Holiday Season 2013; Intro

I may have gone a bit crazy this December with everything I decided to bake/create. In a series of posts over the coming few days, I'll share it all. Beginning tomorrow with my gingerbread house turned into Hansel and Gretel feast. (or as the Big Bro describes it, an LSD party house)

Halloween Fushion: How I did some carving

Before this weekend, I had never carved a pumpkin. Heck, I had done little more than look at pumkins and eat my mum's pumpkin soup. But as my local supermarket had halloween pumpkins in stock and all the carving tools for seriously few €€€, I decided to go ahead and do some holiday stealing. (After all in the Netherlands we don't celebrate Halloween, offcially, anyway).

After some pondering I decided, that if I was stealing holidays, I might as well go all in and steal some Day of the Dead from Mexico as well. And so I carved a mexican death mask into my pumpkin.

I only slipped up once, and I was actually very pleased! I can barely wait till next year, I'll go pumkin crazy!!

Angry Profiteroles; A Little Piece of Heaven

Yesterday I was baking one of my favourite pound cakes and for some reason it exploded all over my oven and worse still, it tasted horribly. So after ranting about how upset I was about wasting all the ingredients and having to clean my oven, again, I decided to put my anger (crankiness) into something productive and make profiteroles.

I had never made them before in my life and my mother has always assured me, making them is a nightmare. But.. It was oddly easy. I used the recipe from Kookook, a Dutch cookbook with basis recipes and preparation techniques. I think everyone should have a cookbook which covers all the basics. And going back to them, sometimes, is the smartest thing.

(of course, as always, I forgot to take pictures during, so you'll have to make do with the finished result)

Pecan pralinés - A Photo Essay

Really in no mood to type out the recipe tonight, but it will follow later (read: eventually). For now, here aresome photos of my first trip into being a chocolatier!

Pecan praline

Ground pecan praline

Pecan praline ganache - filling

Tempering chocolate (that didn't work, better luck next time)

Chocolate molds

Homemade pecan pralinés

Never buying seabanquet chocolates again

Leftovers or.. Treasure troves?

I've been trying to conserve food in the best possible way as to not waste anything, so my fridge has turned into a ziplock haven. But some things don't ziplock too well. Like soy cream and condensed milk. So I decided to look in my cupboard and see what else I had left I could use with cream and milk. I found half a bar of chocolate and dried coconut. And thus my stracciatella coconut ice cream was born, in short: bounty dark chocolate ice cream: HEAVEN. 

The result was this, and it makes me SO happy! I adjusted the recipe to a perfect mix (to me)

200ml soy cream light

Vanilla bean

150 ml condensed milk

25grams dark chocolate

20 grams coconut

Heat the cream with the vanilla pod, bring to the boil and let simmer for five minutes. Turn off heat and let sit for an hour. Remove vanilla bean and scrape seeds and put them into the cream. Turn heat back on, add condensed milk, don't boil. Turn off heat. Let cool and transfer to a freezer proof container.

Place in freezer, let cool for 30 minutes then stir, place back in freezer for another 30 minutes, meanwhile melt chocolate and let cool till it's still liquid but not warm. Remove cream from freezer and while stirring drip in chocolate. Place container back in freezer for another 30 minutes. Remove from freezer and add coconut while stirring. Place back in freezer and remove+stir at four 15 minute intervals, after that leave to freeze. The result is truly divine!

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.

For as long as I can remember my dad made ice cream himself. From scratch and when I was a young kid, with no ice cream churner. And so, from a young age I have learned that making ice cream, really is very easy. All it needs is a boat load of love and some patience. I'm planning to share some of my favourites over the coming weeks, but lets start with the most basic of ice creams, vanilla.

This recipe comes from an old eighties cookbook, many times adjusted. It is incredibly low on sugar compared to the original and also less eggy. After all the cream and the flavour are the stars of the show.

Ingredients: 

500ml cream (or 250 cream/250 soy cream light)

1 fresh vanilla pod

2 egg yolks

50 grams of fine caster sugar

Put the cream in a pan with the lengthwise sliced open vanilla pod and gently heat over a medium fire. Bring to the boil and let simmer for five minutes. Turn off the heat and let the mixture sit for a few hours (preferably over night).

Remove the vanilla pod, scrape some seeds out and put them in the cream. Reheat your cream, but don't bring to the boil! Whisk loose the egg yolks and while stirring add three tablespoons of the warm cream to the eggs. Remove pan from heat and add egg mixture, keep stirring. Return pan to fire and gently stir it until mixture starts thickening a bit. Add the sugar and stir until desolved.

Let your mixture cool while stirring occassionally. Pour your mixture through a sieve into a freezer proof container (or your ice cream churner). Put the ice cream in your freezer and stir every half hour until it starts to freeze then four more times every fifteen minutes, then leave to freeze. 

You have just made vanilla ice cream congrats!!

You can also make cinnamon ice cream with this recipe, just replace the vanilla pod with two or three cinnamon sticks!

(photos to follow)

*title of this post blatantly copied from that wonderful Mars ice cream bar tv advert!

The Heroes and Villains, Tennis Goes Daytime Drama.

After a much enjoyed off season, tennis kicked off early in January and in earnest the past fortnight with the Australian Open. Yet after not even a month, I can do with another off season in tennis. It's not the level of tennis that has tired me, it is the constant stream of negativity that is currently surrounding tennis. While I appreciate journalists being critical of players when warranted, tennis seems about stirring the pot when we need not to stir it and blow issues out of proportion in a magnitude that leaves me wondering, what the hell happened. Federer loses a match, he is done, Vika Azarenka takes an ill timed MTO and gets a little lost in translation post-match and she is nearly burned at the stake, and lets not begin to mention the grunting, I am so sick of the talk about grunting. And this is just the mere top of the iceberg. There is drama every corner we turn.
And if there isn't over-negativity, there is a turn to over-positivism. Yes, Na Li fought bravely through two falls during her final, but calling her a hero, really is a step too far.
Can we go back to a middle ground, give praise where it is due and a critical note when warranted, but can we keep in mind that after all is said and done, we are talking about tennis, not Days of our Lives.

Of baby!GOATS and Australian Open draws.

As I write this, it seems the collective tennis community has plunged into Australian Open draw panic. Draw panic? Yes, panic. Faves M and D will definitely lose in rounds 1 or 2 in their super heavy rigged draws, while fave X sees fans planning who will be met in which round despite a lack of form, and lets not start on fave Q who landed in the same quarter once again. Sound familiar? I guess it is what we do, and while we do it, we judge ourselves for doing it. The fact remains, the table has been set, and all we can do is wait whilst becoming sleep deprived.
But fret not, if your fave does crash out in round one or two, there is still hope. There is a Slam frazzle safe haven, where a win or loss doesn't mean all that much. Unless you go on to win the title, but more about that later.
The safe haven I speak of is the junior's tournament. Random losses are the bread and butter of junior's tennis and winning the title doesn't guarantee your mini star a grown up Slam or easy breakthrough, so any match can just be approached as fun!
My tactic of picking juniors to follow is simple. By name. If I like your name, you're in. It is how stumbled upon Pavlyuchenkova, Kvitova (yes I have a thing for ovas) and Ksenia Pervak.
Currently, I mostly follow the junior boys and I am sure they will all grow up to be extremely headcasey headache inducing players on the ATP tour.
But one of my kids sticks out. When he was only fourteen, there were some ravings of a leftie youngster beating the pants off his opponents in the under-18 category. As I have a thing for lefties, I was immediately intrigued and after some googling and web perusingI I found a young promising leftie, Gianluigi Quinzi or, as I like to call him, baby!GOAT. Or if I'm feeling particularly excited 'he is only still sixteen'. Which I'll need to change into 'he only just turned seventeen' in a few weeks.
Nevertheless, if you need a junior to watch, he's your guy. Steadily climbing the ATP ranking, from unranked to 562 in a year and already transitioning to the ATP tour through the hard work of futures, where you have to make at least the second round of the main draw for one tiny ranking point.
So join me in eagerly awaiting the junior's draw, finding your future fave and hoping for a nice tournament!

Christmas Dessert Madness and Mayhem

This year for Christmas, I said, I'd make the dessert. And of course I had to come up with something ridiculously grand, which I had never done before. What is a fun Christmas dinner without panic attacks and cold sweats?
After much experimenting and seven straight hoyrs in the kitchen prepping on Christmas Eve, I produced a (if I may say so myself) super yummy dessert!

Lime Panna Cotta, Raspberry Sorbet, Lime and Raspberry Macarons and a Raspberry Coulis

Lime Panna Cotta (serves 4-6)

200 g fine castor sugar
200ml semi-skimmed milk
450 ml soya cream light
3 to 4 limes
1 lemon
250 g mascarpone
3 sheets of gelatine

For this recipe I use semi-skimmed milk and soya cream light to ease a little on the load of fat. You can use full fat milk and normal cream, but your dish will be much heavier and of course cooking time will differ.

Put the sugar, milk and cream in sauce pan and bring to the boil while gently stirring. Once the cream mixture is gently boiling, leave it to simmer for an hour to an hour and a half. It will have the consistency of a thick custard. Stir occasionally.
Soak the gelatine sheets in cold water. Meanwhile remove the pan from the heat and stir in the mascarpone, if you have lumps, use a stick blender to remove them.
Juice the limes and lemon, this should give about 150ml of juice. Add a bit to the mixture and mix till you have a smooth mixture and taste before you add more juice. I use about 140ml, but you may want more or less depending on your sweet tooth and/or taste of lemons and limes.
Squeeze the gelatine sheets dry and stir them through your mixture one by one.
Divide the mixture over your panna cotta molds, leave to cool to room temperature and then put in fridge and leave overnignt.

Raspberry Sorbet (serves 4-6)

300g frozen raspberries
1,5 shotglas raspberry vodka (or plane vodka with some raspberry syrup)
Juice of half a lemon
75g icing sugar
75cl water

Leave the raspberries to defrost. Once defrosted, put in a bowl with the vodka and let soak for two hours. Stir occassionally so all raspberries soak up vodka. Drain as much of the liquid as possible (and set aside to mix with some Coke Light later, yumm).
Blend the raspberries with the stick blender and pass the goo through a (plastic) sieve into the pan, pour the water and lemon juice through as well. This makes the passing of the raspberry goo easier and you sieve out any lemon bits as well. (nb. quite a large amount of pitty muck remains). Add the sieved icing sugar and stir. Gently heat the mixture to a boil and leave to boil for a few minutes. Turn off the heat and let cool for five minutes. Pour the mixture into a freezer proof container and leave to cool to room temperature. Put the container in the freezer and stir the sorbet every thirty minutes until it really starts to set. Remove from freezer one minute before you are ready to start plating.

Raspberry coulis (8-10 personen)

250gr frozen raspberries
48ml raspberry balsamic
40 ml water
28 ml lemon juice
(icing sugar/liquid stevia)

Defrost the raspberries. Transfer them to a bowl and pour the balsamic in. Leave to soak for two hours, stir occassionally. Puree with a stick blender.
Pour the water into a sauce pan, pass the raspberry goo through a (plastic) sieve, strain the lemon juice with it. Give it a good stir amd bring to a boil. Leave to boil for ten minutes. Pour into a bowl and leave to cool. Once cooled add icing sugar and/or liquid stevia to sweeten. Do not use powdered stevia as it gives a bitter after taste. Leave for a day, uncovered, at room temperature.

Raspberry macarons 10-20

37,5g aged egg whites (at least 24h, preferrably 48h)
100g fine caster sugar
25 ml water
red foodcolouring

37,5g fresh egg whites
62,5g finely ground almonds
62,5g icing sugar

Make sure your mise en place is complete before starting!
Weigh your almonds after sieving them, you lose quite a bit. Mix the almonds through the icing sugar and add in the fresh egg white, mix till you have a thick paste.

Add water and sugar to a sauce pan and turn on heat, keep stirring till the sugar has disolved. Add food colouring. Don't be afraid to be a little extreme, the colour will fade with following steps and during baking. Add thermometer. When the temperature reaches 100C start whisking the eggwhites. (lowest speed). Once the temperature has reached 121C, turn off heat and gently pour the sugar to the eggwhites while beating. Continue beating until the bowl reaches room temperature.
Divide the almond mixture in three parts and fold it into the eggwhites. Scoop this mixture into your piping bag.
Cover a baking tray with parchment paper or a silicone bakingmat. Gently pipe circles mixture onto it. For this recipe I made macarons roughly the size of a euro. Because the macarons were so small, I used a small piping nuzzle for a little more control.when finished piping, gently tap the baking tray on your work bench six times to release excess air. Leave for 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, pre-heat the oven to 150C. Bake for 15 minutes. At 6/7 minutes, open thenoven door briefly. This prevents your macarons heating up too fast and cracking.
After fifteen minutes your macarons should have a firm top but slightly wobbly foot.
Remove baking tray from the oven and leave to cool for ten minutes. Place macarons on roster to let cook and dry further.

Raspberry filling

160g frozen raspberries, defrosted
5 teaspoons fine castor sugar
2 teaspoons corn flour
1 egg, whisked

Blend the rapsberries and pass through a (plastic) sieve into a sauce pan. Add sieved corn flour and sugar, stir in the whisked egg. (if you have lumps, don't be afraid to use the stick blender) heat for five minutes to a boil while stirring. Remove from heat and keep stirring until it thickens. Pour this mixture into a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Leave to cool.

Once the mixture is cooled, compose your macarons. Do this close to serving, or your macarns will go spungy.

Lime macarons 10-20

37,5g aged egg whites (at least 24h, preferrably 48h)
100g fine caster sugar
25 ml water
green foodcolouring

37,5g fresh egg whites
62,5g finely ground almonds
62,5g icing sugar

Make sure your mise en place is complete before starting!
Weigh your almonds after sieving them, you lose quite a bit. Mix the almonds through the icing sugar and add in the fresh egg white, mix till you have a thick paste.

Add water and sugar to a sauce pan and turn on heat, keep stirring till the sugar has disolved. Add food colouring. Don't be afraid to be a little extreme, the colour will fade with following steps and during baking. Add thermometer. When the temperature reaches 100C start whisking the eggwhites. (lowest speed). Once the temperature has reached 121C, turn off heat and gently pour the sugar to the eggwhites while beating. Continue beating until the bowl reaches room temperature.
Divide the almond mixture in three parts and fold it into the eggwhites. Scoop this mixture into your piping bag.
Cover a baking tray with parchment paper or a silicone bakingmat. Gently pipe circles mixture onto it. For this recipe I made macarons roughly the size of a euro. Because the macarons were so small, I used a small piping nuzzle for a little more control.when finished piping, gently tap the baking tray on your work bench six times to release excess air. Leave for 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, pre-heat the oven to 150C. Bake for 15 minutes. At 6/7 minutes, open thenoven door briefly. This prevents your macarons heating up too fast and cracking.
After fifteen minutes your macarons should have a firm top but slightly wobbly foot.
Remove baking tray from the oven and leave to cool for ten minutes. Place macarons on roster to let cook and dry further.

Lime filling

100cl lime juice
20g fine castor sugar
2 teaspoons corn flour
1 egg, whisked

Sieve the lime juice into a sauce pan. Add sieved corn flour and sugar, stir in the whisked egg. (if you have lumps, don't be afraid to use the stick blender) heat for five minutes to a boil while stirring. Remove from heat and keep stirring until it thickens. Pour this mixture into a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Leave to cool.

Once the mixture is cooled, compose your macarons. Do this close to serving, or your macarns will go spungy.


Plate up and enjoy!!

Oliebollen

I have been ignoring the blog,  but it is a new year, so I decided to whipe the slate clean and start again. So here we are. First of all, a happy 2013 to everyone. May it be unforgettable.

For NYE celebrations in the Netherlands we tend to bake. Specifically oliebollen. You see oliebollen-food trucks pop up as early as late November, but the oliebollen eating really builds up post Christmas, with its culmination on December 30th and New Year's Day.
The recipe I have for it was given to me by my mother who got it from a very old trusted cookbook. As far as recipes go, it is singlehandedly the most Dutch thing I know how to make. (since I don't know how to make cheese).

Oliebollen (10-12)

1/2 kilo plain flour
1 sachet of dry yeast (7g)
1/2 litre of luke warm milk (I use semi-skimmed milk)
Salt
Yellow and brown raisins.

Mix the flour with the yeast, give it a good stir with a wooden spoon so all the yeast is properly mixed in. Add milk until the flour is no longer dusting (about or just over half). Add the rest of the milk and a pinch of salt (rather too little than too much, because salty oliebollen are atrocious). Mix until you have a (nearly) smooth batter. Add the raisins as you please, make sure they are evenly distributed.
Cover with a damp cloth and leave to proof for 45 to 60 minutes in a lukewarm spot. (next to a heater or in a oven at 38C)

Heat a pan with sunflower oil or a deep fryer to about 190C (you can test with a small piece of bread). I use an ice scoop to get nice size oliebollen, dip it in water between scoops or your batter will stick to the scoop. Bake 3/4 at the same time.
They are done when they are brown-ish. (note, they brown a little as they cool down as well.)
Serve with a dusting of icing sugar.