Cinnamonda

On Hiatus

2011-04-02T22:00:00.001+03:00

Dear food blogger friends,

As you have noticed I have not updated Cinnamonda for ages. I simply don't have time to write two blogs and have decided to concentrate on my book blog A Book Blog of One's Own. You are all welcome to visit me there. Cinnamonda will stay online as a recipe archive, and, who knows, I might continue with it at some point.

Best,
Tiina

Midsummer Salad

2010-06-27T01:46:00.000+03:00

This has been a long weekend in Finland, as Midsummer Eve on the 24th is a public holiday. Midsummer food tends to be on the simple side, sausages grilled on open fire being one of the favorites, and for many food is not so important than the more liquid substances. ;) Many left for their summer cottages already on Thursday afternoon and the cities then to be rather quiet this weekend. I'm a city girl myself, not a summer cottage person at all, and I actually hardly ever celebrate Midsummer in any special way other than enjoying the long weekend.

So, there were no grilled sausages for me. Instead I made a nice, fresh salad today.

Midsummer Salad

2 kinds of organic green salad (enough for 2 persons)
half a bunch of organic pea sprouts
1 organic pear, peeled & cut into small cubes
2 organic tomatoes, thinly sliced
2 boiled organic eggs, thinly sliced
4 slices of prociutto
some parmeggiano, thinly sliced
pine & pumpkin seeds
a mixture of olive oil & balsamico for seasoning

1. Shread the greens by hand & set into a large bowl
2. Add the pear cubes
3. Add the prociutto (also shredded by hand into bite size pieces) & the parmeggiano slices
4. Add the seeds & springle with the mixture of olive oil & balsamico
5. When serving, decorate the plates with thinly sliced tomatos & eggs (one tomato & egg per plate)

Serve with some nice white bread springled with olive oil & good quality salt.

Icelandic Memories

2010-06-25T21:07:00.001+03:00

Take a look at some pictures I took during a work-related trip to Iceland this week. You'll find the pictures & a bit more about my trip here.

And yes, I could have tasted some whale while in Reykjavik, but opted not to.
Ate lots of fish and lamb, though. :)

Hiatus

2010-05-15T23:15:00.001+03:00

Unfortunately I don't have the time to write regular posts to two blogs at the moment. As I also have not been baking anything for some time now I have decided to take a break from Cinnamonda. I will continue to post on A Book Blog of One's Own and you are all welcome to visit me there. I promise to be back on posting also on Cinnamonda later this summer.

Have fun and enjoy the spring!

Valentine's Day 2010

2010-02-14T21:08:00.001+02:00

Happy Valentine's Day!

Cinnamonda Turns Two!

2010-01-13T06:37:00.000+02:00

Time flies, my friends! Exactly two years ago today I posted my first recipe here in Cinnamonda. Quite a few recipes later, here we are, celebrating Cinnamonda's second blogoversary! It's been fun, and in addition to Cinnamonda I have since also started a book blog called A Book Blog of One's Own. Thank you all for being such wonderful friends, visiting my blog, leaving encouraging commments -and posting such wonderful recipes on your own blogs! I have learned so much about cooking during these two years! So, here's for many more!

And do take a look at that first recipe I posted. Those bundles are quite yummy! :)

Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright!

2010-01-09T21:36:00.000+02:00

I've been baking some good, old classics lately. It's been so cold outside for many days now that it's just lovely to be inside and bake and let the heat from the oven to warm the whole kitchen! And let the scent of freshly baked cakes to invade the whole house!

The recipe I'm sharing with you today is for a cake that is well known in many places around the world even if its name differes from one country to another. In Finland it is called "tiikerikakku" i.e. the tiger cake.

The Tiger Cake
Recipe from Seitsemän sortin leivonnaiset

200 g butter
2,5 dl sugar
3 eggs
4 dl wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 dl milk
2 Tsp cocoa powder
1 Tsp vanilla sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 200 Centigrade.
2. Butter, or cover with baking paper, a rectangular bread tin.
3. Whip together butter and sugar.
4. Add eggs one by one mixing well between each addition.
5. Add flour, baking powder, and milk. Mix.
6. Remove about 1/3 of the batter into another bowl, add cocoa powder into it, and mix.
7. Add vanilla sugar to the remainder of the batter.
8. Spread half of the batter spiced with vanilla sugar into the bread tin.Then add the batter with the cocoa powder. Lastly add rest of the batter on top.
9. Using a fork pick the batter from various places in order to mix the different batter layers a little, and thus creating some tiger stripes!
10. Bake in the lower part of the oven for 1 hour.
11. Let cool a bit.
12. Enjoy, maybe with a glass of cold milk!

Not Another Nutty Date Movie

2009-12-30T21:43:00.003+02:00

Ok, another Christmas eating traditional, wonderful, but oh, so heavy, Finnish Christmas food for three days in a row is behind me! I spent Christmas with my Dad, as usual, and it is he, who always does all the cooking for Christmas. I only have to move from the sofa to the kitchen table and eat! :) I had promised to bake us a cake, maybe a date and nut cake I had baked earlier in December, but in the end had no time to do it and ended up buying us a lovely bûche de Noël complete with a little, green macaron artistically positioned on top. That bûche with Mövenbick's rose champagne ice cream was simply divine!!

My recipe today is, however, not for a Christmas log, but that date and nut cake, but before that I would like to give a virtual Season's Greeting to all my food blogging friends out there in the blogosphere in the form of a list of ten novels with a food in their title. I compiled this list as a part of a longer list for a reading challenge I'm taking part in next year & thought some of you might also find it useful. If you want to see my whole list for the challenge, it is here.

-Aimee Bender: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

-Laura Esquivel: Like Water for Chocolate

-Joanne Harris: Chocolat

-Joanne Harris: Five Quarters of the Orange

-Lauren Liebenberg: The Volumtuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam

-Kate O'Brien: The Land of Spices

-Gaile Parkin: Baking Cakes in Kigali

-Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: The Guernsay Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

-Rosie Wilde: Life Is Too Short to Frost a Cupcake

-Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Date Nut Cake

Original recipe published in "Afternoon Tea - Iltapäivän teehetki" and modified by Cinnamonda.

2 dl boiling water

2 dl dates, cut into small pieces

2 dl nuts (I used cashews), in pieces (there were no nuts mentioned in the recipe, obviously a printing error...)

100 g butter (or margarine)

2 dl sugar (I used brown sugar)

3 dl wheat flour (it says 3 2/3 dl in the recipe, but how an earth do I mesure 2/3 dl??? and at least in my case, the batter really needed 3 dl flour)

1 tsp baking powder

1 tps salt

1 tps vanilla sugar

1 egg

1. Preheat the oven to 175 Centigrade.

2. Butter a bread tin, or you may use slips of baking paper to cover the bottom and sides of the tin. That is what I most often do instead of buttering the tin, when the tin is rectangular.

3. Put the dates (that have been cut into pieces) into a bowl. Pour the boiling water on top of them & let them be for 15 minutes.

4. After 15 minutes add the butter & mix until it melts.

5. In another bowl mix all the dry incredients. Add the egg & the date-water-butter -mixture. Mix.

6. Pour the batter into the tin.

7. Bake 45-60 minutes.

8. Let cool a little before slicing the cake.

A few days after I had baked this cake I did another, where I substituted dates with coctail cherries. I liked that version even better than the one with dates.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-23T20:40:00.000+02:00

Double Trouble?

2009-11-22T18:53:00.004+02:00

This has been the first weekend in a very long time that I really could just be, relax, watch some dancing from the TV, read a little, and, finally, bake! I have been waiting for the perfect opportunity to try out a banoffee recipe featured in out main newspaper's food&wine-section in September. The recipe is really very easy, but as it includes three hours of waiting for the condensed milk to turn into fudge, it is not something to do in a hurry. Today I finally could make the banoffee, or rather, as you see from the picture above, I made two small ones. The recipe is made for one cake using a 24 cm springform cake tin. I only own a larger one and two little ones, so, I opted for identical twins. :) Now I'm sitting here typing 1/4 of a cake in my tummy and with a happy smile on my face. :) This recipe is a sure winner!

Banoffee

For the base:
250 g Digestive (or oatmeal) biscuits (using oatmeal biscuits you get a firmer base, but I opted for Digestives)
100 g butter or margarine (I used saltless butter)

For the topping:
1 tin (397 g :)) condensed milk
3 average sized bananas
2 Tbs lemon juice
2 dl whipping cream
(1-2 Tbs sugar for the whipped cream)
(some instant coffee or cocoa powder for decorating)

1. Remove any paper labels from the condensed milk tin. Fill a large pan with water & bring to boil. Immerse the tin into the water and let boil in low temperature for 3 hours.

Now you may for example take a good book & catch up on your reading, watch a DVD, or -if you are so inclined- do some house cleaning, as long as you check the pan every now and then & add water so that the tin stays immersed.

2. While the milk is still boiling crush the biscuits into a fine, sand like consistency. Also, melt the butter or margarine. Mix the melted butter/margarine with the biscuit crumbs.

3. Cut a circle (or two if you are making small banoffees) from the baking paper to cover the bottom of the tin. Spoon the butter/biscuit mixture into a 24 cm springform tin (or into two 14 cm ones). Press tightly with a spoon. Put the tin(s) into the fridge for a while.

4. After 3 hours take the milk tin from the pan. Let cool a bit. Open and voilà! You have a tin full of lovely fudge/toffee!

5. Take the cake tin(s) from the fridge. Top the cake base(s) with the fudge. Put back into the fridge to let the fudge settle a little.

6. Meanwhile whip the cream. Add some sugar, if you like. I usually never do, as I prefer the whipped cream without any sweetener.

7. Cut the bananas into slices (about 1/2 cm or even a bit thicker is fine). Springle with some lemon juice to prevent them from darkening.

8. Take the cake(s) from the fridge. Carefully remove them from the tins. Add banana slices on top. Save some for decoration. Then on top of the bananas add a layer of whipped cream.

9. Decorate with some banana slices (and some cocoa or instant coffee powder).

10. Yummy, yummy, yum!

Fair-ly Good

2009-11-10T23:06:00.004+02:00

In October the annual Helsinki Book Fair took place in the Helsinki Exhibition and Convention Centre. For four days the largest hall of the centre was filled with various book-related stalls. About 77 000 people visited the fair. That was a new record! In addition to the book fair there was also a music fair and a food and wine fair. Being a librarian I spent a good amount of time at the book fair (if you want to read more about the book fair & see two pictures I took there, go over to my book blog), but, of course, I also wanted to visit the food and wine fair. And I was not dissapointed! I found some new specialist stores I want to visit later and ended up buying three bars of fine Belgian chocolate and a nice tin of macha. I have wanted to try baking with macha for some time now (I just love the colour! :)) and now I finally found some. I would love to hear of any great macha recipes, if any of you know any?

Otherwise my life this autumn has really been about work and dancing. Autumn somehow always is the busiest time at work, and I and Mr. Dance Partner also had the Finnish 10-Dance Championships to prepare for. The championships were held here in Helsinki on October 31st, and I am very happy to tell you that we won the senior class for the third year in a row! :) Below is a picture of us after the competition.

And I hope to be back with a recipe next week.

A Little Heart to Heart

2009-09-16T18:44:00.005+03:00

I have a confession to make. I am, once again, going through a "I am not cooking anything much" -period. It comes and goes, and it is largely due to being very busy with work and with my dancing. The little extra time I have, I've spent with shortening my ever expanding to-be-read -list of novels rather than in the kitchen. And I know it will continue like this for at least some more weeks. So, don't expect me posting very often on Cinnamonda for the next month or two...

Luckily on Sunday I managed to bake a cheese cake, though. And now I'm sitting here pondering whether I should go and fetch myself another slice of it. I already ate one just minutes ago. :)

This is, maybe, the most simple cheese cake in the world, but with the right pastry as a base, it is very, very tasty! I used frosen shortcrust pastry, but feel free to choose your favorite shortcrust pastry recipe for this cake.

Pear and Vanilla Cheese Cake

Shortcrust pastry (enough to cover a 27 cm pie tin, plus some extra for decoration)
1 large pear, peeled and thinly sliced
200 g vanilla flavoured cream cheese
1 egg
0,5 dl sugar

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200 Centigrade.
2. Roll out the pastry and lift it into the pie tin. It should cover also the rim of the tin.
3. Add a thin layer of pear slices.
4. In a large bowl combine the cream cheese, sugar and egg by mixing well with a spoon.
5. Pour the cheese/egg/sugar mixture on top of the pear slices.
6. Using two heart shaped cookie cutters cut three larger and three smaller hearts from the left over pastry. Place the hearts on top of the cake as decoration. See the picture below.
7. Bake in 200 C for 30-35 minutes.
8. Let cool a bit.
9. Serve warm or cold. It is extra good with a teaspoonful of sweet cherry jam. :)

And just for your information, I did go and eat another slice while I was writing this. :)

A Little Celebration

2009-08-23T19:54:00.008+03:00

Lately I have not had much time for cooking or baking. Summer holidays are over, my dance training is again in full swing :), and I have tons of books I want to read waiting for their turn, so I've spent any little free time I've had reading.

Yesterday I and Mr. Dance Partner had our first competition after the summer break. It was a smaller national competition, 17 couples, and standard dances only for our class. I am very happy to tell you that we won! :)

To celebrate a little I wanted to bake something good just for myself today. Earlier this week David Lebovitz posted a recipe that caught my eye, and I decided to try that one out. Of course, my local supermarket did not have ricotta, green garlic or fresh thyme and I was too lazy to go to another store, so I opted for some feta & little mozzarella balls, little yellow onions and dried thyme. I also added some cherry tomatoes to the recipe. Otherwise I more or less followed the recipe David posted. I must say the tart turn out great! It is very tasty and was very easy to make, without a doubt a recipe I want to use again and again.

Please go over to David's site for the Herbed Ricotta Tart recipe.

Ljubljana: The Central Market Place

2009-07-31T23:51:00.012+03:00

I spent last week vacationing in Slovenia. It was my second visit to that beautiful country. You will find some pictures of my first visit to Ljubljana here. This time I spent a few days in Ljubljana and a couple more in Portoroz on the west coast. The weather could not have been much better. Sun, sun and more sun, and temperatures around +30 degrees Centigrade! :) I took tons of pictures, though many of them are tennis pictures (I timed my vacation so that I could watch the Banka Koper Slovenia Open women's professional tennis tournament in Portoroz), but there are more than enough of more touristy shots, too. Cinnamonda being a food blog I thought to start with sharing with you some pictures I took of the central market place in Ljubljana.

The central market is situated quite near the most important square of the city, the Preseren's Square (Presernov trg in Slovene), and the famous landmark Triple Bridge (Tromostovje). Actually, from Preseren's Square you cross the Triple Bridge, turn left, and there you are on the market place. The actual outdoor market is situated between a beautiful market hall building designed by the famous Slovenian architect Joze Plecnik and the Ljubljana cathedral. On the market, not only food products, but also clothing, some arts and crafts, and souvenirs are sold. There is also a milk automat on one side of the market place!

About the pictures:
Above: a melon stand at the market. Aren't those watermelons beautiful!
Below:
1. Part of Plecnik's colonnade and market hall seen from the Triple Bridge.
2. The market hall seen from the other side. Each door hides a little shop or cafe. Some of the shops are specialized in selling horse meat.
3. The market place in the evening. The Roman Catholic Cathedral can be seen in the background.
4. Some tables folded away for the night.
5. At the end of a market day. Products on sale or perhaps a resting place for the vendor?
6. Apples on sale.
7. The market place seen from the castle mount.
8. The other end of the market hall seen from the Dragon Bridge (Zmajski most).

Who Needs a Knight in Shining Armour?

2009-07-15T23:15:00.007+03:00

Sometimes things don't work out the way one wants. This time it was nothing major, just a Boston cake (a kind of cinnamon bun cake) that ended up all lopsided and funny looking. I really love Boston cake! Every time I bake one it brings back memories of my maternal Grandmother and my Mother. My Granny was a great baker, my Mom really did not like cooking or baking that much, but they both could bake a great Boston cake. And it was fun, as a little girl, to help either one to spread out to dough, butter it, then sprinkle it with sugar and cinnamon, and finally to roll it. I especially liked to roll the dough! Next to eating the cake (always with a class of cold milk), rolling the dough was the best! :) So, I wanted to share with you my Boston cake recipe, but, well, my poor little cake really was no showcase! It tasted great, but looked a little sad, and all too shy to be photographed. :)

But, but...

After two days of eating my way through my lopsided cake I realised that there was another recipe I could share with you all. And a lopsided Boston cake, or any yeast-based sweed bread, f. ex. challah, or even toast would be perfect for this recipe! I desided to use the rest of my cake to make some Poor Knights, a really tasty Finnish dessert, and the perfect way to use any left over white bread. (And it does not matter, if the bread has dried up a little, actually dry bread is preferred for this recipe.)

Poor Knights

Makes a nice dessert for 2, or a big treat for 1.

4 slices of sweet bread, or white bread like toast
1 egg
some milk
cinnamon & sugar
oil/butter for frying

1. Break the egg into a shallow bowl/soup plate and mix it slightly. Pour some milk into another bowl/soup plate. Take some cinnamon & sugar & mix them on a plate. It is useful to arrange these plates into a row for step 3.
2. Warm some oil (I used rapeseed oil, the traditionalists would ude butter) on a pan.
3. Take one slice of bread at a time & using your fingers put it into the egg mixture, so that both sides get a thin egg coating.
4. Repeat with the plate with milk.
5. Repeat with the plate with the cinnamon/sugar mixture.
6. Fry in the pan from both sides.
7. Serve the Poor Knights warm with some (strawberry) jam (and whipped cream) -and a class of cold milk :)

ps. And just in case it you need it, Poor Knights are the perfect comfort food!

On the Art of Doing Nothing

2009-07-07T22:00:00.008+03:00

Hooray, hoo-ray it's a holi-holiday!:) I cannot help it, the old Boney M -song has been playing in my mind these past few days. :) I am on VACATION!! For four whole weeks!

The Rules of Vacation are:
1. Put your planner somewhere where you cannot see it. (If after four weeks you do not remember where it is, you have had a really good vacation!)
2. Do not make any plans.
3. Do things you enjoy doing.
4. Carpe diem!

This far I have followed the rules to the point, and I am planning... ups, no plans...I mean, I am going to continue to do so. I have been reading an excellent book (The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters), doing some fun cooking and baking, playing some tennis, and in general doing nothing special. I had dance practise today, but for the next three weeks, I will also have vacation from dancing. For the next two weeks, to be exact, I hope to continue on these lines, doing nothing special. Isn't that a lovely thing to look forward to! No plans, nothing you have to do, nowhere you have to go! Bliss!:)

Free from my usually crazy schedule I spent yesterday evening baking something I had wanted to try to do myself for some time now. I baked Alexander pastries, or rather Cinnamonda's version of them. Alexander pastry, or Aleksanterinleivos in Finnish, is a rectangular pastry with two, thin layers of cake, raspberry jam in between the layers, and pink sugar icing. It is the first pastry in Finland ever to be named after someone, in this case Russian Emperor Alexander I, who in 1809 also became the first Grand Duke of the Grand Duchy of Finland. He was supposed to visit Helsinki in 1818, and the pastry was created in his honour. In the end he visited Helsinki a year later. By the way, our main shopping street here in Helsinki is also named after him. But back to the pastry! It is still a very popular pastry here, available all around in cafes and pastry shops, and pastry counters in most food stores. It is also a very sweet pastry, perfect for someone with not only one sweet tooth but a whole set of sweet teeth! Even yours truly cannot eat many Alexanders in a row, and I have been known to wolf half a litre of ice cream or a large chocolate bar in no time!

I used my baking these pastries as a way to work towards finally emptying the freezer (I'm almost there now!) and instead of raspberry jam, which I did not have, I made some apple purée using up the frozen apple slices I had in the freezer. Also, I only had very little pink icing sugar left, so I opted for using white and making a marble effect with the little pink sugar I did have. I used 400 g white and 75 g pink icing sugar, but that was too much, therefor I have reduced the amounts for the recipe. If you want to bake traditional Alexander pastries use raspberry jam instead of apple purée and pink icing sugar only (or colour you sugar pink). One way to colour the sugar is with raspberries as in this more complicated recipe I found in the Nordic Recipe Archive.

Alexander Pastries

Makes 10

For the pastry:
200 g soft butter (or margarine)
1 dl sugar
1 egg
4 dl wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

For the filling:
About 2 apples, sliced
Some sugar (according to your taste)

For the icing:
300 g white icing sugar
50 g pink icing sugar
ca. 1 dl water (or water mixed with some lemon juice)

Let's start with the filling:

1. Put the apple slices into a small pan. Add some sugar.
2. Cook the slices in their own juices until they are very soft.
3. Smash the slices with a spoon.
4. To make the purée finer pour the smashed slices into a food processor and pulse twice, that should be enough, and voilà, we have purée!
5. Let cool before use.

Then let's move on to the pastry:

1. In a bowl mix butter and sugar with your fingertips.
2. Add the egg. Mix some more.
3. Mix the flour and baking powder together in another bowl.
4. Shift the flour/baking powder mixture into the batter and mix quickly.
5. Cover with cling film and let rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.
6. Meanwhile heat the oven to 175 Centigrade.
7. After half an hour take the batter out and spread it evenly onto a baking paper covered baking pan. The easiest way to spread the batter is to cover it with some cling film and then use a rolling pin. It should end up thin, only about 1/2 centimetres thick.
8. Bake in 175 C for about 15 minutes.
9. Let cool completely.
10. Cut the pastry into two halves.
11. Spread apple purée onto one half. Lift the other half on top.

Now is time to prepare the icing:

1. Pour the white icing sugar into a large bowl. Add some water, one tablespoon at a time, and mix, until you have a pourable, but not too runny, icing. Do the same with the pink sugar. With the pink sugar, you will need very little water, so be careful. It might be wise to use a teaspoon, when adding water to the pink sugar.
2. Pour the white icing on top of the pastry, covering the top completely. Using a piping bag make a pattern of crossing lines on the white icing. Using a fork draw a zig zag pattern on the pink lines to make them more marblelike.
3. Let the icing harden overnight.

(First thing:)) next morning:

1. Using a sharp knife cut the sides of the pastry, so that you get clean, straight, icing-free sides. (And some nice extra pieces of pastry for the cook i.e. yourself ;))
2. Cut the big pastry into 10 little pastries.
3. Brew yourself a nice cuppa tea. Put one Alexander (or maybe two) on a plate next to your tea, and...
3. En-JOY!

As I have been hopping back and forth between food and book blogs these past few days, I thought to share with my food blogging friends this info I found about The Spice of Life Challenge. It is a reading challenge that encourages participants to read books about food, be them cookbooks, nonfiction or fiction. Maybe some of you would like to join the challenge. It surely sounds like fun.

With Kafka in the Kitchen

2009-06-28T12:30:00.009+03:00

One week until my summer holidays! :) My mind is already starting to tune into holiday mood. I am thinking of what to cook and what to read during my weeks off from work. Most of my summer vacation will also be a break from dance practise, but I'm looking forward to as much tennis as I can cram into those weeks. :) And I will be going to Slovenia for a week in July. That is something I am really, really looking forward to! I'm also planning on more posts on Cinnamonda and on my brand new book blog A Book Blog of One's Own. If you want to learn a bit more about me, take a look at the first post on the book blog, and I hope to see you all visiting there too in the future. :)

Books and food do go perfectly together, don't you think? And some authors have nicely combined the two in their work. I am at the moment reading a fun little book by Mark Crick called Kafka's Soup - A Complete History of World Literarure in 14 Recipes. It is a collection of recipes and little stories that include the method of cooking the recipe. Each story is written in the style of a different writer. There is, for example, a story in the style of Marcel Proust about making tiramisu and another in the style of Franz Kafka about cooking miso soup. Other writers whose style Crick is imitating in the book are Raymond Chandler (a priceless account of cooking lamb in dill sauce, maybe the best story in the book), Jane Austen, Irvine Welsh, Gabriel García Márquez, John Steinbeck, marquis de Sade, Virginia Woolf, Homer (Achilles cooking rabbit and vegetables!), Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, Harold Pinter, and Geoffrey Chaucer. This really is a little gem of a book! I highly recommend you to read it. And maybe even cook from it!

My recipe today is, however, written totally in the style of Cinnamonda. :) It is the rhubarb season now, and I had been waiting the whole week to have time for baking a rhubarb pie. I had also been looking for a nice recipe for the pie. Rhubarb pie is something very common in Finland during the summer, but it seems not one of my cook books have a recipe for the kind of pie I was imagining in baking. I knew what the pie I was hoping to bake should look like, but as I was not quite sure of the ingredients, I wanted to find a tested recipe and not experiment on my own. I found some recipes on the net, but they were not quite what I was looking for. Then I thought that maybe my Grandmother's old cook book from the thirties would include a traditional rhubarb pie recipe. Strangely enough it did not, but a small piece of paper fell from in between the brittle pages of the old book while I was carefully browsing it. I took the paper slip into my hand and turned it over to see what it was. A rhubarb pie recipe! It was clearly written with a computer and then printed out, so I guessed it was not something my Grandmother had used, but rather a recipe my Dad (who had the book before he gave it to me last year) had either written down himself or more probably been given by a friend sometime. And as I looked at the recipe I knew immediately it was exactly the one I had been looking for! It was the simple, traditional recipe for rhubarb pie, and I am glad to share it here with you.
Rhubarb pie

4 dl wheat flour
2 dl sugar
2 dl melted butter
1 egg
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanillin sugar
1 dl water (or milk)
4 rhubarb stalks cut into 2 cm pieces
1 teaspoon cinnamon

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200 Centigrade.
2. Mix sugar and flour.
3. Add melted butter and mix until crumbs are formed.
4. Set 2 dl crumbs aside for the topping.
5. Add egg, baking powder, vanillin sugar and water and mix until smooth.
6. Pour the batter into a round pie tin.
7. Put the rhubarb pieces on top. Then add the crumbs you set aside earlier.
8. Shift 1 teaspoon cinnamon on top of it all.
9. Bake in 200 C for about half an hour or until a tooth pick (or in my case a knitting needle! :)) inserted into the pie comes out clean.
10. Enjoy, preferably warm with some vanilla ice cream or vanilla sauce.

What You Leave Behind...

2009-06-21T21:17:00.009+03:00

We have a saying in Finnish "minkä taakseen jättää, sen edestään löytää". The literal translation would be "what you leave behind, you will find in front of you", meaning of course that if you leave something you should do undone, you are only postponing the inevitable. Well, I really should have defreezed my freezer a long time ago. Winter would have been an ideal time to do that, but... but...

I do admit defreezing the freezer is not one of my favorite things, neither is washing the dishes (thank God for dishwashers!) or vacuuming the apartment, but those are tasks you simply have to do (unless, of course, you can afford to pay someone else to do those things for you, which is not the case here, or you want to live in your own filth, which is not the case here either). Some of those tasks you have to do more often, some, like the defreezing, luckily not so very often. But even that has to be done sometime! And I guess my time to do it is now. Or as soon as I have consumed all the food I have in the freezer. You see, winter would have been a better time for this. It would not have been necessary to worry about food going bad. I could just have loaded my French balcony with all the food I have in the freezer and below zero Centigrade temperature outside would have kept it all in perfectly freezed state to but back in the freezer afterwards. Not so during the summer. So, I am eating, or rather baking, my way towards an empty freezer. And then I will, I promise, I swear that I will defreeze the freezer.

It so happened that among the freezed ingredients waiting to be used were some apple slices, cranberries and blueberries. I put them in good use and baked a cake. And this kind of cake needs a nice sauce, so, I also made some chocolate sauce. Remember the 3 second mayo -recipe I posted some time ago? On the same cooking course I also learned the world's easiest chocolate sauce recipe. Hmm, maybe the course should have been called "the world's easiest cooking course"... Anyway, forget melting chocolate etc. This sause works just as fine and it is so easy to make!

Chocolate Sauce

3 dl water
1 dl cocoa powder, preferably Green & Black's
1,5 dl sugar
50 g cold butter, diced

1. Mix water, cocoa powder and sugar.
2. Let boil for 10 minutes in a pan without a lid.
3. Add the butter.
4. Mix until smooth.
Fruit & Berry Cake

Recipe adapted from Menu à la carte (Easy Menu Planner) ed. Joanne Holliman

2-3 apples, sliced
2-3 handfuls of berries (blueberries&cranberries)
60 g butter
0,5 dl sugar
1 egg, slightly beaten
2,5 dl wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
0,5 dl water (or milk)
30 g butter for decoration
1 tablespoon sugar for decoration

1. Pre-heat the oven to 175 Centigrade.
2. Butter a 20 cm cake tin.
3. Mix butter & sugar well in a bowl.
4. Add egg. Beat well.
5. Add flour & water by folding them into the mixture carefully with a spoon.
6. Spoon the batter into the tin.
7. Place the apple slices on top of the batter so that they make a circle. Place the berries into the centre. See picture below.
8. Bake for 20 minutes or until a tooth pick inserted into the cake comes out clean.
9. Brush the cake with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar.
10. Serve warm (or cold) with warm (or cold) chocolate sauce.

Old Porvoo

2009-06-19T22:13:00.015+03:00

Some time ago I spent a day in Porvoo, a town some 50 kms from Helsinki. Porvoo, which got its town rights in the 14th century, is one of the six towns established in Finland in the Middle Ages.

In addition to its history, Porvoo is renown for chocolate. There is not only one, but two chocolate factories in Porvoo, and for almost anyone visiting the town, some chocolate is on the buying list!
Brunberg has a shop in the old town and a factory shop a little farther away from the town centre. Pieni suklaatehdas (=Little Chocolate Factory) has their factory and shop in the old town. Brunberg's chocolates are more main stream, whereas Pieni suklaatehdas specializes in making hand made chocolate truffles and selling a selection of quality chocolate bars. The brands available include Valrhona and Amade i among others. I especially like Little Chocolate Factory's rose truffles, blueberry truffles being no 2 on my list. The picture above shows my little, tasty souvenirs! :)

Below are some pictures I took in the old part of town. The first picture shows the building housing Pieni suklaatehdas. And if you are wondering where is everybody, why are the streets totally empty? Well, I must tell you that the weather that day was horrible! Cold (+6 in the morning and it was already beginning of June!!) and rainy!

I am listening to Il mio canto libero by Laura Pausini and Juanes.

Daughter of the Baltic

2009-05-17T23:12:00.010+03:00

I am a Helsinkian born and bred. Helsinki was founded in 1550 by the Swedish king Gustaf Vasa (Finland was part of the kingdom of Sweden at that time) on the banks of river Vantaa. In 1812 the capital of Finland was moved from Turku to Helsinki. Nowadays some 570 000 people live in Helsinki. Helsinki is also called the Daughter of the Baltic. Here are some maritime photos I took in and around the centre of Helsinki earlier this month. Enjoy! :)

Such a Closet Case!

2009-05-02T00:01:00.002+03:00

Remember my I'm-not-eating-any- chocolate -campaign that was supposed to last until the end of January, but then went on until Easter? Chocolate is really the only sweet I have ever craved for, and too much of even a very good thing is simply too much. I am an athlete. I don't get any younger. I want to eat a more healthy diet.

I did eat some chocolate at Easter and was very, very surprised to notice that I did not crave for more afterwards. So, I decided to go on eating less chocolate. I don't buy it for myself, but if somebody offers me some, I don't automatically decline. :) What I just realised it that the same pretty much goes with myself and meat!

I really have not thought about it. I have no ethical nor health nor even taste-related reasons for not eating meat, though I do prefer organic if possible, but I simply more often than not choose to eat vegetarian. I hardly ever buy meat and cook it at home. I do eat meat sometimes, if I have lunch at the cafeteria at work, but even there it is very rarely red meat, mostly I choose fish or chicken, and they do have some pretty good vegetarian options, too.

So, there it is. I just might be a closeted vegetarian. Phew, I've said it! Or maybe a vege-fisheterian, who sometimes has a relapse and eats white and even red meat... Actually I don't like labels. Labels are fine in your Jimmy Choo shoes or your Dolce & Gabbana jackets (for those of you that can afford the real thing, please, do not buy pirated copies of anything!!), but not on people. On that note, I might just continue on my chosen path of prefering veggies but not limiting myself to them. I like being me. I hope, you like being you, too! :)

Carrot and bean patties

Recipe by Cinnamonda. Makes about 8 patties.

10 small carrots
230 g large white beans, cooked
1 yellow onion
2 gloves of garlic
3 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon crushed green pepper
1 teaspoon dried coriander
1 teaspoon pepper powder
1 teaspoon turmeric
pinch of salt
rape seed oil

1. Wash (and if necessary peel) the carrots. Crate them.
2. Crush the cooked beans.
3. Peel and chop the onion.
4. Put the crated carrots, crushed beans and chopped onion into a large bowl.
5. Crush and chop the garlic gloves and add into the bowl.
6. Add the flour and all the spices and mix.
7. Pour some rape seed oil into your hands and with oily hands form patties little smaller than the palm of your hand.
8. Put the patties onto a prepared baking sheet.
9. Cook in the oven in 250 Centigrade for about 15-20 minutes. Turn the patties upside down and let them stay in the oven for 10-15 minutes more.
10. Enjoy!

The patties go very well with some salad and a refreshing, cold sauce like this spiced, youghurt-based sauce I used:

Spiced, yoghurt-based sauce:

4 tablespoons Greek or Turkish yoghurt.
handful of fresh basil, shredded
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds
pinch of salt and black pepper

1. Combine all the incredients in a jar.
2. The sauce is great with most vegetable dishes or as a salad dressing.

Happy May-Day!

2009-05-01T00:01:00.003+03:00

Hauskaa Vappua! Happy 1st of May! May-Day (or Vappu in Finnish) is the one and only carneval-like holiday here in Finland. It is a festival of students, past and present, and of workers. In Helsinki the celebrations start on the eve of May-Day with university students washing the statue of Havis Amanda in the Market Square in the center of Helsinki and putting a student cap on the statue's head (See this link for a picture of the "crowning". That is how it is done nowadays :). In the past the students climbed on the statue, but that was prohibited as it could have damaged the statue.) Thousands of people gather on the Square to watch the ceremonies. Many party all through the night and continue then straight to Kaivopuisto Park, which in the morning of May-Day is really like one huge picnic (see a picture here), thousans of people picnicing there!

Traditional May-Day food and drink includes:
-sausages and potato salad
-doughnuts
-May-Day fritters
-mead
-champagne and sparkling wine (lots of it! :))

Other accesories :) include:
-balloons
-student caps
-carnival wigs
-colourful streamers
-picnic baskets

The picture in the beginning of this post shows my little May-Day treat: a class of mead and a May-Day fritter by Fazer Bakeries. A close-up of the fritter below.
Read more of Finnish May-Day traditions here and here.

If you feel really brave and adventurous :), here you can find recipes for both May-Day fritters and mead.

Man from the Moon

2009-04-25T22:33:00.008+03:00

Last week I had the great pleasure to meet one of the few persons ever to walk on the surface of the moon Dr. Harrison Schmitt. He was in Helsinki to give a lecture at my work place entitled "My Space Travel. The Future of Mankind in Space", and what an interesting lecture it was! Dr. Schmitt was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 17 (last of the manned Apollo missions) which makes him one of the last humans this far to visit the moon. Apollo 17 mission took place in December 1972. Dr. Schmitt was also the only scientist to visit moon. All other astronauts were pilots. Dr. Schmitt was a geologist, but before he went to the moon, he had to train as a pilot, too.

His lecture was a great success. People came all the way from Oulu (some 600 kms from Helsinki) to hear him speak. All together there were about 300 people attending the lecture. I do have many pictures of the event, but unfortunately not any taken by myself, and I have not had the opportunity to ask permission to use any of the pictures on my blog, thus no pictures of the event here.

I guess the perfect recipe for this post would be moon cake. :) Sorry folks, no moon cake recipe this time! I will, however, share with you the recipe for the world's easiest mayonnaise that I learned on a cooking course the other day. Forget all about adding the incredients in a certain order or carefully pouring in the oil. This recipe is sooooo easy, and the mayonnaise tastes great!

World's easiest mayonnaise recipe aka 4 second mayonnaise :)

2 dl rape seed oil
1 egg
1 teaspoon mustard
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground white pepper
1 teaspoons lemon juice or white vine vinegar
(3-4 garlic cloves)

Note: Both the oil and egg must be room temperature!

1. Put all the incredients in a small bowl.
2. Put your stick mixer into the bowl so that it touches the bottom.
3. Turn the mixer on and counting to 4 lift it until it reaches the top of the mixture. If there is still any oli showing repeat once more.
4. Serve for example with spicy oven potatoes.
5. The mayonnaise keeps up till 5 days in the fridge.

Note no 2: If you want your mayonnaise to be thicker, add more oil.

Spicy oven potatoes
(another great recipe from the course I took)

large potatoes
rape seed oil
salt
garlic powder (or crushed green pepper)
cayanne pepper

1. Pre-heat the oven to 225 Centigrade and cover a baking pan with baking paper.
2. Wash the potates but do not peel them. Cut them into "sticks".
3. Brush the potatoes with some oil and place them on the prepared baking pan.
4. Sprinkle with salt.
5. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes.
6. Season with garlic powder and cayanne pepper or green pepper.
7. Enjoy with homemade mayonnaise.

Small Is Beautiful

2009-04-04T21:19:00.006+03:00

There was a big, new supermarket opened a couple of weeks ago only a few hundred meters from where I live, and I have visited their food section a few times since, but about a week ago I checked out the upper floor where they have among other things quite a nice collection of kitchen utensils for sale. I ended up buying a very nice 5 liter steel bowl and two cute 16 cm springform cake tins. All those were put to very good use today!

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday. Up here the only palms we have sit in pots, but I wanted to bake something for tomorrow with a kind of, even if a bit far fetched, palm theme. The food section in the above mentioned new supermarket is quite good, and I bought a small jar of coconut jam there the other day. I had never seen, much less tasted, coconut jam before. I also always have coconut flakes in my cupboard as they are part of my favorite breakfast, so, the thought prosess went something like this: Palm Sunday -palms? -hmmm? -coconuts? -yes! -coconut palms! -okay! I had coconut jam, I had ococnut flakes and a pair of brand new cake tins. I decided to bake a coconut flavored layered cake.

About the layers. I have notices that for some reason in American resipes the layered cakes most often have four layeres. Here in Finland it is usually three. Don't ask me, I have no idea as to why it is so. Anyway, this time I broke with the Finnish tradition and used both of my new tins to bake two small cakes that I cut into two layers for a four layered cake. This recipe is very easy and quick, and fool proof really, as long as you whisk your eggs and sugar very well and avoid upsetting the batter by banging your whisk(s) into the sides of the bowl. You want to get two well risen cakes, don't you? This is no pancake recipe, you know. :)

Layered Coconut Cake

For the cakes:
4 eggs
2 dl sugar
2 dl wheat flour

For the filling and topping:
2 dl whipping cream
150 g coconut jam
a few tablespoons strawberry jam
coconut flakes
1/2 dl cranberry juice mixed with 1/2 dl water

1. Preheat the oven to 200 Centigrade.
2. Prepare two 16 cm springform cake tins with butter and breadcrumbs.
3. Mix eggs and sugar in a large bowl until light and fluffy.
4. Add flour and mix well.
5. Divide the batter into the two tins.
6. Bake for 30 minutes.
7. Let cool.
8. When the cakes have cooled down completely cut them into two layers.
9. Whip the cream.
10. Start compiling the layered cake.

Moisten the bottom layer with 3-4 tablespoons of the juice/water mixture. Add half of the coconut jam and some whipped cream.
Put the second cake layer on top of the filling. Moisten. Add some tablespoons of strawberry jam and some whipped cream.
The third layer is moistened and then topped with the rest of the coconut jam and some whipped cream.
Moisten also the top layer. Then cover the whole cake with the rest of the whipped cream. It is not necessary to smooth the cream very finely.
Decorate with coconut flakes.

11. En-Joy!:)

Beauty on a Plate

2009-03-16T21:58:00.008+02:00

I'm sure we all have been taught not to play with our food, but there is nothing wrong with embellishing your soup a little bit to make it look its best! :) So, below you will find a few suggestions how to make that simple soup look a little more special.

Snow White

2009-03-09T18:41:00.008+02:00

It's snowing, and it has continued to do so the whole day! That much for the "spring is in the air" -feelings of last week! Well, there are two sides in every coin. :) I'm sure every skier in the Helsinki area is hoping for even more snow, where as us summer folks are counting days for... well, hoping, wishing, praying that in a few weeks time all snow would be gone!

In the meantime silky loveliness of some coconut flavoured semolina pudding with the hidden gem of half a nectarine in the bottom will keep the spirits high!

Semolina Pudding

Recipe from Samettisia makuja (Original French title of the book Délices de Lait) by Laurence & Gilles Laurendon

Serves 2

400 ml coconut milk
1 dl water
3/4 dl semolina
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons coconut flakes

1. Heat the coconut milk and water in a saucepan.
2. Add the semolina and let boil for about 8 minutes, mixing every now and then.
3. Season with sugar.
4. Enjoy warm or cold.

My own addition:

-Slice half a nectarine and place the slices in the bottom of the bowl/plate you'll use to serve your pudding.
- Fill the bowl/plate with the semolina pudding.
-Decorate with some coconut flakes and brown sugar.

This is Helsinki. Now. :)

Alpine Treat

2009-03-04T12:00:00.002+02:00

While in Ljubljana, Slovenia last November I bought an interesting cookbook by Kay Shaw Nelson called Cuisine of the Alps. It includes lovely recipes from France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia. My favorite of the recipes I have tried this far is the recipe for red cabbage with apples. This sweet red cabbage and apple salad is a great side dish for pork, or duck for example. And look at the colour!

Red Cabbage with Apples
(original recipe from Cuisine of the Alps by Kay Shaw Nelson)

Serves 4-6

1 red cabbage, shredded (ca. 1 kg)
3/4 cup boiling water
3 apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup red wine vinegar (or cider)
1/4 cup browm sugar
salt and pepper

1. In a saucepan combine the shredded cabbage and boiling water over medium-high heat. Cook, covered, for 10 minutes.
2. Add the apple slices & cook for another 10 minutes.
3. In a small bowl mix the butter, vinegar (or cider), and sugar & add it to the cabbage and apple mixture.
4. Season with salt and pepper, and cook for 10 more minutes.
5. Enjoy!

Heavenly Heights -The Eternal City

2009-02-28T22:46:00.005+02:00

Love or Hate?

2009-02-10T22:54:00.008+02:00

Some love it, others hate it. What is your stance?

Edible Poetry

2009-02-08T21:48:00.007+02:00

February is the month of snow and cold -and sometimes, like today, of rain! The above was the view from my living room window this morning, but luckily February is also the month for two very special baked goodies here in Finland: shrove buns and Runeberg's cakes. Last year I shared with you a recipe for shrove buns. So, let's talk about Johan Ludvig Runeberg and Runeberg's cakes this time.

Johan Ludvig Runeberg was born in February 5th 1804 in Pietarsaari, and he died in Porvoo May 6th 1877. He was a poet, a novelist, a journalist and a teacher. He was a Swedish speaking Finn, who wrote all his works in Swedish. His poem Vårt land or Maamme in Finnish (Our Land in English) is his most well known piece of work as is was used as lyrics for the Finnish national anthem. Runeberg is considered the national poet of Finland. His poetry has been compared to that of Keats, Shelley and Lermontov among others. His birthday is an official flag-raising day. For most of us the most common way to celebrate Runeberg's day is to eat Runeberg's cakes.

These lovely, moist, almondy cakes topped with a dollop of raspberry jam circled with some white or pink icing are a hit in every bakery or food store from January to February 5th, and in Runeberg's home town Porvoo there is a cafe in which it is possible to buy Runeberg's cakes all year round.

It is said that Runeberg himself was very fond of these cakes. His wife Fredrika had written a recipe for the cakes in her recipe book in the 1850s. Her recipe was propably an adaptation of a recipe by pastry-cook Lars Astenius. He had created a similar cake in the 1840s.

For a proper Runeberg's cake you need a special tin, as the cakes should be quite tall with straight sides, but if you don't own a Runeberg's cake tin it is also possible to bake them in a muffin tin.

Below you will find a picture of a Runeberg's cake I bought in a bakery. And did it taste good? Oh, yes! Pure edible poetry!:) If you are wondering of the right way to eat this cake, I'll give you two options:
1. The civilized way - use a teaspoon or a dessert fork
2. Cinnamonda's way - crab the cake with your fingers, start munching from the bottom and leave the best (that is the top with icing and jam) for last. :)
In case you want to try and bake some Runeberg's cakes there is a recipe on the Nordic Recipe Archive. The same recipe is quoted on Nigella's page.

More on J. L. Runeberg in English can be found here.

A Game of Gingerbread Tennis

2009-01-17T20:32:00.008+02:00

Gingerbread cookies are very popular in Finland. A lot of them are eaten and baked during the Christmas time, but they really are something enjoyed all the year round and not just during Christmas.

I bought two packets of frozen gingerbread dough before Christmas and used one of them immediately, but for the past few days I had been pondering what to do with the other packet. Also, I happened to mention to my Dad that I might bring him something baked when we are going to meet for our weekly game of tennis tomorrow.

So, I decided on baking gingerbread cookies for my Dad, and what better than bake some gingerbread tennis rackets and balls! :) Especially, as the first Grand Slam of the tennis season is about to start in Australia. I only had a packet of pink icing sugar, so I ended up with some pink rackets and pink balls. :) And some butterflies, as that is what you propably have in your tummy before an important tennis match. Plus simply because I love my butterfly cookie cutter. :)
In case you want to try and make gingerbread all the way from making also the dough yourself Food from Finland has a recipe for Finnish style gingergread snaps. May I mention that Food from Finland is a great site, if you want to learn more about Finnish food.

And just for comparition. This is the real thing, and no, it is not pink! :) This picture I took at the 2008 French Open in Paris.

1st Anniversary!

2009-01-15T21:11:00.005+02:00

My goodness! I just realized Cinnamonda turned 1 a few days ago! It was January 13th 2008 that I posted my first post about puff pastry bundles. What fun this have been! And how time has flown! I have not always had time to post as frequently as I would have liked to, but 48 times anyway, this post included. :)

How should we celebrate? Some chocolate, maybe? Or perhaps a cake? I am still abstaining from anything chocolately, and I just posted about ambroisia cake. Hmmm... How about some nice coconut filled croissants? Yes, coconut filled croissants it is! Easy to make, very easy to the taste buds! :)

I have used my "Seitsemän sortin leivonnaiset" cook book by ICA provkök a lot lately. Even this recipe is from that book. I have adapted the recipe just a tiny bit. In the original version milk is used instead of water, but I hardly ever have any milk at home, so, I usually substitute milk with water which I did also when baking these croissants. If you don't like coconut, feel free to use another filling, for example strawberry or raspberry jam.

Coconut croissants

makes 24

50 g fresh yeast
150 g (unsalted) butter (or margarine)
3 dl water
3/4 dl sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
ca. 1 l flour

For the filling you will need:
50 g (unsalted) butter (or margarine)
1/2 dl coconut flakes
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon (Well, this is the 1st anniversary of Cinnamonda, the recipe kind of had to have some cinnamon in it! :))
grated zest of 1 orange

some egg for brushing

1. Crumble the yeast into a large bowl.
2. Melt the butter. Mix with water. Let cool to 37 degrees Centigrade.
3. Pour the mixture onto the crumbled yeast. Mix until the yeast has melted.
4. Add sugar, lightly beated egg and most of the flour.
5. Knead with your hands or with a machine until smooth. Let rise for half an hour.
6. Prepare the filling by mixing all the ingredients together in a small bowl.
7. On a floured table knead the batter a bit more.
8. Divide the batter into three parts. Using a rolling pin roll out each part of the batter into a circle of ca. 30 cm in diameter. Cut each circle into 8 triangles.
9. Place a teaspoonful of filling onto the widest part of each triangle.
10. Roll the triangles into croissants starting from tha widest end.
11. Place the croissants onto a prepared baking dish, and let rise covered with a kitchen towel for another half an hour.
12. Meanwhile heat the oven to 250 centigrade (225 if you are using a convection oven).
13. Bruch the croissants with some egg.
14. Bake in 250 (225) for 6-10 minutes.

New Year's Resolutions, Anyone?

2009-01-04T17:21:00.006+02:00

I hope everyone has got a good start for 2009. I have had a relaxing, almost a fortnight's, vacation from work with a nice combination of Christmas and New Year's family traditions and shopping therapy!

I have also had time to test some nice recipies, which I hope to post about later. Today, however, I want to share with you the recipe for my new favorite cake! It is so easy to make, and it tastes so good that you simply must try this recipe! Please do, you will not regret it! :)

Oh, and did I make any New Year's resolutions? Yes, I did. After stuffing myself with all that lovely chocolate I bought from Amsterdam and Ljubljana, plus all the lovely Finnish chocolates I ate during Christmas, I have decided... drums, please!..I have decided to have chocolate free January! Yes, you read absolutely right, I will not eat a single piece of chocolate for 31 days! :) Umm, that means, 4 days down, 27 to go...

Ambrosia Cake

Recipe from "Seitsemän sortin leivonnaiset" by ICA provkök.

Preheat the oven to 150 Centigrade.

For the cake you will need:

125 g liquid margarine or butter
2 eggs
1,5 dl sugar
1,5 dl wheat flour
0,5 teaspoon baking powder
some butter and breadcrumbs for the tin

For the icing:

3 dl icing sugar
2-4 tablespoons water or freshly pressed orange or lemon juice (I used lemon juice)
ca. 4 tablespoons candied (orange) peel in small pieces

1. Butter a round (25 cm) pie tin & prepare it with breadcrumbs.
2. Mix eggs and sugar until nicely fluffy.
3. Add flour, baking powder and margarine/butter. (If liquid margarine or equivalent is not available, melt the margarine/butter and let it cool before use.) Mix. then pour into the prepared tin.
4. Bake in the lower part of the oven for 25-30 minutes.
5. Let the cake rest for awhile, before removing it from the tin.
6. While the cake is cooling down, prepare the icing by mixing water of juice with the icing sugar. You should get a lovely, thick mixture.
7. Pour the icing onto the cake. Use a spoon or a knife to spread it evenly.
8. Decorate with candied peel.
9. Remember to let the icing harden before you cut the cake!
10. Yum- yum!!

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star!

2008-12-05T21:42:00.012+02:00

Thousands of stars are being born in thousands and thousands of Finnish homes this time of the year, and no, I am not talking about the "fifteen minutes of fame" kind of stars, but more like "the fifteen minutes in the making" kind. What I am talking about is Christmas stars, the edible kind. There are really two kinds of baked goods that are essential parts of Finnish Christmas time: gingerbread cookies and Christmas stars. I'll try and post more about gingerbread later, but let's talk about Christmas stars this time!

Christmas stars, which actually can also be made into a half-moon shape, if so desired, are made of puff pastry and plum jam. You can also use soft prunes instead of jam, like my Mom used to do, but most people use plum jam. This time of the year both plum jam and special frozen Christmas star puff pastry are in good supply in every food store around here! Most people use forzen puff pastry as it comes in packets of five small sheets that you only have to cut in two to make two Christmas stars from each sheet. Of course those with an extra amount of Christmas spirit may opt for making their own puff pastry, and I guess some with all year round Christmas spirit might even have their home-made plum jam stored in the basement waiting for Chrismas star baking...

I do not admit of having any less Christmas spirit than Santa Claus himself (and he does live in Finland, you know that, don't you?) and Rudolf combined, but I am a busy, professional lady with only 24 hours in every day (and night) and I should also get my beauty sleep, otherwise I will most surely scare away both Santa C and Rudolf when they come to visit me on Christmas Eve. And I am very positive they will call on the evening of the 24th as I have been very, very, very good this whole year, really, truly, I promise, scout's honour. Hmm, ups, I never was s scout...

Anyways, feel free to use any puff pastry recipe you like. My stars are proud to admit that they are made of ready-made puff pastry!

Finnish Christmas Stars

For 10 stars you will need:

500 g puff pastry
ca. 100-150 g plum jam
1 egg for brushing

1. If using ready-made frozen puff pastry, let the pastry thaw in room temperature. If your pastry is not pre-made into sheets, roll it out into a thickness of ca. 0,5 cm or little less.
2. Using a pastry wheel cut the pastry into 10x10 cm squares.
3. From each corner of each square cut a diagonal line about 2/3 way towards the centre.
4. Using a teaspoon put a spoonful of plum jam into the centre of each square.
5. After you have cut the diagonal lines each square now has 8 "points" or we might perhaps call them corners. Turn every other corner towards the middle of the square. Wet the corners a little, and press well, so that they will stay together also in the oven. And see, there is your little star! Twinkle, twinkle!
6. To make the stars even prettier, brush them with some egg.
7. And into the oven they go! 225 Centigrade for about 15 minutes or until the pastry is beautifully golden.
8. Remove the stars from the oven, take a deep breath and inhale the sweet smell of Christmas time!
9. If you like, you may sprinkle the stars with some icing (confectioners') sugar. I prefer mine without.
10 Enjoy warm or cold. They taste so good either way!
I have nine little stars cooling down in the kitchen this very minute and one in the tummy! :) I will save the rest for later and will give half of them to my Dad. I will not eat another one tonight, I promise, scout's honour...

Lovely Ljubljana

2008-12-02T21:57:00.014+02:00

How majestic the Alps are! Their beauty mesmerizes you even when you are flying above them in the smallest plane you have ever set your foot into -and there is turbulence! I must say I have been a regular "Flying Finn" lately, what with first going to Amsterdam and then after only a few days back home flying again, this time to Ljubljana in Sloveni a.

I had been wanting to go to Slovenia for a long time. Every single person with whom I had talked about going there, had told me what a nice and beautiful country Slovenia is. So, my expectations were pretty high, but I must say, I was not dissapointed! Ljubljana is lovely. And you have to love a place where they serve you three kinds of pancakes, apple strudels and couple of other sorts of cakes for breakfast!:)

I also managed to buy a find assortment of hand made Slovenian chocolates, which I am trying very hard not to eat all too quickly! What do you say about white chocolate with pictacchios, dark chocolate with cinnamon and carnation, white chocolate with cinnamon or dark with salt flower? Cukrcek also makes dark chocolate with Tabasco, but that I found a bit too exotic for me...

Potica is a typical Slovenian dish which can be made in different flavors, walnut potica being one of the most traditional variations. As I like walnuts a lot, I just had to try this Slovenian speciality. The potica in the picture is admittedly bought in a store :) (I have not had time to try to bake one yet), but here is a recipe for making one. The recipe comes from a wonderful little book called "100 Selected Dishes. The Cuisine of Slovenia" by Slavko Ademlje and Janez Bogataj. And before we go to the recipe, here is a wonderfully funny cartoon video with another recipe on how to bake a potica. :)

Walnut Potica (Orehova potica)

Dough:
600 g flour
40 g fresh yeast
1 egg
2 egg yolks
50 g butter
50 g sugar
2-3 dl milk
3 tbsp breadcrumbs
zest from 1 lemon
salt

Filling:
300-400 g walnuts
100 g sugar
100 g honey
40 g butter
2 egg whites
2 dl milk
zest from 1 lemon
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tbsp rum

Dough:
1. Pour the flour into a large bowl, cover and leave somewhere warm.
2. In a small bowl mix the yeast, 2 tablespoons of both lukewarm milk and flour, and 1 teaspoon of sugar. Leave somewhere warm to rise.
3. In a third bowl beat the butter, egg yolks & sugar until creamy.
4. Grate the zest of 1 lemon.
5. Heat the milk slightly.
6. Pour the milk onto the egg mixture. Add salt & lemon zest.
7. Mix together the flour, the yeast mixture, and the milk & egg mixture, and make a dough that is not too thick. The dough is ready when it comes off a wooden spoon & the bowl.
8. Cover with a cloth & let rise in a warm place until the dough have doubled in size.

Filling:
1. Heat the milk.
2. Add half the butter & half the sugar & bring to a boil.
3. Grind the walnuts & pour the liquid over them.
4. Bring the honey to a boil & add to the milk mixture.
5. Grate the lemon zest & add it to the mixture. Add the cinnamon & rum.
6. Leave to cool.
7. Whip the egg whites with the remaining sugar until firm. Fold into the cooled walnut mixture.
8. Stir in the remaining butter.

Compiling the potica:
1. Grease a cake mould & sprinkle it with some breadcrumbs.
2. Roll the dough out to the thickness of ca. 1 cm.
3. Spread the filling onto the dough.
4. Roll the dough up tightly & put it into the mould
5. Leave in a warm place to rise once again.
6. Beat an egg & brush it on the roll.
7. Bake for ca. 1 hour in 180 C.
8. When the potica is ready remove it immediately from the mould, in order to prevent it from getting damp and to prevent the crust from coming off.

And Then It Was Winter

2008-11-25T22:57:00.010+02:00

All of a sudden Helsinki is the winter wonderland: white, pristine, beautiful, trees covered in snow as if wrapped in intricate lace. This does not happen so often at this time of the year. We often don't get much snow before Christmas, but then sometimes it is like this, and I remember why I like winter. I don't like the cold or the darkness, but I love the beauty of new snow, I love to sit inside and look at snowflakes falling from the sky, building maps of unknown continents on my windows.

Yes, winter in Helsinki is a time of cold weather, a time of darkness -and a time of warmth and light! The warmth of people, friends and family, the light of lanterns and candles and -like today- of pristine snow.

Well, not to become too poetic about it, I'm afraid the snow will melt soon, but it does look very pretty just now!

I guess at the moment large parts of Europe are white. I have heard of wintry weather and snow in Estonia, the Netherlands and Slovenia. Estonia and Finland had a big snowstorm last weekend.

It was windy in Amsterdam, but to come back home and find the weather had turned freezing was kind of a shock! But now, after the storm, these past two days, it's been just so... well, I said it already :) ... beautiful!

But I promised you to write some more about Amsterdam. Amsterdam is known for great Indonesian and Chinese restaurants. Last week I had the opportunity to visit Srikandi, an Indonesian restaurant and art gallery, with Anya from Godful Food, and to taste my first ever ricetable! It was, in fact, the first time I ate Indonesian food. Srikandi is a very nice little restaurant located in a beautiful old building by a canal (lots of canals in Amsterdam :)). The ricetable tasted very good, service was friendly and knowledgable and I was in good company. :) It was a very nice evening.

Here are some photos I took while in Amsterdam. Enjoy!

Back on Track

2008-11-22T23:18:00.009+02:00

Canals, boats, bicycles, beautiful buildings, nice people... Add some rain, hale and stormy wind and you will have quite a well rounded picture of my five fabulous days in Amsterdam! :) Getting there was easy, getting away a bit more difficult, as due to bad weather air traffic was badly deleyed. I should have been back home before midnight, but at that time I was still waiting for my plane to take off from Schiphol... In the end I reached home at 4 am. after a peaceful and uneventful flight.

It was my first time in Amsterdam. A friend said to me before my trip: "You are going to love the city!" and he was right. :) This time I was there on business, but I will definitely go back for a holiday, hopefully in the not too distant future. I took quite a bunch of photos and will post some of them and more about my time in Amsterdam later, but I guess I owe you all a recipe after having had such a long hiatus from blogging. This one I found in a lovely little book called "New Flavours of the Jewish Table" by Denise Phillips:

Challah bread

Makes 2

600 g flour
1 tablespoon dry yeast
2 teaspoons salt
1 egg
1 tablespoon honey
25 g raisins
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 apple, cut into small pieces
100 g vegetable oil
150 g warm water
olive oil for brushing
1 egg yolk, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
honey & cinnamon

1. Mix flour, yeast, salt, egg, 1 tablespoons honey, raisins and 2 teaspoons cinnamon in a large bowl.
2. Puré the apple using a mixer and add together with vegetable oil and warm water into the same bowl with the flour mixture.
3. Mix for a couple of minutes (if using a mixer or for about 10 minutes if you are doing the mixing by hand) until the batter is smooth and does not stick into to bowl anymore.
4. Remove the batter from the bowl. Brush the insides of the bowl with some olive oil.
5. Knead the batter lightly with your hands, then replace into the bowl, so that it gets a light olive oli coating.
6. Cover the bowl with cling-film and let the batter rise for ca. 30 minutes or until it has doubled in size.
7. Meanwhile warm the oven to 200 Centigrade and cover a baking sheet with baking paper.
8. Divide the batter into two and knead both parts into long logs. Fold each log from the middle and then twist them into a spiral shape. Brush both breads with egg yolk and sprinkle with some sesame seeds on top.
9. Bake for 30 minutes in 200 Centigrade or until the breads are golden brown.
10. Brush the baked breads with some honey and sprinkle some cinnamon on top.
11. Serve warm, if possible.

Confessions of the Periodic Cook

2008-11-11T20:53:00.009+02:00

Just a quick note to tell you, my blog friends, that all is well. I have been a lousy blogger this autumn, not posting once since July!! I have simply been concentrating on other things, mainly work and sports. :) We had the most important dance competition of the year last weekend. And preparing for that did take quite a lot of my "freetime". I am very, very happy to tell you that I and Mr. Dance Partner won our age group. :) :)

I have also read more books and less blogs, and to be honest I have hardly cooked much less baked anything for a long time! That is nothing new, however. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that I am a "periodic cook" :), sometimes I want to cook everything myself and from the beginning and then comes the time when I'm happy with buying everything ready-made. Well, Christmas is here soon and I think I just might be inspired to baking cookies or cakes soon!

I have also two trips abroad to look forward to. I'm soon going to spend some days in Amsterdam on a work-reladed study trip and a bit later I'll fly to Ljubljana in Slovenia for a short holiday.

Take care all!

Greetings,
Tiina

Paris in May 2008

2008-07-18T09:00:00.002+03:00

Time for the Paris post! :) I spent the last week of May in Paris with my Dad. It was a vacation, but a special one. We were there to watch the French Open Tennis Championships at Roland Garros. It was the second time for me, I was there also in 2007, and the first time for my Dad. It was also his first trip to Paris. We had a great time! Tennis was great! Paris was great! Weather not so :), but we did get 2-3 sunny days. Actually our first and last day there was really beautiful, most other days there were showers of rain. In addition to watching numerous tennis matches we also managed to see some sights: the Eiffel tower, the Notre Dame, the Triumphal Arc, the castle and gardens of Versailles and Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried.

And the breakfast buffee at the Hotel Eiffel Kennedy was just as good as last year and the service was as excellent! :)

1. Eiffel Tower
2. View from our hotelroom window
3. Sunny day in Versailles
4. Statue of Napoleon at Les Invalides
5. Napoleon's coat and hat at display in Les Invalides
6. A streetview (Pont de Bir-Hakem)

Salami Bread

2008-07-13T05:17:00.001+03:00

I love visiting bookstores, especially the Academic Bookstore in downtown Helsinki. When visiting the AB I usually head first to the English new releases, then browse through the rest of the fiction section. I might then continue to the next floor for history or the uppermost floor for cook-, travel- and artbooks, but almost always I end my visit walking through the magazine section to see if there is any intresting interior decorating or food magazines that I would like to buy. And more often than not I leave the store with a glossy magazine -and very often also with a book or two in my bag! :) There are plenty of different food magazines in number of languages in addition of the local Finnish and Swedish available in most Helsinki bookstores and even kiosks, so often it is quite hard to choose which one to buy. Lately I've really liked Cuisine et Vins de France. Great recipes -and it is in French! :) Now, let me tell you, I am not fluent in French. I have studied French a little on my own and would love to be able to speak the language, but the truth is that even if I might be able to say a few simple lines in French, I more often than not would not understand more than one or two words of any response, if even that. The strange thing is I am quite capable of reading -and understanding- many recipes written in French! With the help of other languages that I know better than French my reading comprehention skills are much better than my command of the spoken language. It's a bit irritating, truth to be told. Well, I guess it is also a good reason to return to Paris again and again... :)

The June-July edition of CVF included an intriguing recipe for a mortadella and herbs bread that I wanted to try. It was the usual story, however! The recipe (obviously) called for some mortadella (I did not have any), some rocket (nope, did not have any of that either), pine seeds (neither did I have those), parmesan (no, no parmesan in my fridge) and persil (well... you guessed it already). There were so many of the required ingredients missing that this called for a pause. A moment was taken, the insides of the fridge and the cupboards were examined and a decicion was made. Mortadella and herbs bread it was not going to be, but maybe a Spanish salami bread with olives and pumpkin seeds and...well, the only green I had was some ice lettuce, so that had to do. And guess what? It worked out beautifully! The bread was absolutely delicious! :) If you want to try my weird and wonderful "what ever there is in the fridge will go into this bread" version of the original recipe, here it is:

Salami bread

Recipe modified by myself from the original recipe "Cake aux herbes à la mortadelle" published in June-July issue of Cuisine et Vins de France

180 g flour
50 g Spanish salami slices
70 g something green:) (I used ice lettuce)
50 g pitted black olives
3 eggs
55 g cheese (I used a combination of cottage cheese and Rahmlaib)
1 dl olive oil
1 dl milk
1 sachet (11 g) dry yeast
25 g pumpkin seeds
20 g butter for the mould
a pinch of nutmeg
salt
pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Centigrade.
2. Cover a bread mould with two pieces of buttered baking paper. See the photo above.
3. Wash the salad and cut it with a sharp knife or with scissors into thin stripes. Cut the salami slices likewise.
Cut each olive into four. Cut the cheese into small pieces (well, not the cottage cheese, obviously :) that's fine as it is.)
4. In a large bowl combine the flour, yeast, cheese and olive oli. Add the eggs one by one. Then add the milk. When all these are mixed add the salami, lettuce, pumpkin seeds and olives. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Mix well.
5. Pour the batter into the papered mould.
6. Bake in the middle of the oven for about 40 minutes or until a toothpick pressed into the bread comes out clean.
7. Let cool before removing from the mould. You may also want to serve the bread from the mould as it will look quite nice that way.
8. Enjoy warm or cold.

Lemon Cake

2008-07-10T10:41:00.006+03:00

I've been eating lots and lots of fruit and berries lately: nectarines, bananas, apricots, honey melons and strawberries of course. (Hmm, somehow that sounds much better than telling you that I'd been eating lots and lots of chocolate! :)) Actually I'm quite proud to say that fruit and berries have been my chocolate these past weeks.

I have also been baking quite a lot using both berries and different fruit as incredients. Yesterday I came across these really beautiful lemons and absolutely wanted to bake something using them. I googled various lemon cake/pie/tart recipes. Lemon shaker pie looked really interesting, but I did not want to wait overnight to be able to bake my cake. I also loved Lemony French Cake recipe posted by "have cake, will travel!", but in the end I decided to use my own recipe. Maybe you remember the Sunshine Cake? This is the somewhat larger lemon version:

Lemon Cake

4 eggs
2 dl brown cane sugar
2 teaspoons vanillin sugar
200 g unsalted butter
2 dl sliced almonds or almond flour
4 dl wheat flour
1-2 tablespoons crated lemon zest
1,5-2 lemons peeled & sliced
2 tablespoons lemon juice or water
some breadcrumbs for the tin

1. Preheat the oven to 175 Centigrade.
2. In a mortar crush the almond slices into small crumbs. (You may also use a blender, or simply use almond flour.)
2. In a bowl beat the eggs until pale and frothy.
3. Add the sugars and continue beating.
4. Add the butter in little pieces and beat until dissolved into the egg-sugar mix.
5. Add the crushed almond slices, flour, lemon zest and lemon juice and mix.
6. Use a large cake tin with a central hole. Butter the tin and cover its insides with breadcrumbs.
7. Place thin, round slices of lemon all around that side of the tin that will be the outer side of the finished cake. The lemon slices will partly caramelize and partly form flowerlike decorative motives into the cake, plus they will add extra moisture and taste.
8. Pour the batter into the tin.
9. Bake in the middle of the oven in 175 C until a toothpick pressed into the cake comes out clean. (About 45 minutes.)
10. Let cool before removing from the tin.

Take notice that this cake is very lemony. :) I happen to like lemons. If you prefer a milder taste, use only 1 tablespoon of lemon zest and water instead of lemon juice. You may also consider leaving out the lemon slices. But if you, like I, like the taste of lemon, then this really is the cake to bake!

Nectarine Cobbler

2008-07-06T20:35:00.004+03:00

I bought some lovely, juicy nectarines a few days ago in order to make some kind of pie using them. However, they tasted so delicious that I ended up eating them all as such. On Saturday I bought some more and this time I came up with this very easy and quick to make cobbler recipe. Feel free to use more sugar, if you want to.

Nectarine Cobbler

4 nectarines cut into small pieces
2 dl water
1 dl liquid margarine or butter (or you might also try using olive oil) + some for buttering the mould
0,5 dl granulated sugar
2 dl wheat flour
5 table spoons hazelnut flour
1 tea spoon baking powder
1 egg

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Centigrade.
2. Mix all other ingredients but the nectarines in a bowl.
3. Pour the batter into a buttered pie mould or small baking dish.
4. Place the nectarine pieces on top.
5. Bake in the oven for about 55-60 minutes or until a knife pressed into the cobbler comes out clean.
6. Enjoy as such or with some vanilla sauce, ice cream or whipped cream.

Vanilla Ice Cream with Curd Cheese & Financiers

2008-06-30T22:34:00.011+03:00

It's been some months now since I bought my ice cream machine. I have had some moments when I would have liked to rename it "I scream machine" for the trouble I 've had when trying to experiment with some recipes of my own. :) Finally I've come to the conclusion that until my ice cream making skills are on a little bit higher level I just should stop experimenting and stick to recipes that someone else has already found good. And that is exactly what I did last weekend with surprisingly good results! :) I had been baking the whole day and it had been a nice and warm day, so the temperature in my kitchen was not the best for making ice cream, but ice cream I wanted to make! What to do? What to do? Well, I planted my "I scream machine" on the living room floor and let it churn away while I watched the fourth round Wimbledon match between France's Richard Gasquet and Britain's Andy Murray.

This recipe is from the little booklet (Philips ice cream recipe book) I got with my machine. I modified it very, very slightly. :)

Vanilla Ice Cream with Curd Cheese

350 g curd cheese/cottage cheese
2 dl milk
125 g castor sugar
2 dl whipping cream (the original recipe says 1,5 dl)
3 tea spoons vanillin sugar

1. Whip the cream together with the sugars.
2. In another bowl mix the milk with the curd cheese.
3. Add the milk-curd mixture with the whipped cream.
4. Churn in your ice cream machine following the manufacturer's instructions. (With my machine it took 40 minutes before the ice cream was ready.)
5. Enjoy!
The curd cheese makes this ice cream deliciously fresh! I served my ice cream with some "financiers au miel" that I baked following Clotilde Dusoulier's recipe. The recipe can be found in her Chocolate & Zucchini cook book. I used half almond half hazelnut flour in my financiers and made them muffin-sized. Don't they look pretty? :)

Daring Bakers' June Challenge: Danish Braid

2008-06-29T19:57:00.008+03:00

I know :), I have not been blogging at all this past month! I posted more actively during my trip to Paris, thanks to Blogger's new feature that allows one to schedule posts to appear in a future date ;), than later in June. Well, first I was busy with work and sports and lately I have been enjoying my summer holidays! :) But I promise to be a good girl and post some recipes also during this vacation. Plus I have some nice pictures I took in Paris that some of you might find interesting, so, I will also do a Paris post later.

Today, however, it is time for this month's Daring Bakers' challenge post. The recipe we were to bake was "Danish Braid" from Sherry Yard's "The Secrets of Baking". As I like baking "pulla" as we say here in Finland:) I liked this challenge a lot! The dough was a butter-laminated dough and we were given the possibility to either use the apple filling recipe provided or use some other filling that we had made from scratch. Even though the apple filling recipe looked really nice I opted for sliced, fresh strawberries that I bought from my favorite farmer's market. I think they were just the perfect filling for this braid! :)

Picks of the Month May 08

2008-05-31T09:56:00.002+03:00

This month I have especially enjoyed these posts:

1. Pioneer Woman's flowerpot desserts. What a fun and ingenious way to serve ice cream!

2. White on Rice Couple's tour of their garden. It's a brillant video and it stars the cutest four legged villan there is!! :) Plus the garden is lovely, too. :)

3. Kajal of Aaplemint's decadent Napoleons.

4. Heidi of 101 Cookbooks' Warm and nutty cinnamon quinoa looks so delicious!

5. Red Wine-Poached Rhubarb recipe featured on David Lebovitz's site.

Oh my, and I could go on... :) So many great recipes out there in the blogosphere! I better stop at these five though, otherwise this will not be "picks of the month" but "a history of Cinnamonda's surfing on the food sites in this month of May"! :)

Daring Bakers' May Challenge: Opera Cake

2008-05-28T09:00:00.002+03:00

This month's challenge was opera cake. The challenge was hosted by 4 DBers, namely co-foundereds Ivonne and Lis and two newer members Fran and Shea. They dedicated this month's challenge to Barbara of winosandfoodies.com who is the force behind A Taste of Yellow -blog event that supports the LiveSTRONG foundation started by Lance Armstrong.

The opera cake = a cake compiled of a joconde (=a cake layer), a syryp, a buttercream, a ganache and a glaze. And with the longest recipe I've ever seen!!
We were instructed to use light colours only and were given the option to leave out the ganache/mousse and the freedom to choose the shape of our cake and some of the flavorings. I ended up flavoring my syrup with cloudberry liqueur and the buttercream with lemon extract. I also left out the white chocolade mousse to save some time -and money. And I halved the recipe to make a smaller cake.

I did not have any particular problems when making this cake (other than my camera's battery dying after just two pictures of the finished cake & my not having any extra batteries charged at the time...), but I must confess that my choice of flavorings was maybe not very successful. The cloudberry liqueur was lost under the very powerful and v-e-r-y sweet taste of lemon in the buttercream. I am a person with a veritable sweet tooth, but that was almost too sweet for me. I ended up freezing half the cake in little pastry-sized pieces and when I defrosted the pieces they actually tasted better than the fresh cake and also the taste of lemon was less prominant. Hmmm...

I'm not sure if I will ever try this recipe again. I am not too fond of buttercream in general. I might bake the joconde again, though, as it was really easy to make and tasted delicious, but propably not the whole cake. I am, however, glad that I did this challenge. It was an interesting project, and it was rewarding to see that, yes, I did manage to do a good job with a rather complicated or at least multiphase recipe! :)

Tuna In Disguise

2008-05-24T11:10:00.001+03:00

I have been eating lots of salads again. They are so easy to make, refreshing and all in all they simply taste good! When tossing together a salad I usually follow my own "2 greens -rule". That means that as a base I use two different green salads, and more often than not one of the two is iceberg lettuce as I simply like it most! :) In additions to the 2 greens I almost always use either tomatoes or cucumber or both, some kind of cheese, nuts or seeds and only very rarely any salad dressing. This time I wanted a bit more fulfilling salad so I added some tuna, but this tuna was so well hidden behind a simple disguise of some spices that eventhough I knew I was eating a tuna salad my eyes and brain said "noooo, it's chicken"!

Tuna in Disguise Salad

Serves 2-3

2 green salads of your choice (=large bunch of both) washed and shredded by hand
100 g mozzarella pearls or mozzarella cut into small cubes
some cucumber cut into small cubes
pumpkin seeds (roast them if you want to, I was too hungry to do it :))
seedless green grapes, cut in two
a can of tuna
ground ginger and turmeric
olive and sesame oil

1. Pour some olive and sesame oli into a pan and add the ground ginger and turmeric. Mix.
2. Add the tuna and mix until the fish gets a beautiful yellow colour. Let cool.
3. While the tuna is cooling combine all the other ingredients in a salad bowl.
4. Add the tuna.
5. Enjoy, preferably with some rye bread.

You Are My Sunshine...Cake!

2008-05-20T08:44:00.002+03:00

If blood oranges are my favorite fruit, then the "original" version comes a close second. But...if only one did not have to peel them! :)

Well, this recipe of mine I am about to share with you does include peeled oranges, but you can peel them "roughly" with a knife removing also the outer skin of the sections. It will be a juicy business, so to speak, but the end result will be delicious, I promise!:)

Sunshine Cake

2 eggs
2 dl granulated sugar
100 g unsalted butter
1,5 dl almond flour
1,5 dl wheat flour
1 tablespoon grated orangepeel
1,5-2 oranges peeled and sliced into thin slices
some more butter for buttering the cake tin & some breadcrumbs for the tin

1. Preheat the oven to 175 Centigrade
2.In a medium bowl beat the eggs until pale and frothy.
3. Add the sugar and continue beating.
4. Add the butter in little pieces and beat until dissolved into the egg-sugar mix.
5. Add the flours and orange peel and mix.
6. Use a cake tin with a central hole. Butter the tin and cover its inside with breadcrumbs.
7. Place thin, round slices of orange all around that side of the tin that will be the outer side of the finished cake. The orange slices will partly caramelize and partly form flowerlike decorative motives into the cake, plus they will add extra moisture and taste.
8. Pour the batter into the tin.
9. Bake in the middle of the oven in 175 C until a toothpick pressed into the cake comes out clean. In my oven it took about 40 minutes, but my oven is known to be a bit slow. :)

Last Year in Paris: Versailles

2008-05-18T10:23:00.008+03:00

In the not too distant future, I will be flying to Paris for a week's holiday. I was there also in 2007. In anticipation of my upcoming trip, I browsed the pictures I took there last year and thought to share with you some I took when visiting Versailles.
I hope you will enjoy these photographs!

The palace is magnificant, but I simply love the gardens and park! I was lucky enough to visit on a Sunday afternoon when music played in the gardens and the numerous fountains were all working!

Links:
The official site of the Palace of Versailles
Louis XIV (The sun king)
Marie Antoinette
The French Revolution
Napoleon

Domino Trifle

2008-05-06T21:55:00.010+03:00

My favorite cookies are called "Domino". Domino cookies have been sold in Finland since 1953. They are cocoa cookies with a filling. The original flavour for the filling is vanilla, but nowadays there are also many other flavours. I like mint filling the best, vanilla being a close runner-up. :)
I had been thinking of making somekind of a dessert using Domino cookies for a while, but Pioneer Woman's ingenious flower pot desserts, where she used crushed Oreo cookies as "dirt", made me want to crush some cookies, too. :) The result: Domino Trifle!!

This is a very easy dessert to make, or let's say, I made a very easy version of it. If you want to make your own fruit soup to use in your trifle, it will be a bit more difficult. And if you opt for the very, very easy version you crush the cookies with the filling and use store bought whipped cream. As I did not measure any of the incredients I used, all the measurements, except the amount of cream, are only approximate.

Domino Trifle

Serves 3

100 g Domino cookies with vanilla filling (you can use Oreos or other cookies with filling as well)
2-3 dl peach-passion fruit soup (or other fruit soup of your choice)
2 dl whipping cream
vanilla sugar to taste

1. Open the cookies and scrape out the filling with a spoon. Put the filling aside for later.
2. Put the fillingless cookies into the food processor and pulse a few times until they are of a fine sandlike consistency.
3. In a bowl combine the whipping cream, a pinch of vanilla sugar and the filling you removed from the cookies. Do not worry if the filling is in clumbs. It will even out just fine when you whip the cream. Whip the cream until hard (not butter, though;))
4. Use vine glasses or other nice glasses that show off the layers of the trifle for this dessert. Put about a third of the crushed cookies into the bottom of each glass. Save about 1/2 teaspoon chrushed cookies for decoration.
5. Carefully pour some fruit soup on top of the crushed cookies.
6. Fill the classes to the brim with whipped cream. Decorate with a pinch of cookie crumbs.
7. En- joy!!

Fluffy Puffins and Sauce from the Past

2008-05-02T21:36:00.021+03:00

Fluffy puf... excuse moi, what?? Let me explain. It all started with me wanting to bake some muffins. I browsed my lovely, little Le Cordon Bleu muffin book for inspiration and chose a recipe for pear-pecan muffins to bake, only I did not have any pecans and there was just one lonely pear in my fridge... I did not even have any unsalted butter. Actually I did not have any butter at all! What shall a girl do in situations like this? Improvise, of course! :)

I did have some apples, so I combined them with the pear. I chose to ignore the fact that I did not have any pecans. I did have 50 g less fruit than the original recipe asked for, so I thought omitting the pecans would not change the consistancy of the batter too much. I replaced the unsalted butter with olive oil, extra virgin in fact. A bit fancy for cooking, but that was all I got. And then I decided to use marshmallow fluff in my muffins.
Marshmallow fluff. Ahaa, you say, that is the fluffy part, but what on earth are the puffins?? The puffins are the solution to the story of my muffin baking life! I own a very nice muffin pan, where I can bake 12 ordinary sized muffins at one go. Ordinary sized, I say, not huge, not tiny, but ordinary. This time the original recipe was for 6 large (2,5dl) muffins. I thought that I could make maybe 8 and surely not more that 12 ca. 2 dl muffins with that, but no! There is always, well almost always, too much batter when I use a recipe that should make 6 big ones. What to do with that extra batter? Well, I baked puffins! That is, I baked muffins in small ramekins usually used to make puddings, thus "puffins".:)

See how the puffins are bathing in the warmth of my oven. :)

I wanted to serve the puffins with a nice sauce and found just the right one in a nice, little cookbook of historical recipes published by the town museum of Kankaanpää here in Finland. The cinnamon sauce should be used with a cheesecake, but it worked perfectly with my puffins. The original recipe is from the 16th or 17th century.

Pear and Apple Muffins with Marshmallow Fluff

(Original recipe from "Le Cordon Bleu muffinit". Slightly modified by myself.)

450 g wheat flour
3,5 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
0,5 teaspoon nutmeg
115 g brown (or granulated) sugar
350 g pealed fruit (apples and pears) cut into small pieces
2 eggs
3,75 dl milk (or water)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla
125 unsalted butter (or olive oil)
some marshmallow fluff (=1 tablespoon per muffin)

1. Preheat the oven to 210 C.
2. Butter your muffin pan, or do as I do, instead of buttering the pan I use paper muffin cups.
3. Combine the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg in a large bowl. Add the sugar, apple and pear cubes.
4. In another bowl beat together the milk or water, eggs and vanilla. Mix with the dry ingredients. Add the olive oil or butter. Mix with a spoon. Do not overmix.
5. Spoon some batter into the muffin pan. Add about a tablespoon of marshmallow fluff into each muffin. Cover with more batter.
6. Bake for 25-30 minutes.

If baking puffins instead of muffins follow the recipe above, but use buttered and bread crumb covered ramekins to bake the puffins and add some dark chocolate with the fluff. Cover with more batter.
Cinnamon Sauce
(Original recipe from "Makuja menneisyydestä. Ruokia ja ruoanvalmistusta 1200-luvulta 1700-luvulle" ed. Leena Sivula)

2 dl cream
1 dl sugar
1 rkl rose water
1 teaspoon cinnamon

1. Put all the ingredients into a small pan.
2. Let simmer until the sauce thickens.

Helsinki: the Senate Square

2008-04-21T20:51:00.021+03:00

No, I have neither fallen off the earth nor been to Paris. I had, however, a very nasty case of flu :(, which means there has not been much cooking or baking been done in my kitchen lately...

Before the flu I spent some time one sunny Saturday evening photographing the buildings around the Senate Square in the city centre. I hope you enjoy this "virtual visit" to my home city. If you want to learn more about the architecture of these buildings or the history of the square, you will find some useful links at the end of my post.

The picture above shows the most impressive of the neoclassical buildings around the Senate Square: The Lutheran Cathedral (built 1830-1852). Below is another view of the cathedral. The statue of Alexander II Tzar of Russia and Grand Duke of Finland from 1855 to 1881 stands in the center of the square.

Opposite the Lutheran Cathedral on the other side of the square there is a fine row of beautiful buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries including the blue Sederholm's house, an old merchant's house, in the left corner of the picture below. It is the oldest stone building in Helsinki and was built in 1757. It was once the finest privately owned house in Helsinki. Today the building holds Helsinki City Museum's special exhibitions.
On the other end of the picture in the yellow building is one of my favorite cafés: Café Engel. The café is named after architect C. L. Engel who designed many of the buildings around the square (including the cathedral).

Left from the cathedral there is the old senate building, now the Government Palace. It, too, was designed by Engel.

Opposite the Government Palace is the University of Helsinki main building and next to it the beautiful National Library, both of which were designed by Engel.

Links:
Chronology of Finnish History on Virtual Finland
History and architecture of the National Library
Panorama tour of the Senate Square
Another panorama of the Senate Square
Main building of the University of Helsinki
Helsinki Cathedral from Wikipedia

Daring Bakers' March Challenge: Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake

2008-03-30T15:13:00.012+03:00

I've joined the Daring Bakers! This month's challenge was hosted by Morven from Food Art and Random Thoughts and she chose Dorie Greenspan's perfect party cake recipe for us to bake. The recipe is published in Dorie Greenspan's book Baking: From My Home to Yours.

Even though I'm someone who likes challenges (also in other things than baking :)) I was a bit worried before I knew what the March challenge was, as some of the previous recipies chosen were rather difficult. So, when I realised we were to bake a layered cake, I was happily surprised. This was something I could do without too much trouble, and that was good, as I did not have days to dedicate for this project. My dance partner also had his birthday this month, so I got a good reason to bake a cake. It was going to be a birthday cake for Mr Dance Partner! :)

The original recipe is for a layered citron flavored cake with a buttercream and raspberry filling and a buttercream and coconut flake coating. We were given the choice of using other fillings and could also substitute the buttercream with whipped cream. I thought that citron flovoured buttercream with a citron flavoured cake would be a bit too much and opted for the whipped cream version. I used 5 dl:s whipping cream in this cake. My filling of choice was whipped cream and strawberry jam and I coated the cake with more whipped cream. This was a fun project, and the end-product tasted pret-ty good! :)

Here are some more pictures of the cake:

Picks of the Month March 08

2008-03-30T12:24:00.007+03:00

Good heavens! Is it again time for Picks of the Month? The month of March is nearing its end and spring is (knock on wood ;)) finally approaching even in Helsinki. By looking at this picture taken from my French balcony downwards yesterday, you might have some doubt about the start of spring, but I am optimistic. :) Temperatures should climb up to about +10 C during the coming week...

This month I have especially liked these posts:

1. Rosa's pictures from the Salève. I've been to Geneva once and I love the mountains. I would love to go for a hike on the Salève!

2. Kajal's lovely photos of iced hibiscus tea really made me thirsty and thinking of warm summer evenings!

3. White on rice couple continued to inspire me with their wonderful recipes, and they finally revealed their faces in a very nice video!

4. Annemarie posted a lovely recipe for blood orange sorbet. And the recipe included the use of rosewater! I had just bought a bottle of rosewater some days before and was wondering what to do with it! I served my sorbet with some whipped cream. It was delicious! :)

5. Maybelles mom came up with a vegan version of my orange rice. I'm so happy little Maybelle liked the vegan orange rice!

I'm also very honoured that Anya from Godful Food awarded my blog with this award:
Thank you so much, Anya!

Now I still have to decide whom to pass this award forward to! It will be hard! There are so many wonderful blogs out there in the blogosphere!

Chicken Legs and Vegetables the Simplest Way Possible :)

2008-03-28T21:16:00.009+02:00

If you have been reading my blog entries, you might have notices that the words simple and easy are mentioned quite often when I write about my favorite recipes. That is the way I like to cook. Even though sometimes it is fun to try complicated recipes, for everyday use simple and easy are, I believe, the way to go. Dividing my days between work, dance practise and tennis I do not have much time to dedicate for cooking during the weekdays, so when I do, I prefer to cook something that is easy to make. But, easy is not synonymous with bland or uninteresting. Little things can turn an ordinary dish into something special.

I'm sure most of you have a favorite recipe for chicken legs. This is mine, and it really should be called "chicken legs 101" :), as it really is one of my simple and easy recipes! Be aware of getting your fingertips yellow, though! ;)

Chicken Legs and Vegetables

Serves 3

2 small yellow onions
1 small shallot
1 carrot
2 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon clove powder
1 teaspoon ginger powder
1 teaspoon coriander powder
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder
5 tablespoons sunflower oil
12 slices of bacon
6 chicken legs

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Centigrade.
2. Cut the shallot, carrot and yellow onions into medium and the cloves of garlic into small pieces.
3. Pour the sunflower oil into a soup plate. Add all the spices. Mix with a spoon.
4. Dip the chicken legs one by one into the spicy mixture. If you want, you may also let them marinate in it for a while, but that is not absolutely necessary.
5. Cut three good-sized squares from foil.
6. Wrap two slices of bacon around each chicken leg.
7. Put some yellow onion, shallot, garlic and carrot pieces in the middle of each foil square. Add two chicken legs per square. Close the foil rather tightly around the chicken legs and vegetables.
8. Cook in the oven in 200 degrees Centigrade for about 1 hour. Mmmm! Delicious!!

The Case of the Red Grapefruit

2008-03-22T21:21:00.011+02:00

A couple of weeks ago I borrowed some cookbooks from the library. Among them was "Dining with Sherlock Holmes -A Baker Street Cookbook" by Julia Carlson Rosenblatt and Frederic H. Sonnenschmidt.
In the book there are recipies for dishes mentioned in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books as well as recipes for dishes that might have been enjoyed by the inimitable Mr. Holmes and his devoted companion Dr. Watson. Browsing the book I found many interesting recipes. While Stake Tonga (made of raw beaf) was something I cared neitner to make nor taste Broiled Grapefruit with Ginger sounded both interesting and easy to make, and I just happened to have some lovely red grapefruit waiting in the fridge. So, without any mystery, this is the Case of the Red Grapefruit. :)

Red Grapefruit with Ginger

(Original recipe "Broiled Grapefruit with Gingner" from "Dining with Sherlock Holmes -A Baker Street Cookbook" by Julia Carlson Rosenblatt and Frederic H. Sonnenschmidt, adapted a little by myself)

Serves 1 or 2 depending whether you serve 1 or 2 halves of grapefruit per person

1 red grapefruit
2 tablespoons brown cane sugar
1 teaspoon ginger powder
2 teaspoons runny (orange blossom) honey
some cocoa powder and dark chocolate for decoration

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
2. Cut the grapefruit in half. Remove the seeds and with the help of a grapefruit spoon of a knife section the fruit, but do not remove the sections from their half.
3. In a small bowl or a cup combine the sugar and ginger powder.
4. Divide the sugar-ginger mixture between the two grapefruit halves by sprinkling it over the sectioned flesh of the fruit.
5. Add 1 teaspoon of honey over each half.
6. Lift the grapefruit halves into a baking pan, and put the pan in the 200 C oven for circa 5 minutes.
7. Let the grapefruit halves cool for a moment, so that you will not burn your fingers when moving them!
8. Serve decorated with some cocoa powder and pieces of dark chocolate.

Happy Easter everyone!
Or as we say here Hyvää Pääsiäistä!

An Egg Is Just an Egg or Is It?

2008-03-15T15:14:00.009+02:00

Easter is only some days away, and food stores and various supermarkets are bursting with all kinds of Easter candy: little chocolate bunnies, huge chocolate bunnies, middle-sized chocolate bunnies, and tinsel covered chocolate eggs in all sizes with plastic trinkets or toys inside. I'm sorry to say, but I think most of those eggs, bunnies or whatever are made of second-rate chocolate and really are not worth the money. I hardly ever buy any of those Easter "treats". But look at these beauties in the picture above! These I could eat as many as... well, actually I couldn't, because they are the real thing and one (okay two :)) are all you need to be blissfully, perfectly full of some of the best nougat there is!

They look so innocent and humble, don't they? Well, do not let their simple exterior fool you! These are Mignon eggs, produced by Fazer. Karl Fazer brought the idea for these eggs to Finland in 1896 from Germany, and Mignon eggs have been part of Easter in Finland ever since. During the reign of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who until 1917 was also the Grand Duke of Finland, mignon eggs were also given to the Tsar and his family during Easter time. Okay, enough of the history part, could not help myself, as I find the history behind the Mignons quite interesting, and I am, might as well admit it, a history buff! :) Actually I have an MA in history.:)

Back to the eggs, then. Although, talking about eggs and the imperial Russia, we could also spend some time talking about the other eggs... or are you all already at sleep? You are? O-kay then. Cho-co-la-te! CHO-CO-LA-TE! CHO-CO-LA-TE EGGS, ANYONE????? Sorry, did I wake you up?

Actually, as I already mentioned, the Mignons are filled with nougat. An ordinary hen's egg is emptied, and the shell is filled with nougat and sealed with a sugar "cork". The white ones a smaller and are sold most everywhere here already well before Easter. The brown ones are the same size as regular eggs and they are sold only at Fazer's Café during the Easter season.

Mingons are so good they make even my troll collection smile! :) These eggs are my ultimate Easter treat, what's yours?

Orange Rice

2008-03-09T11:47:00.011+02:00

Orange Rice, appelsiiniriisi in Finnish, is something my mother used to make for me when I was little, so it brings back nostalgic memories of family dinners on lazy Sunday afternoons, but it never really has lost its magic for me. It still is one of my favorite desserts. And it is sooo easy to make!

As my mother always made her appelsiiniriisi without any sugar I grew accustomed to the more sour version of this dessert. Feel free to add some sugar, though.

Orange Rice

2 dl whipping cream
4 dl white rice, cooked and cooled (preferably refridgerator cool)
3 juicy oranges
(some sugar)

1. Whip the cream until it is quite stiff.
2. Peel the oranges so that you also remove most of the skin from the backs of the sections.

3. Using a sharp knive cut the peeled oranges into small pieces. Remove any excess juice. Add the pieces of orange into the bowl containing the whipped cream.

4. Take the cooked rice from the refridgerator. Mesure 4 dl:s and add into the bowl. Add sugar if you are using any.
Mix properly with a spoon.

5. Enjoy!

Little Chocolate Puddings

2008-03-02T17:35:00.018+02:00

It was my intention to post a lunch recipe today, a simple, sombre, very easy-to-make tofu lunch recipe to be exact, but... somehow I ended up spending yesterday afternoon browsing cookbooks with lots of recipes that use chocolate, and... then I just absolutely had to try one of those recipes... and... Yes, I know, Tiina and chocolate...more self-discipline might be good! ;)

Anyways, to let you all join in the chocolately fun, out it was with the lunch recipe and in it was with a recipe for extra lovely, super rich, wonderfully moist... ok, now I ran out of superlatives ;)... chocolate puddings!

The recipe I used is from a lovely book "Maittavat suklaaherkut" by Parragon Books. It is one of the cheapest cookbooks I've ever bought and more than worth every one of those few euros it cost me!

The original recipe is for 6, but I halved the amount of every incredient, and as I used 2,5 dl ramekins, there was just the right amount of batter for 2 puddings.

Little Chocolate Puddings

These are the original amounts of ingredients, so if you are using 2,5 dl ramekins, you should end up with 4 puddings. If using smaller ca. 2 dl ramekins, you should get 6 puddings.

125 g soft (unsalted) butter
150 g brown sugar
3 eggs
a pinch of salt
25 g cocoa powder
125 g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
25 g dark chocolate
75 g white chocolate

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Centigrade.
2. Cut the chocolate into small pieces.
3. Butter your ramekins slightly.
4. Using an electric mixer mix the butter and sugar properly.
5. Add the eggs into the sugar-butter mixture one by one. After each addition beat the mixture well (I mixed for 2,5 minutes after each egg.).
6. Using a spoon mix the salt, flour, baking powder and cocoa powder in a bowl. Add the pieces of chocolate and mix again.
7. Divide the batter between the ramekins.
8. Cut a square of foil for each ramekin and butter the squares. Use the buttered foil squares as lids for the ramekins. Try to make the lids as tight as possible by pressing their edges around the ramekins.
9. Boil some water in a pan.
10. Set the covered ramekins into a deep baking pan and add boiling water around them. The water should reach half way up the sides of the ramekins.
11. Bake in 180 C for 50 minutes or until a tooth pick pressed into a pudding comes out clean.
12. Take the puddings from the oven and let cool a little before removing them from the ramekins.
13. Serve warm, preferably with cold custard or ice cream.

If you are saving some of the puddings for the next day, let them stay in the ramekins and only remove them before serving. Rewarm the puddings in the microwave.

I served my puddings with...hmm, let's call it my hazelnut-chocolate custard from the freezer. ;) Actually it was something that later became the very first succesfull ice cream I've ever made!! :) :) :) I'll tell you more about that later, but the thing was that when my puddings were ready to be served, the ice cream that I hoped to serve with them was still more of a custard than an ice cream and I was too impatient to wait, so I just spooned some of the "ice-cream-in-progress" on top of my puddings!

Picks of the Month Feb. 08

2008-02-29T20:06:00.013+02:00

Leap day. According to folk tradition in Finland, as in many other places, this is the day when women may propose marriage to men. If the man refuses, he is supposed to buy the woman material for a skirt. So, this morning when I sat in the metro on my way to work the female metro driver made an announcement to remind all the women onboard not to forget to propose to someone today, as all men are surely not carrying some skirt material with them! ;)

In case you want to learn more about leap day/year here's a few useful links:

Information on leap year on timeanddate.com
Leap year traditions on About.com:Marriage
Wikipedia article on leap year

Ok, well, back to business then. :) Not only is today the leap day, it is also the last day of February (what a surprise! ;)) and that means time for Cinnamonda's Picks of the Month no 2.

My favorite posts around the blogosphere this past month were in no particular order:

1. Kate/Kajal from Aapplemint started February with a very interesting post on coffee in Ethiopia. Her photographs are just great, aren't they?

2. Annemarie from Ambrosia and Nectar posted a very nice recipe for a rhubarb crumble cake. Rhubarb being one of my favorite ingredients I just had to try the recipe. Luckily I had just enough rhubarb left in the freezer for one cake, as it is still some time before rhubarb season starts in Finland.
I had to improvise a little, as I did not have all the incredients mentioned in the recipe and my large cake tin was in the dish washer, but the cake turned out ok. Very tasty actually! :)

3. This month I really fell in love with the curried egg salad recipe by Heidi from 101 Cookbooks. This salad is absolutely fabulous! So easy to make, so tasty! So good that I had eaten it all before I remembered that I might have taken some pictures of my rendition of it... Well, I will definitely be making this salad many times in the future.

4. Pascale Weeks from C'est moi qui l'ai fait posted a very informative video on how to make petits pots de crèmes au chocolate. Plus I learned a few new words of French listening to her instructions. :)

5. Anya from Godful Food was kind enough to share with us food bloggers her grandmother's pancake recipe. If you want to make real Russian pancakes, this is the recipe for you!

Three Fruit Spaghetti

2008-02-24T16:38:00.007+02:00

I've been leafing through Nigel Slater's wonderful, wonderful book "The Kitchen Diaries" lately. The book is so full of recipes I would like to try that I don't know where to start, but in additiond to the recipes, what really got me hooked, was the very first lines of the introduction (The Kitchen Diaries, p. vii):

"Right food, right place, right time... this is the best recipe of all."

Could it be said any better? No, it couldn't. That kind of sums everything up. That is the motto I want to live by. That is the motto I want to keep in mind every time I cook anything. Right food, right place, right time. An elaborate meal or a quick snack, good, red Bordeaux or water from the tap, 500 ml of Ben & Jerry's Phish Food eaten straight from the container or a fruit salad composed of homegrown, organic fruit. There is the time and place for everything. Although, in my case, it is not always the most obvious time and place...

This should be the heart of winter (at least according to the calender, if not weatherwise just now) and shouldn't I be craving for hearty, fullfilling meals, red meat, potatoes, lovely, creamy soups, warm chocolately pies and tarts with heaps of whipped cream on top? Ok, I'm ALWAYS craving for warm chocolately pies and tarts, but my point is, what I really wanted to cook the other day, was, once again, something really summery, well suited for a lunch eaten outside in the sun on a lovely July afternoon when the temperature is nearer to +25 or even +30 C than zero. Hmm, maybe I'm just really looking forward to summer...

Three Fruit Spaghetti

Serves 2-3

170 g spaghetti of your choice
1 red apple
1 orange
1 ripe avocado
100 g ricotta
a big handful of thai basil
a pinch of salt
ground pepper
some olive oil

1. Cook the pasta in salty water.
2. While the pasta is cooking peel the orange and avocado, and cut them into small cubes. Don't peel the apple, just wash it properly and cut into small cubes. Shred the thai basil leaves with your fingers.
3. When the pasta is ready (don't overcook it!) drain it and set into a large bowl.
4. Sprinkle the pasta with some olive oil. Add the fruit cubes, the basil and the ricotta. Mix well.
5. Season with ground pepper.
6. Serve immediately.

The three fruit pasta is best served at once as the idea is to only cook the pasta and add fresh fruit. I would recommend to eat any leftovers cold, as you will not necessarily want to eat your pasta with cooked apples the next day! ;)

Coconut and Almond Cookies

2008-02-22T20:44:00.006+02:00

Well folks, to celebrate just because it's Friday and today was such a nice, sunny day and weekend with all its promises of lovely relaxation...or hmm, in my case work on Saturday:) ... looms ahead, let's bake some cookies! This is my slightly altered version of a super easy recipe from ICA Provkök's cookbook "Seitsemän sortin leivonnaiset" that I have mentioned before here.

Anyone interested in knowing what some basic ingredients used in this recipe are called in Finnish?

Ok, here comes:

coconut = kookospähkinä
almond = manteli
sugar = sokeri
wheat flour = vehnäjauho

And in case you are not familiar with the letter ä, it is pronounced like the a in "that" or "cat". And any two identical vowels one after the other make a loooong sound. :)

Coconut and Almond Cookies

Pre-heat the oven to 175 C

For 1 full baking sheet of cookies you will need:

50 g unsalted butter
1 dl granulated sugar
1 tablespoon light-coloured syrup (I used my favorite = Amaretto syrup)
1/3 dl cream
1 dl coconut flakes
1 dl almond flakes
1/2 dl wheat flour

1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan and let it cool a little.
2. Mix all other incredients in a bowl. Add melted butter. Mix with a spoon until smooth.
3. With a teaspoon spoon little heaps of batter onto a greaseproof paper covered baking sheet.
4. Bake for about 10 minutes or until the edges of the cookies are nicely brown.
5. Let the cookies cool before moving them from the baking sheet. The cookies may still have soft centers when you take them from the oven. That is ok. They harden as they cool down.

If you want to make your cookies a little more special, dip them half way to melted chocolate. Let dry before eating.

Have a lovely weekend!

Tagged For The Very First Time!

2008-02-21T22:03:00.007+02:00

White on rice couple from California have a truly wonderful blog, and not only they, but their dogs, too! I'm honoured to have White on rice couple as regular visitors to my blog and now they have challenged me to share 5 facts about myself. I'm still new to blogging and this is the first time ever that I've been tagged! Very exciting! :)

So, here goes...

Five facts about myself:

1. I'm a lefty. :)

2. I am passionate about two sports:
dancesport and tennis

3. I am very partial to chocolate!

4. I own all too many books.

5. I also own the complete 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. ;)

To share in this fun, I'm tagging 5 fellow bloggers whose blogs I enjoy very much. Actually, I would have liked to tag more than 5, but some of my other favorite blogs have already answered this meme quite recently, so I will not be bothering :) them with this now.

And the rules are...

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself.
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

1. Godful Food = Anya from Moscow, Russia

2. Ambrosia and Nectar = Annemarie from London

3. Aapplemint = Kate/Kajal from Ghana

4. Rubber Slippers in Italy = Rowena from the province of Lecco in Italy

5. Anne's Food = Anne from Stockholm, Sweden

I hope these fab 5 will have time to participate!

Buckthorn Smoothie

2008-02-19T22:16:00.005+02:00

Sometimes something goes so wrong that it goes right! I have been wanting to try and make ice cream for a long time. The thing is I don't have an ice cream machine, but I know it is not necessary to have one in order to make ice cream. I was, also, well aware that making ice cream without a machine would be a long process and mean quite a lot of churning. What I did not take into account was that my freezer might not be able to freeze my ice cream-to-be!! Or, I don't know, maybe the milk I used was the wrong kind, or maybe I just was not patient enough. Anyways, after 1 hour the mixture had thickened a little, but no freezing in sight. After 2 hours, no more freezing. After 3 hours, nada. After... ok, the mixture smelled really nice, and it tasted really good, and...I gave up. It was not going to freeze, but I most surely wanted to eat it! It was not ice cream, but it was one extra silky and rich buckthorn smoothie worthy of a king...or an emperor!;)

Buckthorn Smoothie

Makes 1 big or 2 small smoothies

2 dl organic milk
2 dl organic cream
100 g (or less) granulated sugar
150 g buckthorn jam

1. Mix all the ingredients. Reduce the amount of sugar considerably, if the jam you are using is very sweet.
2. Freeze for a while. (Not for hours, 1/2-1 hour will probably be enough.)
3. Mix again.
4. Pour into a tall glass/two smaller glasses and enjoy right away.

Chicken Filets with Honey and Cream

2008-02-17T21:02:00.019+02:00

Okay, maybe I got a bit carried away when cooking my lunch today! :) Not only did I use cream and honey, I also included saffron and pomegranate seeds into my menu. Well, it's Sunday, it was cold outside, and a girl really got to pamper herself with an extra nice lunch sometimes! Plus I bought some plane tickets today, so I was celebrating a little. :) A clue to where the tickets will take me follows at the end of this post...

Chicken Filets with Honey and Cream

Serves 2

2 chicken filets
3-4 tablespoons honey
3-4 tablespoons flat leaved parsley, chopped
2 dl (low fat) cooking cream
2 tablespoons sunflower oil

1. Smear the chicken filets with honey, lots of it. Add some chopped parsley on the filets.
2. In a large saucepan warm the oil. Add some chopped parsley.
3. Add the filets into the saucepan. Fry for a couple of minutes on both sides.
4. Add the cream.

5. Lower the heat and let simmer under an almost closed lid for a while.
6. Enjoy with saffron rice.

Saffron Rice

Serves 2

2 dl cooked basmati rice (you will not need quite this much for the hearts, but save the rest for later)
2-3 tablespoons Greek yoghurt
some threads of saffron
2 teaspoons water
You will also need 1 heart shaped cookie cutter

1. Add the water into a small bowl.
2. Crush the saffron threads with your fingertips and mix with water.
3. Add the yoghurt, and mix with a spoon.
4. When placing the rice on a plate, use a heart shaped cookie cutter as a mould. With a teaspoon fill the mould with the saffron rice. Remove the cookie cutter carefully.

Pomegranate Jus

1 teaspoon unsalted butter
juice and seeds of half a pomegranate
2-3 teaspoons granulated sugar

1. In a small saucepan melt the butter.
2. Add 2-3 teaspoons of sugar and mix.
3. Add the pomegranate seeds & juice.
4. Let simmer for a while.
5. Use to decorate the rice hearts.

Foodclub Meeting February 9th

2008-02-16T22:27:00.020+02:00

I belong to a foodclub. The members of the club are myself and three of my friends. Once in every six weeks or so we gather together to cook and eat a meal. In December I played the host, the theme was French cuisine, and we managed to cook duck filets with raspberry sauce in my small kitchen and with my grill-less oven. It was a challenge, but the end result was delicious!:)
Last weekend three of us gathered at Merja's house to cook some Indian food. The unwritten rules of the club are that the host chooses a theme and the recipes. The others will be told the theme in advance, but the recipes will be revealed only at the meeting.
This was the menu Merja had chosen for us to cook:

Red Lentil and Carrot Soup
Chicken in Spiced Coconut
Aromatic Pilau
Mixed Vegetable Bhaji
Chocolate Squares

I was put in charge (actually I volunteered :)) of the (not very Indian) dessert department, while Merja and Mirja started with the soup. Both the soup and the dessert were prepared without any problems, and in no time a large baking pan full of chocolately goodness was in the fridge to cool down and lovely, spicey fumes were rising from the soup pot. At this point we all were already so hungry that we decided on eating the soup right away and only then continue making the main course!

Here you can see what the soup looked like:

After strenghtening ourselves with this lovely, golden soup we were ready to cook the rest of our menu. Merja prepared the pilau, while Mirja worked on the mixed vegetable bhaji, and I with the chicken. Except for some spice related mishaps :) (No, it was not I toucing my face after slicing some chillies this time! I did slice some chillies, though, but wore plastic bags in my hands just to be extra careful! :)) everything went really well.

In this picture Mirja is stirring the chicken:

Merja's rendition of aromatic pilau:

The mixed vegetable bhaji:

The whole main course:

I liked all the dishes we cooked and really fell in love with the taste of coriander once again! But we still had the dessert to taste. I have already written about our history with chocolate or mocca squares in my Valentine's Day post, so I will just say that, oh boy, oh boy, wasn't that an extra rich chocolate dessert! :)

Thanks Merja for choosing a lovely menu for us to cook! And for Merja and Mirja both for a lovely evening! Next meeting is scheduled for April, and the theme will be Spain! Olé!

Happy Valentine's Day!

2008-02-14T00:03:00.009+02:00

Happy Valentine's Day everyone! On a day celebrating love and friendship, what would be better than serving your loved ones some extra chocolately, extra spongy -and extra easy-to-make -chocolate cake? This is a recipe I and my friends grew up with. We all ate "mocca squares" or "chocolate square" as they were called, when we were young teens, and most of us also baked them. They were probably one of the first things I ever baked in my life.

I and two friends Merja and Mirja had a foodclub meeting (more about that later :)) last Saturday at Merja's, and she had chosen "chocolate squares" as a dessert. Yours truly was put in charge of making the dessert and it was such a pleasurable job to do that I repeated the process at home the next day!:) I must admit the delicious taste of the "squares" had someting to do with it! The recipe I used at Merja's was one she had clipped out off some magazine. At home I modified the recipe very slightly to bake this chocolate cake:

Chocolate Cake

For the cake you'll need:

3 eggs
2,5 dl sugar
4,5 dl wheat flour
3 tablespoons cocoa powder (I used Green & Black's organic cocoa)
3 teaspoons baking powder
3 teaspoons vanilla sugar (you may also use vanillin sugar)
1,5 dl water (you may also use milk)
150 g liquid vegetable oli product for baking (or melted margarin)

For the frosting:

100 g liquid vegetable oli product for baking (or melted margarin)
3 tablespoons cocoa powder (I used Green & Black's organic cocoa)
3 teaspoons vanilla sugar (you may also use vanillin sugar)
2 tablespoons Amaretto syrup
250 g confectioners' sugar

1. Mix the eggs and sugar in a bowl with an electric mixer.
2. In another bowl mix the dry ingredients.
3. Add the dry ingredients into the eggs and sugar mix. Mix properly. Add the liquid vegetable oli product (or melted margarin) and mix.
4. Pour the batter into a greaseproof paper covered baking pan with high sides (circa 20 x 25 x 5 cm) or use a cake tin with a removable bottom.
5. Bake in 200 C for approximately 15 minutes.
6. Let cool.

7. To make the frosting mix all the ingredients into a smooth paste. Spread on top and over the sides of the cake.
8. Set into the fridge overnight to let the frosting settle.

This cake is very, very rich, so eat cautiously! :) For a nice variation slice a peeled apple into small cubes, add some Greek yoghurt and a thin slice of the chocolate cake. The sourness of yoghurt and apple make a very good contrast to the sweet yumminess of the cake.

Pomegranate and Citrus Fruit Salad

2008-02-10T22:06:00.000+02:00

I've been thinking about food and colour quite a lot lately. The world of food is so full of wonderful incredients in such wonderful hues of all the rainbow. As I have also been eating quite a lot of fruit salads in these past few weeks, it was only natural that I wanted my salads to be colourful! If its gray outside, let my plate be sunny and bright!

In this salad I used oranges and sweeties (also called oroblancos), but you could choose any two citrus fruit you like, just choose two with different colour. Also instead of roasted chestnuts, you could use rosted pecans or hazelnuts.

Pomegranate and Citrus Fruit Salad

Serves 2

2 oranges
1 sweetie
2 handfuls pomegranate seeds (=about 1/2 pomegranate)
some roasted chestnuts
2-4 tablespoons Turkish or Greek yoghurt
cinnamon

1. Peel the oranges. Cut each section into 3-4 parts. Set into a bowl.
2. Cut the sweetie into two halves. Using a grape fruit spoon remove the juicy pulp from the sections. Add into the bowl with the pieces of orange.
3. Cut the pomegranate into two and remove the seeds from one part. Add into the bowl.
4. Add some small pieces of roasted chestnuts. Mix.
5. Divide the salad into two deep plates or bowls.
6. Spoon 1-2 tablespoonfuls of Turkish or Greek yoghurt into both bowls.
7. Decorate the yoghurt with some cinnamon.
8. Enjoy!

Tofu and Basmati Rice with Pumpkin Seeds and Rosemary

2008-02-07T21:22:00.001+02:00

About a week ago I bought a little potted rosemary that I have tried to nurse as well as I can. As I like rosemary a lot, I was hoping to be able to get the little plant to flourish and already dreamt of all the dishes I could season with fresh rosemary straight from the pot on my kitchen shelf. Well, it seems that either I am not a very good gardener when it comes to rosemaries or then these plants just don't last very long during winter, as my little rosemary has started to look a bit dry (I did water it!!) and I thought I better use the good parts of it here and now. As I also had this little packet of tofu sitting in a cupboard, I decided to fry it and use rosemary as part of the recipe. This is what I came up with:

Tofu and Basmati Rice with Pumpkin Seeds and Rosemary

Serves 2

350 g tofu
1 white onion
2 handfuls of pumpkin seeds
1,5 dl basmati rice
1-2 tablespoons sunflower oil
2-3 tablespoons soya oil
ground pepper
fresh rosemary

1. Cook the rice in 3 desilitres of water.
2. Rinse the tofu under cold water. Dry with paper towel. Cut the tofu into small pieces.
3. Chop the onion.
4. Add 1 tablespoon sunflower oil into a sauce pan. Add chopped onion and pumpkin seeds. Add 1 tablespoon of soya oli. Sauté. Remove from the sauce pan and set aside for later.
5. Using the same sauce pan (add some sunflower oil, if needed) start frying the tofu. Add some pepper, 1-2 tablespoons soya oil and leaves from 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary. Fry until the tofu is nicely golden.
6. Add the onion and seeds mix into the sauce pan. Mix.
7. Add the cooked rice. Mix again. Let stir under an almost closed lid for some minutes.
8. Serve decorated with some fresh rosemary leaves.

This dish is great for lunch or as a little something to enjoy while watching your favorite TV-show!

Cardamom Meringues

2008-02-05T18:38:00.000+02:00

After browsing many food blogs that featured the Daring Bakers' latest challenge lemon meringue pie, I got into mood to make some meringues of my own. I chose a simple recipe from a cookbook by ICA provkök in Sweden. The original title of the book is "Sju sorters kakor" (Seven sorts of cake (or maybe all sorts of cakes would be a better, if not a literal, translation)).

For a baking sheet full of meringues (circa 35) you will need:

3 egg whites
1 dl sugar
1 dl confectioners' sugar
2 tablespoons Maizena
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom.

1. Heat the oven to 150 C. The original recipe actually says to heat the oven to 100 C, but such a low temperature is not possible using my oven, where 150 C is the lowest temperature. The little higher baking temperature seemed to work just fine and also shortened the baking time somewhat.
2. Combine the egg whites and 1/2 dl sugar. Using an electric mixer beat until soft peaks form.
3. Add rest of the sugar without ceasing to mix. Beat until you cannot hear the sugar in the bottom of the bowl anymore and hard peaks form.
4. Combine confectioners' sugar, Maizena and cardamom in another bowl and then fold carefully into the eggs and sugar mixture.
5. Using a piping bag pipe the mixture onto a baking paper covered baking sheet little at a time forming the meringues into any form you like. Instead of a piping bag you can also use a spoon.
6. Bake in 150 C for about 45 minutes or until the meringues are dry and feel very light.
7. Let cool properly before eating.

These meringues have a very nice cardamom flavour and a lovely, slightly golden colour.

Supersized Shrove Buns

2008-02-03T22:51:00.000+02:00

Today is Shrove Sunday or Quinquagesima meaning we are 7 weeks from Easter and only a few days from Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. Traditionally in Finland Shrove Sunday was a happy, even a bit boisterous celebration, the last occation to eat meat and greasy food before the Lenten fast. After the Lutheran Reformation in the 16th century fasting lost its importance, but many aspects of the old Shrove celebrations continued. Shrove buns became popular in the 19th century. They are buns with whipped cream and marzipan or jam filling, and are sold in every supermarket in Finland in the weeks leading to Shrove Sunday either individually or in packets of two.

Heated discussions are sometimes had between supporters of marzipan and those saying that the only real Shrove bun is one with jam inside. Which party do Cinnamonda belong to, you may ask. Well, I am a pro-marzipan person. :) Today, however, because my corner store had run out of marzipan (not so unusual at this time of year) and I did not have the time to make my own, I had to change sides and use jam. Actually jam worked just fine. Jam is good. Jam is very good! I like jam, too.

The dough I used for these buns is a rather typical "pullataikina" i.e. a dough for Finnish-style coffeebread. You can make any kind of buns or braided coffeebreads from it. I spiced up the recipe a little by using not only cardamom, but also some Mallorcan saffron bought from Madrid last November.

Supersized Shrove Buns & 1 Extra Large Braided Coffeebread

For the dough you will need:

5 dl (organic) milk (can be substituted with water)
22 g dried yeast (or 50 g fresh yeast)
1 egg
2 teaspoons salt
1 dl sugar
1 tablespoon ground cardamom
14 dl wheat flour
200 g liquid vegetable oil product for baking (or melted butter)
a pinch of saffron
some egg for brushing

1. In a large bowl mix 7 dl flour, salt, sugar, saffron and cardamom with a spoon.
2. Heat the milk to 42 degrees Centigrade (a little warmer than your hand) if using dried yeast or to 37 degrees Centigrade ( same temperature as your hand) if using fresh yeast. My method of getting the milk (or water) just warm enough is to keep my fingertips in the milk (or water) while heating it. :) Too cold or too hot will lead to the dough not rising. Pour the milk onto the dry ingredients and mix with an electric mixer using dough hooks.
3. Add the vegetable oil product or melted butter and the egg. Mix again.
4. Start adding more flour 1 dl at a time until the dough feels silkysmooth to your hand and does not stick to the sides of the bowl anymore. This should happen after 14 dl of flour, but sometimes you may need a bit less or a bit more flour.
5. Cover the bowl with a kitchen towel. Let rise in a warm place for 30 minutes.
6. Take the dough from the bowl. Knead it with your hands on a clean (slightly floured) surface. Cut 9 good-sized pieces of the dough and mould into round buns between your hand and the surface. Place the buns onto a baking paper covered baking sheet. Cover the baking sheet with a kitchen towel and let rise for 30 minutes.
7. While the buns are rising, heat the oven to 225 C, and make the braided coffeebread from the remaining dough.
8. Cut the dough into 3 parts.
9. Knead each part into a long (circa 30 cm), thin bar.
10. Braid the bars, and let the braid rise for 30 min in a warm place and covered with a kitchen towel.
11. After the buns and the braid have risen brush them with some slightly beaten egg and decorate with flaked almonds.
12. Bake the buns in 225 C for about 15 minutes or until they are beautifully golden. After taking them from the oven lower the temperature to 200 C and bake the braided coffeebread for about 25 minutes or until it, too, is beautifully golden.

For the filling of 9 buns you will need:

6 dl cream
berry jam of your choice (it should actually be strawberry, but let's not be too strict here :) I used raspberry jam)

1. Whip the cream until its quite hard (not butter, though!:))
2. Cut off the tops of well cooled buns. Place 2 teaspoonfuls of jam in the middle of the bottom part of each bun.
3. Add lots of whipped cream. It should show between the "hat" and the bottom part of the bun.
4. Enjoy!!

Rockin' Rolls and Cinnamonda's Bread Spread

2008-02-02T20:45:00.002+02:00

The other day I happened to run out of bread and thought to bake something else than my usual breakfast rolls. I did not have much time to browse for an interesting recipe, so I decided to simply bake this spiced up, or rather more colourful, version of the recipe I often use. You see, I have been using quite a lot of beet roots lately and still happened to have a couple of large ones waiting for their turn in my fridge.

This recipe is an adaptation from a breakfast roll recipe published in Siv and Key L Nilson's book originally called in Swedish "Alla tiders bröd" (Bread for all times) .

Rockin' Rolls

For 15 round rolls you will need:

25 g fresh yeast
5 dl warm water (37 degrees Centigrade)
1 tablespoon rapeseed oil
2 teaspoons salt
1 large red beet root ( circa 150 g when peeled)
4 dl rye flour
circa 14 dl wheat flour

1. Peel and grate the raw beet root and set aside for a moment.
2. Crumble the yeast into a large bowl.
3. In a small pan heat the water until it's about the same temperature as your hand (37 C).
3. Pour the water onto the yeast and mix (with your hand) until the yeast has totally dissolved.
4. Add the rapeseed oil (you may also use sunflower oil or olive oil) and salt.
5. Add the grated beet root. Mix slightly.
6. Add the rye flour. It is not necessary to shift the flour, but you may do so, I you wish. Mix with a mixer using dough hooks.
7. Add the wheat flour 3 desilitres at a time until you have used 12 desilitres of flour and mix properly between each addition. Add the rest of the flour just a little at a time and mix, mix, mix until the dough does not stick to the sides of the bowl anymore.
8. Cover with a kitchen towel and let rise in a warm place preferably for 30 minutes. If you are in a hurry 20 minutes will d0.
9. After the dough has risen remove it from the bowl and set onto a clean, slightly floured surface . Knead slightly with your hands. Then shape the dough into an oblong shape and cut it into circa 15 equal pieces. Shape each piece into a round roll between your palms.
10. Set the rolls onto a baking paper covered baking sheet. Cover with a kitchen towel. Let rise in a warm place for about 30 minutes. Again, if in a hurry, even 15 minutes may do.
11. While the rolls are rising, heat the oven to 225 C.
12. Just before putting the rolls into the oven sprinkle them with cold water.
13. Bake for circa 15 minutes.

These blushing, but not shy, rolls are sure to stand out in any breakfast table! They have a distinct taste of beet root in them and go best with savoury toppings, but I have also eaten them with organic cherries & berries jam and liked that taste combination, too.

Here is my suggestion for a savoury topping: 1-2 teaspoonfuls of Cinnamonda's Bread Spread and some ricotta cheese.

Cinnamonda's Bread Spread

1 bunch i.e. 10-15 g fresh cinnamon basil (or ordinary basil)
30 g sunflower seeds
30 g pumpkin seeds
1-2 teaspoons cinnamon
olive oil

1. Roast the seeds slightly in a sauce pan.
2. Put the roasted seeds into a mixer and mix until they are fine pulp.
3. Shread the basil leaves into smaller pieces with your hands. Add into the mixer. Add the cinnamon. Mix properly.
4. Add some olive oli and mix. Continue mixing and adding olive oil little at a time and until you get a pesto like consistency.
5. Spoon into a jar and refridgerate. The bread spread keeps in the fridge for at least one week.
Oops, not much bread spread left in this jar!:)

You Say a Cup, I say 2,3659 desilitres!

2008-02-01T23:20:00.000+02:00

Some of my favorite recipes are from cookbooks or websites that use American cooking measurements. By now I have baked Heidi's holiday cupcakes enough times to know by heart approximately how many dls is 1 or 1/2 or 1 1/2 cups, but it is a pain, a small one, but a pain nevertheless, to have to do some calculations every time I want to bake something from a "non-metric recipe". And of course, the same applies the other way round, if you are used to cups and ounces and would like to bake using a "metric recipe".

Also I might be able convert cups to desilitres, but! 1 cup equals to 2,3659 dls. If your average metric measurement cup gives you wholes and halves then 2,4 or 3,6 etc. are a challenge, not to mention 2,3659!!! I know we are not talking about rocket science here! It is perfectly fine to use approximate measurements and still succeed when baking, but sometimes I've wondered whether it would make a difference to be able to be a bit more exact when using American recipes. Well, ta-daa!! Now I will be able to do just that. See what I found in a store today! I am the proud owner of this measuring cup that has both cups/oz and ml/liter marked on it. I'm one happy camper today! :) Plus it snowed, quite a lot, too! :)

Here are a couple of useful links if you need to convert kitchen measurements:

Picks of the Month

2008-01-29T20:34:00.000+02:00

To wrap up this January, my first month as a blogger :), I would like to share with you all links to some posts or recipes from other food blogs that I have found especially interesting during these past few weeks.

1. Firstly apple scones by Anne from Anne's Food
I've never been too enthusiastic about scones, but these apple scones are something else! Easy to bake and really, really delicious, they totally converted me to a pro-scone person. :)

2. Heidi from 101 Cookbooks posted this wonderful recipe for olive oil crackers. They are fun to make and taste almost too good!

3. Peppermint panna cotta with raspberries and ginger tuille by Kate/Kajal from Aapplemint
Everything about this dessert looks really appetizing. I am yet to try the panna cotta recipe, but the ginger tuilles are very good indeed!

4. Rosa over at Rosa's Yummy Yums posted a very intriguing recipe for Basel bread that I would have liked to try immediately after reading her blog entry. Unfortunately the recipe calls for sourdough and I have not yet had the opportunity to make any. But some day, some day... :)

5. Last but not least Clotilde from my favorite blog Chocolate & Zucchini wrote about a conference on molecular gastronomy she attended. Very interesting stuff!

Snowy Mountain

2008-01-27T16:42:00.001+02:00

Unbelievable how time flies, isn't it? It feels like Christmas was yesterday and now we are only a few days away from February! We should be entering the coldest part of the year here, but this far the winter has been really mild with temperatures mostly above 0 Centigrade and hardly any snow at all. Even though winter might not traditionally be an ice cream season here thinking of snow made me come up with this simple but tasty dessert that combines mascarpone cheese and ice cream.

Snowy Mountain

This recipe is per person.

2 large scoops vanilla ice cream
2-3 heaping tablespoons mascarpone cheese
1 tablespoon Amaretto liqueur
dried mint for decoration (optional)

1. In a small bowl mix the mascarpone cheese and Amaretto together with a spoon.
2. Pour the mixture on top of the ice cream.
3. Recorate with some dried mint.
4. Yum-yum!! :-)

Orange Cookies

2008-01-25T23:58:00.001+02:00

Weekend, lovely weekend! Time to relax and regroup, time to read, watch TV ( Australian Open Tennis Championships finals, yay!!), and try out some lovely recipes. :)

Today's recipe is, however, an old one I have used numerous times. It is easy and very basic and you can variate it in many ways. I have used this recipe to bake date cookies and coconut cookies (If you try these, use 1/2 to 1 dl finely chopped dates or coconut flakes respectively and only 2 desilitres of wheat flour), but the other day I found this lovely Danish orange marmalade at my corner store and simply had to use it to make orange cookies!

Orange Cookies

1 egg
100 g unsalted butter
0,5 dl granulated sugar
3 dl wheat flour
0,5 dl potato flour
3 heaping tablespoons orange marmalade
0,5 teaspoon vanillin sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder

1. Preheat the oven to 175 C.
2. Cream the unsalted butter and sugar together in a bowl.
3. Beat in the egg.
4. Mix together all the dry ingredients and add to the dough.
5. Add the orange marmalade and mix again.
6. Prepare a baking sheet. (I always use greaseproof paper when baking cookies.)
7. Take about a tablespoon of dough at a time and mould it into little flattened balls between your palms.
8. Set the balls onto the prepared baking sheet.

9. Bake for about 15-20 minutes. Don't bake too long or you'll get stones instead of cookies! :) These cookies are rather pale even when ready.
10. Let cool.
11. Enjoy as such or with some orange marmalade!

Sour Milk Cake

2008-01-23T23:16:00.001+02:00

There is a very special "new" addition among the cook books in my kitchen. "New" because the book has actually already reached the ripe old age of 75 years! It is a copy of the Finnish cook book classic "Kotiruoka" that my grandmother used most of her life. The book later belonged to my mother and some weeks ago I asked my father whether I could borrow the book. He happily gave it to me.

"Kotiruoka" literally means home food. It is a collection of basic recipes from which generations of Finns have learned how to cook and bake. The first edition was printed in 1908. My copy is 13th edition, printed in 1933. And the book, updated many times over the years of course, is still in print. The 68th edition came out in 2005!
My book is all battered in use, some pages are loose, and the spine stays together with the help of lots of tape, but all the recipes are there, almost 400 pages of them, usually 2 recipes a page. The language is old fashioned. There is no mention of baking temperatures or times and sugar, cream and butter are used quite a lot! I simply love the book! It is on the one hand an interesting peek into the kitchens of generations past, on the other a still very useful collection of recipes.
Sour milk cake is something that my grandmother baked often when I was little. Here is my updated version based on a recipe I found in "Kotiruoka". The original recipe is actually for a buttermilk cake. If you don't find any sour milk -or buttermilk, plain yoghurt or creame fraiche can be used just as well.

Sour Milk Cake

1,5 dl sour milk
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 dl granulated sugar
1 dl Amaretto syrup
1 smashed banana (1-1,5 dl)
1 dl melted butter
3 dl wheat flour

1. Melt the butter.
2. Smash the banana with a fork.
3. Mix all ingredients in the order they are mentioned above.
4. Pour the batter into a well buttered cake mould.
5. Bake in 180 C for about 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean.
6. Let cool for 15 minutes.
7. Remove the cake from the mould.
8. Enjoy!

Florence Fennel And Clementine Salad

2008-01-19T00:01:00.002+02:00

It's raining in Helsinki. No snow in sight, not even a flake. And this should be the land of Santa Claus! This not so wintry winter somehow made me think of last summer and all the lovely salads I ate during my summer holidays. One ingredient that made its way into my salads more often than not was florence fennel (foeniculum vulgare var. azoricum). This wonderful plant with an interesting shape and nicely anis-like taste is a great addition to any green salad, but in the middle of all this January grayness a more colourful version is maybe in order. Fennel-dee-dee!

Florence Fennel And Clementine Salad

Serves 2

1 small florence fennel
1 medium-sized yellow onion
some watergress sprigs
1/2 clementine
4 large and 8 small red basil leaves
2 hard boiled eggs
some lemon juice

1. Slice the fennel and onion into thin slices.
2. Sprinkle the fennel slices with some lemon juice in order to prevent them from darkening.
3. Peel and half the clementine. You will only need one half of the fruit, so, save the other half for later or pop it into your mouth now! :) Section the half you are going to use for the salad. Cut each section into three parts.
4. Half the eggs length-wise. Then half the halves also length-wise.
5. Arrange the ingredients nicely onto two plates.
6. Serve with some olive oil-lemon dressing.

Puff Pastry Bundles

2008-01-13T23:19:00.002+02:00

It all started in Paris from the divine clafoutis aux cherises served as part of the breakfast buffet in Hotel Eiffel Kennedy in the 16th arrondissement. It was, unbelievable but true, the first time I ever tasted French style cherry pie, and it was love at first bite!

Some days later back home in Finland I googled the net for clafoutis recipes. What I found was not only more cherry pie recipes I could ever hope for, but a whole new world of -food blogs! That was last June. Since then I’ve become an avid follower of a number of food blogs and finally, after some gentle pressure by a couple of my friends (Hi there! You know who you are! :) ) I decided to try blogging myself. So, here goes…

Let’s start, not with clafoutis, though, but with one of my favorite desserts: puff pastry bundles. These are really easy to make, especially if you buy your puff pastry frozen, and even easier, if the pastry comes in ready-made sheets.

Puff Pastry Bundles

2 20 cm x 20 cm sheets of puff pastry
1 small (Golden Delicious) apple or ½ of a larger one
handful of raisins
3 tablespoons liquid vegetable oil product or butter
3 tablespoons oat flakes
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon dried mint
some slighty beaten egg for brushing

Preheat the oven to 225˚ C.
Mix the vegetable oil product (or butter), oat flakes, sugar, lemon juice and spices with a spoon in a small bowl.
Slice the apple into thin slices.
Cover a baking sheet with greaseproofed paper and place the puff pastry squares onto it.
Divide the oat flakes mixture, apple slices and raisins between the two pastry squares.
Moisten the edges of the pastry squares with water in order to make them stick together better.
Turn the corners of the squares towards the middle and pinch them together tightly with your fingers.
Brush the bundles with slightly beaten egg.
Bake for 20 minutes (or until beautifully golden)

Serve the bundles on their own or with some vanilla ice cream. One bundle makes small treats for four or one big treat for someone with a very achy sweet tooth!