Chocolate Mousse

One of the easiest desserts I've ever made and not less delicious because of it. This is my mothers recipe of an airy, fluffy mousse, not to dark and not to sweet. It's the mousse I used to eat in my childhood (there was no birthday party without it) with strawberries or strawberry jelly on the side. I decided to serve it in individual flasks, which made it a lot more fun and perfect for eating in from of the TV while watching my favourite series.  Hope you like it.

250g dark cooking chocolate

4 table spoons confectioners sugar

1 table spoon butter 

8 eggs ( 8 yolks, 7 whites)

Melt the chocolate with the butter (I did it in the microwave) and mix. Add the yolks and the sugar to the chocolate and mix well. Beat the egg whites until stiffened. Add the whites to the chocolate mixture and mix it slowly with a whisker until you get an airy mixture. Pour the mouse in a bowl, or like in my case in small recipients/flasks for individual portions, and let it rest in the fridge for at least 1 hour. In my opinion it tastes better if you leave it longer, but that's a matter of personal taste. If you like it darker and stronger just add less egg whites. Oh! And for some extra "punch", and when we got older, my father used to had a bit of whisky or Frangelico (hazelnut liquor). 

all photos by me

Baked (NOT) Doughnuts

I've been craving for a doughnut for a long time now. Unfortunately  that has proven to be a wish difficult to fulfil in this small town where I live. It's difficult to find a doughnut to start with, and when I do find one it is covered with chocolate or some other weird stuff, and I really only like simple doughnuts. So I turned my attention to some wonderful pictures on Pinterest that claimed to be of baked doughnuts. However, after actually reading a couple of recipes I lost all hopes of getting a real doughnut out of those recipes, but decided to try it anyway  and hope for the best. 

I picked up this recipe from 101 Cookbooks, because I'm a fan of the site. The instructions are very good, and much better than what I can write in English, so I decided to only post here the ingredients and some pictures to make it easier for my readers to decide if it's something they would be interested in. For more details please click the link above.

for the dough:

1 1/3 cups warm milk

1 packet active dry yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons)

2 tablespoons butter

2/3 cup sugar

2 eggs

5 cups all-purpose flour

A pinch or two of nutmeg, freshly grated

1 teaspoon fine grain sea salt

to cover:

1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 tablespoon cinnamon

As I saw them getting shape and colour inside the oven, I knew I was not having doughnuts that evening. However, just like some "Ugly Ducklings" these...things, maybe bagels, I'm not sure what to call them (in Portuguese: qualquer coisa como um pão-de-leite adocicado)... are absolutely delicious in their own way. I decided to make a quick glazing (just water and confectioners sugar mixed until it has the right consistency) and it tasted wonderfully. Keep in mind that they should be eaten in the same day, they get hard and massive otherwise. And next time I won't bother shaping them as a doughnut. Small buns will be much easier to shape and I can cut them in half and have them with jam and cheese...yummy! 

all photos by me

Scones

When the days start getting shorter and darker, and it's cold and raining outside, there's nothing better than a warm cup of tea and some sort of "munchies" while watching a good series on TV. And there's no better "munchie" for this than scones. My problem was that I didn't really like the recipe I had. The scones would get very compact and hard. I swear they could make a hole in the wall if I had thrown them. So I asked my sister if she had a good scones recipe that I could try. She gave me the one I'm posting here and I'm very happy about it. Done it twice now (in a week!) because it's so easy and quick to make, and the scones are delicious. Even Emil, that is normally picky with this sort of food, loved them. 

3 cups of flour

2 tea spoons of baking powder

½ tea spoon sal

125g (half a pack) butter

1 cup milk

1 egg

1 yolk to brush on top of the scones.

Mix very well all the ingredients in a bowl. Pre-heat the oven at 180.C. Shape the scones and placed them on an oven tray covered with cooking paper. with these quantities I made 9 scones, but I like them big(ish). Brush the top of the scones with the remaining yolk. Goes to the oven at 180.C for 30 minutes (more or less depending on the oven).

I love having them right out of the oven, with butter and my home made jams, and when no one is looking I also add some whipped cream (shame on me!).

   

all photos by me

Apple Pie

Last week my friend Linda was picking some apples and saying that she wanted to make an apple pie. So I promised her to put on the blog the recipe of the only apple pie I actually like. Until I was maybe 20 or 21 years old I hated apple pie. The problem was, I didn't like the thick, soft, gooey layer of apple. Then my sister gave me this recipe which has a very thin layer of apple and, as a bonus, it has a topping made of butter and sugar caramelized, and now I love apple pie...well, this one at least. And now that I think of it, this was the first baked desert I made. It's simple and quick and anyone with no experience in baking can do it.

dough:

250g flour

125g butter

1 egg

topping:

125g sugar

125g butter

3 or 4 apples

Mix all the ingredients for the dough and let it rest for 20 min. Pre-heat the oven at 180.C. Cover a deep-dish pie plate (coated with cooking spray or butter and flour) with a thin layer of dough (just enough so it won't break) leaving a slightly elevated border all around. Cut the apples in very thin slices (and when I say thin I mean really thin) and cover the base of the pie placing them like an open fan. For the topping, melt the sugar and the butter in a sauce pan and pour it over the entire pie. Goes to the oven for 30 min. 

I love to make a small change and add grated gruyère cheese on top of everything at around 15 min after being in the oven. But some people call me weird because of that... they really don't know what they are missing! The contrast between the sweet and the salty is divine. But for the more traditional approach just sprinkle some cinnamon on top, after the pie has cooled down, and serve with vanilla ice-cream or whipped cream. 

all photos by me

Orange and Blackcurrants Muffins - recipe

Last week, my friend Linda suggested we should go pick blackcurrants to make some jam. Before I moved to Denmark I was always very much of a city girl, so picking my own berries sounded really exciting... plus, I had no idea what blackcurrants were! With the help of Google translate I found out it was something that I only knew from a concentrated drink but had never actually seen the fruit. It was a fun and new experience, and when I got home I just couldn't wait to make the jam. I left the blackcurrants in the sink, in cold water, for 30 min. and then followed, more or lees, the same recipe that I use for strawberry jam, only this time I actually used half the weight of the berries of sugar. (note: the damn things release a lot of juice when you handle them, careful with stains in your clothes or even the kitchen counter).

I saved a few berries but wasn't sure what to do with them until I saw some muffins on TV (on a commercial I think, wasn't really paying attention) and decided that that's what I wanted - blackcurrant muffins. I looked up some cake recipes and picked my grandmothers orange cake. I figured it would be consistent enough for muffins, I liked the idea of the 2 flavours together and... I had oranges at home. The idea was to make just some normal cake mixture, pour it in silicone muffin forms and add blackcurrants (I also made some with little pieces of dark chocolate for Emil  because he doesn't like berries).

The result was delicious! So I'm writing here the recipe:

250g sugar
150g butter
250g all purpose flour
4 eggs (separate yolks and whites)
1 big orange (zest and juice)
2 tea spoons baking powder
100 ml milk
a few blackcurrants

Pre-heat the oven at 180.C
Mix the sugar with the butter. Beat well.
Add the yolks and the orange zest. Beat a bit more.
Alternate adding the flour and the milk. Beat slowly.
Add the orange juice. Beat again.
Beat the egg whites until stiffened and then mix them by hand with the rest of the cake mixture.
Pour the mixture in muffin forms and add 3 blackcurrants to each.
Goes to the oven for 20 min. (for a cake it should take 1 hour in the oven)

   

all photos by me

Home Made Bread

A week ago I discovered a great blog called lark&linen. It's a blog with a mix of interior design, food and little everyday life things...the sort of things that I like. As I was exploring the recipes list, I found one for bread that didn't need kneading. The author of that blog said that that recipe was so simple and easy, that she did it on a Friday evening after a few drinks. I had never made bread before, never had the guts, but after reading that statement I decided to try it.

The original post had a link to this video where you can see the explanation of the recipe, and you should check it out, but I'll write it here anyway, to make it easier. 

3 cups of flour (all purpose)

1/4 tea spoon of yeast

1 and 1/4 tea spoon salt

1 and  1/2 cups water 

Mix the flour, yeast and salt. Add the water and mix it all with your fingers and once you get a dough it's done. Cover the bowl and let it rest for at least 12h. 

Pre-heat the oven at 260.C (500.F) with the pot that you will use inside.

Remove the dough from the bowl and shape the bread. Then cover it all with sesame seeds or flour.

Place the bread in the hot pot and put it in the oven with a cover for 30 min. Then remove the cover and leave it for 15 min. more. Done!

Well now, my personal experience was...interesting... to say the least. Not because the recipe wasn't that simple, because it really was. But because anything that could have gone wrong went wrong. And I'm the only one to blame. The most amazing thing though, is that in the end I still had a delicious home made bread, just out of the oven, for breakfast. Allow me to show you just how idiot-proof this recipe is.

Last evening I grabbed my little piece of paper, where I had written the recipe down, and, filled with courage, started working on that bread. 

going wrong n.1

1 cup of flour, hmm... 2 cups of flour...erm... I don't have any more flour. Ok, ok, no stress... I'll make a third of the recipe instead. 

going wrong n.2

Then came the yeast. I couldn't find yeast in powder in the supermarket, only in a sort of a cube "thingy", so I didn't know very well how to measure it. I ended up using a little chunk of the thing with the size more or less of a 1/4 tea spoon.

going wrong n.3

I had no problems with the salt...haha. But then I got distracted and added more water than I was supposed to for a third of the recipe. 

I started mixing everything and it was like if I had gone back to my childhood. 

(As I felt that gooey dough on my fingers I remembered the times when me and my brother wanted to do some collages and there was no glue at home. My mother would then mix some flour and water and that worked perfectly fine as glue.) 

I decided to wait the 12h to see if any sort of miracle would happen. Then this morning I went back to the bowl and the goo was still very much a goo. But I can be as stubborn as a mule and so decided to carry on.

going wrong n.4

(well this actually ended up working perfectly fine)

Due to the already described texture of the dough I obviously couldn't shape it into a bread. But apart from that, I didn' have sesame seeds to cover it with, because I had decided to use flour...but now I also had no flour. And I didn't even think about that until that precise moment. So what to do, what to do?... Oats! I always have oats around, for my pancakes and to have with yoghurt. It worked great!

going wrong n.5

As if I hadn't done enough stupidities, I left it in the oven for 5 min longer than what was supposed, so some of the oats covering the bread got a bit "toasty". 

But the bread actually looked like a bread. So I decided to take some pictures. Then I put it back on the kitchen table and stared at it for a while. I thought: what the hell! It looks like bread... let's see if it tastes like bread. I cut a slice, it was still warm, I spread some butter and home made strawberry jam, took a deep breath and bit it. It was real, I had made bread and it tasted good! Ok it was a very small bread, but still...

I've been wearing a huge smile since then, all proud of myself for finally making my own bread...despite all the things that went wrong.

all photos by me

Chocolate "Brigadeiros"

Brigadeiros is the Portuguese name for a delicious chocolate treat similar to truffles. It's very easy to make and it's heavenly good. The recipe I'm posting here was adapted by my father to perfection and It was actually the first thing I ever cooked. When I was younger I hated eating, cooking and everything about food, with very few exceptions... being one of them chocolate (obviously). So before I even knew how to fry an egg, and having my brother as my helper to turn on the stove... because yes, I was that helpless in a kitchen... I could make Brigadeiros.

1 can condensed milk

2 table spoons butter, not very full (real butter, not margarine or such) 

2 table spoons cocoa powder

2 table spoons chocolate powder

chocolate sprinkles for decoration

You start by melting the butter. 

Add the chocolate and the cocoa powder and mix very well to avoid lumps. 

Then start adding the condensed milk. hold the can over the pot and let it drip slowly but constantly while mixing the batter vigorously.

Never stop whisking and let it come to a point of starting to boil and then lower the heat. 

It's ready when the mixture thickens and you can leave a trail on the bottom of the pan with the whisk or spoon. 

Pour the batter on a pre-greased plate or tray , let it cool to room temperature and then put it in the fridge for 2 or 3 hours. 

Then all you have to do is shape the batter into balls (the size depends on your gluttony) and roll them on a bowl with the chocolate sprinkles. 

I didn't have enough sprinkles for all of it so I used some of the powder chocolate too. It works but can't go back to the fridge, because the chocolate gets all gooey.

And they are better served at room temperature even though some people prefer them right out of the fridge.

   

   

all photos by me

Oats Pancakes

I've posted a recipe for pancakes before. But after a few months of normal pancakes, time has arrived for the diet pancakes. When I first heard of this recipe, from my mother, I thought it was a weird thing. But after actually giving it a try I loved it, and it's the only pancakes I have now. It's really simple and... hey! It's healthy too (well depends on what you put on them after).

1,5 spoon of oats

1,5 spoon of cottage cheese

1 egg

a pinch of salt

Mix all in the blender. 

Fry in a well heated frying pan with a tiny bit of olive oil...I'm Portuguese, we cook everything with olive oil.

The recipe is for 1 pancake, so just multiply it for how many you want to make. 
And Ta-da, ready to eat. I cut mine in small circles with the help of a glass, and had it with cottage cheese (to be healthy) and my home made strawberry jam (to be yummy). 

all photos by me

Strawberry Jam

I hate buying food when I know I can make it better! And last month I found out that I can make strawberry jam.

I had some strawberries about to go bad, just 8 or 9 of them. They were already a bit to mushy for my taste so I didn't want to eat them, but I also didn't want to throw them away. So I decided to try making a jam... Yes, with only a few strawberries, and my first attempt on jams. I knew that it involved the fruit and sugar, wasn't sure about anything else. So without even measuring things I threw strawberries and sugar into a sauce pan and turned on the heat. I also added some lemon juice because, I think, I read somewhere (probably pinterest) about it. Then I run quickly to my computer and "googled" a recipe. It didn't say much more but it said to add balsamic vinegar. I'm all for balsamic vinegar so I followed the advise. Again, nothing was measured. I let the thing cook up to a point that seemed right (when you scratch the bottom of the pan and it goes "scretchhhh"). Poured the jam on a small bowl, covered it and stuck it in the fridge. And then.... completely ignored it for almost two weeks. 

At first I was afraid of trying it, and then just forgot about it. Then one wonderful day I was "browsing" the fridge, in search of something to put on my toasts with cottage cheese and I saw the little abandoned bowl. It seemed like it was time to try it. On my first bite I felt my world going upside down... It was SO MUCH better than any other jam I had ever tried. I didn't use to much sugar, and was sort of generous with the lemon and balsamic, so the jam was perfect for my taste, slightly acidic... oh I can't describe it, it was just absolutely delicious. 

Of course then I felt stupid for not having tried that before. And I made an oath to never again buy jams at the supermarket. 

all photos by me