pumpkin muffins

I haven’t made any in a long time, but I still have the recipe. this one’s a special request delivery for shazza.

you’ll need

step one
50 g butter

–> melt

step two
250 g pumpkin, cut to rough cubes
90 g apples, peeled & cored–> steam pumpkin cubes for ten minutes and mash with mixer
–> steam apples and mash as well, add to pumpkin pulp and set aside to cool

step three:
150 g flour (I use spelt)
1tsp baking powder
90 g sugar
1/2 tsp Stevia (or another 90 g sugar)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamom
1 pinch of salt
1 pinch powdered cloves

–> mix all together

step four
mix the pumpkin and apple pulp with the butter

–> add
2 eggs and
4 tbsp acorn syrup

–> then add the flour mixture from step three

step five
fill into muffin molds and pop in the oven for 25 – 30 minutes at 190° C
baking time depends on mold sizes and oven type, so check regularly, even before the 25 minutes have passed (especially if you use small molds)

savoury puff pastries

I was in the mood for cooking and without a cause to cook for so I made a batch of these puff pastries on tuesday afternoon and within minutes we had eaten half of them, that’s how yummy they were.

 the puff pastry I bought at the supermarket, I can’t be arsed to make that myself! and the filling was quite easy and fast to make. chopped up an onion, two carrots and some white mushrooms and defrosted a cup of peas.

sautéed the onion in a pan with olive oil, added the carrots, later the peas and at last the mushrooms and let it simmer for a while. once the excess fluid from the shrooms had evaporated I crumbled in some feta cheese and stirred until the cheese had melted. off the heat comes the pan.

I cut the pastry into squares, put a blob of filling in the middle of each and then it took some time until I found a folding method that wasn’t a complete and utter mess. as you can see on the photo I mostly stuck to simply folding in two opposing corners and sticking them together, subsequently folding the other two opposing ones over them and pasting those together. until I GOT there everything was a bit messy though …

whisk an egg and brush the pastries with it. into the oven at 200° C for about 15 minutes. if the pastries in the back don’t brown turn the pan around! horizontally I mean 😉

from our own experience: let them cool a bit or you’ll frickin burn your tongue and your fingers and everything else that comes near these pastries. they’re also really good (if not better) on the next day cold from the fridge btw!

Edit: I tried filling them with cheese and ananas the second time around – also very yummy, if you can appreciate the sweet with the savoury 🙂

equilibrium in all its glory

The whole last week was very fruit and pudding affected. it all started the frozen rasperries that had to make way for ice cubes in our mini-icebox, so I made a rasperry crumble. while double-checking my recipe with nigella lawson’s crumble recipes her rhubarb crumble caught my gaze again. see, the gf doesn’t like rhubarb whereas I love it, but I thought what the heck, I’ll just make her something else then. so I bought some not-so-pink but otherwise good rhubarb and when the in-laws announced themselves last sunday afternoon I thought “well, I can’t serve them crumble, that’s an evening kinda pudding and not something you have for coffee.” So I rang up my dad and asked him what goes into his equilibrium cake, knowing it was easy and fast to make.

my father used to make this cake a lot in the summer when I was a kid, with all kinds of fruit. actually that was the only way one could make both of us eat any fruit at all. it’s called “gleichgewichtskuchen” in german gleichgewicht meaning equilibrium, balance. basically it means that you just have to weigh the eggs in their shells and all, and say they weigh 200g you then take that same amount of everything else. 200g sugar, 200g butter, 200g flour. NO baking powder, you’re just going to beat the egg whites separately – that makes for the fluffyness of the cake.

so beat the egg whites, then in another bowl beat the yolks with the butter and the sugar (i’m sure you can use a food processor for that, only I don’t own one) and then fold in the flour and the beaten egg whites with a spatula. you’ll end up with the yummiest of all doughs ever. I had to keep the gf from having a go at it and leaving nothing to bake with, so from now on I just make a little more than I need and leave it in the bowl and on the spatula for us to lick clean. the rest of the dough, the part that I actually want to bake i put on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and spread it evenly. this part is a bit of a bummer but I usually manage to get it smooth in the end.

line the dough with cut up fruit and into the oven it goes at about 200° C for about 20 to 30 minutes (depends on how done you want it). you can use rhubarb like I did or all kinds of stone fruit like apricot or nectarines, cherries, peaches, plums, my dad put grapes on it a couple of times in autumn, very yummy. just cut the smaller fruits in halfs and the bigger ones into slices. and leave the stones out of course. you can probably use apples and pears if you like, i guess that’s more “wintery” then.

so I made a rhubarb cake that even the gf and her father – who both claimed not to like rhubarb – enjoyed. if you use a fruit as sour as rhubarb you can put a little more sugar in the dough or sprinkle some sugar over the cake right before it goes into the oven. and don’t forget to peel the rhubarb of course or it could get ugly 😉

I used up what was left of the rhubarb in a crumble (which the gf liked as well!) later in the week, so I made a second batch of equilibrium cake yesterday with peaches. let me tell you this: don’t use whole flour. I had to use it up, it had been standing there in the cupboard forever and the cake’s not bad at all, but it’s just not as good as it is with white wheat flour. and that’s also why it is a little darker in the pictures, so don’t worry if yours actually looks a little lighter.

OK then, so that was our sweet week 🙂
Tell me in the comments about what fruits YOU used if you happened to try out this recipe or tell me about your favourite summer baking recipes!

rumballcake

i actually made this last saturday, but what the heck, it’s still a yummy recipe a week later. i made it for cat’s birthday party, she just loves these.

i used a basic ring cake (in german: gugelhupf) recipe with baking powder, i took one from an old recipe book, but just take your own fave ring cake recipe if you have one:

heat oven to ~ 170° C

sieve 280 g flour with 1/2 pkg of baking powder
beat 140 g of butter with 140 g sugar and 1 pkg vanilla sugar, add 4 egg yolks one by one until everything is fluffy
add a dash of rum (or more if you really want the cake to be very rum cocos) and a dash of cream

beat the egg whites seperately (remember to use clean utensils, so you’re better off beating the egg whites before you do everything else, that way you don’t have to constantly wash the beaters)

now fold in the flour mixture and the beaten egg whites into the sugar/butter/egg yolk mix.

butter a cake tin (not ring cake form), coat it with small breadcrumbs and pour the batter into it, evenly drop in a packet of rum balls (or as many as you like). now put it in the preheated oven for about an hour, if it’ still soggy in the middle it needs a little longer, also depending on your oven.

for the icing i beat together some butter and sieved icing sugar and mixed all that with some molten dark chocolate and a dash of rum. spread the icing on the cake (also sides) once it’s out of the tin and cooled down, put it in the fridge to harden the icing before you sprinkle coco flakes over it. put a couple of rum balls on top for decoration or if you’re more creative and/or have more time than me do whatever you want with the decoration as long as it doesn’t contradict the rum flavour 🙂

the greatest thing about this cake is that if you cut it, you’ll find out that the molten rum balls will have flocked to the bottom of the cake making a delicious soggy mix of rum, chocolate and coco:

the pictures unfortunately don’t show off all the cakes glory cuz they were taken with a mobile phone. finn brought the camera but she kinda left the memory card at home stuck in her computer …
 

nutty was good

nutty turned out to be the perfect name for a cake to give to my mum.
it was also really yummy – but if i were you i wouldn’t leave out the oil. just makes it more tasty. forgetful me…

 btw: our syphon in the kitchen broke so we’re trying to avoid having to do too many dishes. which means right now there won’t be much cooking happening in my kitchen. tonight that will mean spaghetti and red pesto right out of a glass. we’re still contemplating if we’re going to use dishes or just eat the pasta right out of the pot.

I like nutty

I just finished the carrot cake and it’s sitting there on the table, still warm and damp and I’m not allowed to cut it open *sniff* gotta wait til tomorrow.

but if you want your own perfectly moist and nutty carrot cake that you ARE actually allowed to eat – here goes the recipe:

in one bowl (doesn’t have to be big, just big enough to hold the dry ingredients) combine the ingredients from the first paragraph in the recipe. i decided to sift the flour because spelt flour can be quite clumpy and i wanted it to mix well.

in a bigger bowl beat the eggs with the sugar and then beat in the yoghurt.

now slowly add the flour mixture to the egg-mixture (i usually don’t beat it but just mix it in with that lovely green spatula that i have taken a liking to. hey I like the colour, ok?!)

add the carrots, add the nuts and the vanilla sugar. this is the step I love cuz it becomes this lovely, clumpy but kinda silky sweet mixture once the carrots and the nuts are in…

and off it goes into the pan and into the preheated oven on 160° C for about 40 minutes  (that is if your pan is roughly the size of the one i used).

and this is the gorgeous result:

hopefully perfectly moist and nutty inside (well, we’ll only know tomorrow, but I’ll let you know then, once I figure out a way to transport this thing to my parent’s house). I’m not gonna put any icing on it, for one I don’t really like icing and neither does my mum, secondly i think it looks beautiful just like that – and much healthier 🙂

btw: the gf happily took those pictures and then threw me out of the kitchen to make dinner. yep, the day that I start my foodblog is the one day my baby is in the mood for cooking 😉

* now about the sugar: I substituted half of the sugar with stevia.
stevia is a natural zero-calorie sweetener, which has a distinctive bitter taste if you put too much into something. but as it’s quite potent you don’t need much. I used about a quarter of a tsp substituting half a cup of sugar. in austria you can get it at health-food shops.