome so far! However, cooking is hell. I find myself going to the supermarket every single day . When I finally think I have everything I remember something else I need, or I run out of milk and have to go again anyway! I´ve never had to think this much before buying anything. I´ve never really had a budget I seriously had to keep. Also, I´ve never really shopped & cooked for one person only. This recipe is something I came up with today, but you have to want as well. For instance, the mushrooms I’ve had in the fridge for a few days now. I use them in every single meal! You only need a spoon or two crème fraîche which leaves you with the whole rest of the package. You can buy lots of chicken fillet and just freeze the rest, no problem. But things like chives have an expiry date as well at some point!
If anyone has any brilliant ideas on how to cook for just one person, let me know.



Ingredients:
1 spoon oil
1 chicken fillet
2 mushrooms
1-2 spoons crème fraîche
a bit of chives

1. Fry the chicken in the oil until its thoroughly ready or white.
2. Add the mushrooms and wait until these are cooked as well.
3. Take the pan off the heat and add the crème fraîche straight away and stir it in.
4. Cut fresh chives over your warm dish to decorate.
5. Add salt & pepper during any time for taste (I should’ve!).

And there you have it! I think this looks like a really luxurious Christmas dish because of the cream. It’s really quick as well (although it might depend on how much you’re making). I made this and two other dishes in about 30 minutes time. Also, if you know how to not burn your food, you can’t go wrong. It’s really not complicated to make. Do remember not to add the crème fraîche any time sooner. I’ve made pasta with crème fraîche before and if you cook it for too long it just disappears.



Anyway, Enjoy! (with capital E, yes.)

Banana cake with Lemon icing

Another recipe I made for my dessert table! This is like the sophisticated version of the Banana Teabread I made before and it’s just as delicious! The lemon icing adds some extra fresh taste to it as well.



I’ve done a little experiment with the ingredient list and steps. I opted not to leave the steps out and turn it into one long story of what to do as I personally find that really unhandy and disturbing. Do you think it looks any better now I've shortened all the measurements? Or do tbsp and tsp tend to confuse you as well? Are the steps easier to read now?

Cake:
250 g plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
115 g butter
225 g sugar
75 g light brown caster sugar
2 eggs
1/ 2 tsp grated lemon zest
2-3 bananas
1 tsp vanilla essence
50 ml or 4 tbsp milk

- In one bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt.
- Mix the butter with both sugars until light and fluffy in a separate bowl. Beat the
eggs in one by one and stir in the lemon zest.
- In another bowl mash the bananas (or use a blender) and mix in the vanilla essence
and milk.
- Add the banana mixture and the dry ingredients to the butter in a few additions,
alternating between the two of them. So, add a fourth of the banana mixture and
carefully mix it in. Then add a fourth of the dry ingredients and mix in. Then back
to the banana mixture, and so on.
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius or 350 degrees Fahrenheit and bake the cake
for about 30 minutes.



Icing:
60 grams butter
250 grams icing sugar
1/2 tsp grated lemon zest
4-5 tablespoons lemon juice

- Mix the butter until light and fluffy and gradually add the icing sugar.
- Mix in the lemon zest.
- Now beat in the lemon juice spoon by spoon until the consistency of the icing is
just right. Add more icing sugar if you accidentally make the icing too running and
add more lemon juice if you believe it is too thick.

I just only half the icing used in the recipe I looked up, but it was more than enough to cover the cake. However if you find yourself wanting to make a layered cake or feel for more decoration than you can always double the icing! Also, if you feel a skewer comes out of the cake dry, you might want to leave it in the oven a little longer anyway. In my case, banana cakes or bread all tend to come out a little thick on the inside. Somehow I can’t get them to the perfect consistency.
I think I’m keeping the numbers for the steps, just because I like it. However I can use a BOLD script to indicate >recipe here<. When looking at blogs a lot of the times I completely skip the nice story around the post and skip straight to the recipe! That’s kind of evil isn’t it?
Anyway! The cake! It’s a really nice cake especially if you’re going for fresh. It suits any summer party with the fruity flavours. However this would also work perfectly in winter (oh, maybe with chocolate icing?). I know I haven’t found a lot of cakes that weren’t worth making, but believe me, this one is worth making as well!

Smoothie shots

Although this was one of the easiest things ever, I thought I’d write a recipe for these cute smoothies as well. I used this recipe on my sweet dessert table (check it out!). Basically it’s just layers of mashed fruit and you can make any combination you can think of. But here’s what I ended up using:



Bottom layer:
Sugar melon
Green grapes

1. Remove all twigs and peel, slice the sugarmelon into smaller pieces and mix everything with a blender.

Middle layer:
Raspberries
Blueberries
Yoghurt

1. Put the raspberries and blueberries in the blender and add a spoon or two of yoghurt.

Top layer:
Strawberries
Banana

1. Put everything in your blender again and mix!



To make the layers:
1. Start with the first ‘smoothie’ and put two spoons into the glass, depending on how large your glasses are.
2. Very gently pour the second smoothie on top. Start with half spoons so the smoothies don’t sink into each other and blend.
3. And at last add the top layer. Use a grape to garnish and done!



One of the easiest and quickest things I’ve made from the whole dessert table and in my opinion also one of the most adorable things on it. Grapes might actually not be the best garnish for smoothies. As you can see they sink into the smoothie a bit. Of course, strawberries always work as decoration.
Me and my mom have been looking for the perfect kind of glasses for a few years now. We never found anything that was really worth it and it was always really expensive with prices ranging from 6 Euros to 20 or more. This set cost me 3 Euros including the spoons. I put these little glasses on a plate I got from a Japanese set I bought a while ago (it included bowls, plates, spoons, chopsticks and little sauce bowls). That plate is standing on an upside down oven tray. I tried to use so much stuff I already had for decoration or to add some 3D into the table. Would you have thought of upside down oven trays?

P.S. I wouldn’t have either, but they were right in front of me when I needed ‘something higher’.

Blueberry Lemonade

I’ve seen a lot of recipes trying to find the perfect one for this. And they all really come down to the same thing really. A few blueberries, a lemon, sugar and water and you’ve got blueberry lemonade. So I just used the same recipe from my Home-made Lemonade I posted earlier and added some blueberries. You can keep the lemonade quite a long time, however you can’t when you add blueberries. After one and a half day it started getting fizzy and tasted slightly off. In my experience berries tend to go off veryvery quickly, so best drink this within a day.
Note: sorry for the lame picture! I swear it's the only picture of my dessert table that isn't perfect!



Ingredients:
1 cup sugar
Zest of half a lemon
Juice of three lemons
1 cup blueberries (or: 1/2 -3/4 cup blueberries and add blueberry juice to make 1 cup)
3-6 cups water

Now there are two ways to make this:
1. Just throw everything into a pan (start with 2-3 cups of water), boil it, squeeze the juice out of the blueberries by mashing them a little, sift it later if you like and pour into cups. Add more water to taste.
Or:
1. Put the sugar, blueberries, lemon zest and 1-2 cups of water in a pan and boil it. Once boiled and all the sugar is dissolved, leave to cool.
2. Juice the three lemons and add the juice to the blueberry juice. Add more water to taste.

The amount of water really depends on how you like your juice. If you like it to have more fruity flavour: use less water and also less sugar. If you like to to be sweeter: add more sugar. If you’d like not to be overwhelmed by sweetness or lemon: add more and more water. You can alter this recipe to totally fit your taste! Which you can also do by adding a different kind of berry. Strawberry & lemon might be a very nice combination. Or blackberries & lemon, like jam I made before. (Which reminds me I'm still behind on posting!! - like always)
Hope you enjoy!

Berry dream with Greek yoghurt

This recipe I looked up for my dessert table. I stole it from one of my moms old cooking books. The recipe suggested you eat it ‘pure’, but I decided against it and I'm glad I did. I wanted to use this very berry stuff (for serious lack of a better word) as a sauce on top, but ended up doing it the other way around. I’ve altered the recipe since I didn’t have all the ingredients and wanted it to have more berries. I also added a lot more water than necessary. Here’s the recipe I ended up with:



Ingredients:
125 grams blueberries
125 grams raspberries
125 grams strawberries
125 grams blackberries
125 grams sugar
200 ml + 1-2 cups water
1 package vanilla pudding powder (for 1/2 liter)

1. Wash and clean all the berries. Remember to take off any leaves etc.
2. Add all the berries with the sugar and water together into a big pan and bring to boil.
3. Add 3-5 spoons of water to the vanilla powder to make a thin paste. Add this to the berries. At this point the mixture will become very thick very quickly. Keep adding water and stirring until end up with a ‘thin jam’.
4. Pour the berry mixture into glasses and leave to cool. Add yogurt on top of it later.



I know it takes a lot of berries. It could be a very expensive recipe if the berries aren’t in season, but it doesn't actually take a lot of each. 125 grams is about a handful with two hands full being the absolute maximum. So don’t get into shock just yet.
I’m not sure if it makes any difference but I used caster sugar in stead of granulated sugar. This was because on the one day I needed a lot of sugar we suddenly had none at all in the whole house which normally has at least 3 spare kilo’s of it. Luckily I had some caster sugar or I wouldn’t have known what to do. Imagine making a super sweet dessert table and while you’re baking notice you have no sugar?!!

My sweet dessert table!!

I made a dessert table! A REAL one! Can you believe it?! I decided to make one because there are so many lovely sites with lovely pictures of others doing it and it looks so wonderfully delicious. I had to have one! Since dessert tables aren’t really known here I decided to just make one myself. That way I could make it as perfect as I wanted.
I started with picking a theme. The hardest part about arranging a dessert table is picking the theme. It took more time than all the baking together. I had various theme’s in mind, but I also had to take the materials I had into account. I really love the sort of Victorian swirly style so I thought of making a theme around that. I had a few glasses with that theme on it, in red. From there I just worked around it. The colours would be red, black & white. The main theme would be the swirls.
The next step was looking at all the dessert tables online and finding little things I liked or things they had in common. For instance, most of the dessert tables have cupcakes. You can’t really do without cupcakes, so I put cupcakes on my list. Next was those massive candy jars with I think are just totally adorable. Now I didn’t have any massive jars, so I filled the pretty glasses I have. Then, I almost forgot, a massive cake, which is also totally unmissable. I had seen cute popcorn cones. I had to have bonbons or little chocolates or fudge or something bite-sized. To make the dessert table slightly more bearable and healthy I could add fruit. I needed drinks, I needed cookies, I needed loads of sweets. I’ve made uncountable lists of things I wanted and needed and must have. I’ve made more and more and narrowed them down and came up with more creative things or found something totally adorable, etc.
When I had finally decided on the ‘menu’ and I knew what it was supposed to look like, it was time for the actual decoration and finding of jars, bowls, glasses and so on. I wanted everything to be either white, black or glass as to not destroy the theme. It wasn’t that hard to find all the stuff I needed right here in my house. So I started checking off my list with what food I wanted where, and when I finally had it all I went on to the cards. A lot of dessert tables have little cards with a note on what is on the plate behind it. I used Photoshop to make cards of my own and added a butterfly theme to it, as I had the cutest butterfly nameplates (which in the end I didn't even use!). The invitations I made had the same theme to them.
When I was finally sure I had organized about everything, it was just waiting for the big day to come. Or rather the day before, so I could start baking everything I wanted.

So here’s what it ended up looking like from a distance: (let's stop talking and actually show what I've done)



I didn’t have the leisure of an empty white wall I could put the table against and paste decoration on the walls. But it didn’t really matter in the end anyway. I put a little side table on one side with tea, hot water and teacups on it. In case anyone wanted tea (they did). Here’s a close-up:
Note: you see that caramel apple tea in there? It's absolutely delicious! I recently bought it because I'm totally addicted to strawberry caramel tea but they didn't have any!



Can you see the little butterfly I added to fit the theme? My printer didn’t want to print anything without stripes though. So we just had to put up with that.
Oh look! What have we here? The unmissable cupcakes, disguised as Doughnut muffins with blueberries. They’re really as yummy as they look!



Another unmissable part of a dessert table is a cake. I made a Banana cake with Lemon icing. A sophisticated version of the Banana teabread I made before with a lemon icing.



Apparently we couldn’t do without cookies either. So here are the cookies I used! I cheated on this actually. I bought spritz cookies from the store and just dipped them in milk & dark chocolate.



More things I cheated on: Raffaello and Choc&Fudge. They’re so delicious! I could never copy them or come up with a better alternative to make.



Oh yeah! Here comes the healthy stuff. Fruit on a stick, or skewered fruit. I was afraid no one would understand the word “skewered” so I decided on this. Don’t ask me why I insisted the cards were English and not Dutch. I just like the way it sounds better. It's a pity the banana had gotten a bit brown in the half hour it had to wait to be eaten. But doesn’t it look really nice and colourful?





Here you see Berry dream with Greek yoghurt – and a strawberry as decoration. This was so delicious! I’m definitely going to have to make this over and over again. Plus it looks quite good as well don’t you think? I love the pretty glasses as well; I’m totally going to need some of my own.





To stay in the healthy fruit direction: Smoothie shots! I made the name up myself, not bad right? They also look pretty delicious like this. Note: there was absolutely no alcohol in these like normal shots tend to have.





Oh! The picture spam! I just can't help but show off a little. I think some of the pictures came out so pretty!
On to the chocolates: I made the bonbon version of Chocolate salami. Some of them I covered in caster sugar, others with milk chocolate. My mom loves these so much! I completely robbed her of her diet (sorry mom!).



A close-up of the invitations which were used as the cups to pour juice in. My sisters decided to pour tea into these because it was way cooler than a normal teacup. And it could hold more. They had a point.



Now for a close-up of my lovely glasses (at a pretty odd angle). They are quite pretty aren’t they? I tried to make layers of candy in each glass, but this is totally not noticeable at all. Next time I’ll just go for one sort of candy each. That way flavours can’t mix either.



I made Blueberry Lemonade and bought two different juices with Cherry/Pear and Forest Berries flavour. I didn't have any good pictures of that though.
Now last, but not least two pictures of either side of the table so you can see what it looks like all together a little closer. I didn’t do bad right?





So there you have it! The sweet dessert table I made and I'm so totally proud of. I hope you enjoyed! Don’t forget to click on the links for the recipes!

Quick & easy: Super Simple Salad

When you don’t know what you want to eat for dinner except rice and you can’t be asked to actually cook a lot, this salad will be the perfect solution. At least, that’s what I thought. It adds something healthy to the rice (I thought this too) and it’s still done in no time. Not to forget delicious, of course.



Ingredients:
A cucumber
Cherry tomatoes (handful)
Soy sauce
Dried parsley
Salt & pepper

1. Cut the cucumber into thin slices (and then into four if it’s a very large cucumber). Slice the cherry tomato into four as well and throw everything in a bowl.
2. Sprinkle over a good deal of soy sauce and add salt & pepper to taste. Mix a bit again.
3. Sprinkle over some dried parsley for decoration and extra taste and done!

I told you it was easy! This would make a perfect quick side dish for any menu. And look at how fresh and colourful it looks. I’m telling you, you can’t go wrong! Having said that, I think I’ve said about everything there is to say. Did I mention it was quick and simple?
By the way, what do you think of my title? I’m getting more original every time don’t you think?