Saturday 28 December 2013

TRADITIONS

So, it's the 28th of December, and we don't have any Christmas decoration in the house.
I love Christmas, to check all the lovely decorations, the delicious recipes, the handmade gifts, the gigantic dinners. I check it all for months, and I always, invariably, inexplicably, do nothing.
No decorations.
No special dishes.
No handmade gifts.
No dinners.
I'm no Grinch. I'm just purely, genuinely, lazy.
I mean, I've even collected some ideas for handmade gifts, and one of them -the hot chocolate kit- is basically suggesting that yes, I give the chocolate, but could you please make it yourself?
And I didn't even prepare that.
Nevertheless, there is one thing that is bound to happen every Christmas, no matter what.
The only thing that actually made it to become one of our, well, our Christmas tradition.
I suggest you make it one of yours as well.


This is the recipe we used, taken from Weekend Bakery which, so far, proved being the very best.
Although, we kinda went crazy with the spice mix, totally changing all the doses. We just kept the cinnamon overload but then, for example, put almost as much cardamom, which I love. And skipped the aniseed powder cause.. I just don't know what that is.
In any case, you just can't go wrong.

SPICE MIX:
6,5 gr cinnamon
2 gr ground cloves
1,5 gr grated nutmeg
1 gr ground white pepper
2 gr aniseed powder
1 gr ginger powder
1/2 gr ground cardamom (pff, 1/2 a gr...)

COOKIE MIX:
225 gr all purpose flour
115 gr butter -room temperature-
130 gr soft brown sugar
7 gr baking powder
2 TBS milk
3 tsp spice mix
pinches of salt

DIRECTIONS:
1- Mix together flour, baking powder, spice mix and salt.

2- In a separate bowl, mix together butter and sugar. Add also the milk and knead with your hands until smooth.

3- Add the flour mix to the butter mix and knead it into a ball. Wrap it in plastic foil and leave it in the fridge for at least half an hour, so that all the ingredients mix together and soak into one another.

4- Take the dough out of the fridge and roll it from 2 to 7 mm thick (the thicker the easier, the thinner the crunchier)

5- Preheat your oven at 165°, cut your biscuits and bake for 16-18 minutes. To us it took a bit longer but, from minute 15 on, keep an eye on your cookies, 'cause they burn fast.



Well, I'm not always that lazy.
Wish you all some lovely holidays and new-found traditions.



Thursday 19 December 2013

CLOSED FOR MOVING. BIG RE-OPENINGS AND FAIRY TALES.

And, yes, we are still living a sort of camping experience, getting our clothes out of boxes in the cellar and finding the baking paper in the toilette but, finally, we moved!
It all sounds like a Disney story, a good mix of magic and drama and, in our case, I would say a mix between Cinderella and SnowWhite.


So, once upon a time, there were two girls forced to endlessly clean a house (that would be us), with an evil stepmother calling every half hour to yell that they had to do it better and faster (and that would be the landlady) and, yes, we even had our own midnight magic.
Although in our case, sadly enough, there were no gigantic pumpkins in the living room, just our cat that, at midnight o'clock, gracefully peed right in the middle of our parquet.
Yes, the last evening was quite a nightmare.


And even though now we've moved to the land of Far Far Away, the evil witch is still part of our story, holding our deposit hostage since a month. So,we just baked our poisonous apple into some delicious, end of the season's apple muffins.

So, that's basically the very same recipe I used for the apple cake you've never seen. Of course with halved measure, just because this time I didn't need 45 muffins but, well, you see.
Anyway, what happened is that this time I forgot to marinate the apples in lemon juice and cinnamon.


So, pity for the lemon, but I really needed the cinnamon: so what I did was mixing some cinnamon and some sugar, and topping the muffins before baking them.
So, pros: when baked the muffins had this crunchy, sugary, cinnamony top that was just so nice.
Cons: I think the topping kinda prevented them from rising as puffy as they could have been.
Still, I would say: success.

For directions, it's seriously the very same as for this cake, but with half the ingredients. I really just wanted to publish the pics.





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