Monthly Archives: April 2015

Baking

Strawberry and poppy seed mousse cake.

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In the recent GF it stands as a “Queen of hearts” cake, but theirs has hearts on top, mine has flowers, due to not having a heart shaped cutter.  I baked the base last night, this morning made the mousse and the rest, then spent 30 minutes cleaning the kitchen. This cake belongs to the “Lots of pierdolenie” category, should one like that exist. 🙂

So, for the base;5 egg yolks got beaten with 160 g of caster sugar. A zest and juice of 1 lemon added( can’t taste any, to be frank),85 g of self raising flour, 25 g of ground almonds and a tbsp of poppy seeds, all taken care of by the kitchen aid. The egg whites whipped separately got added later, to loosen up the mixture. It all baked for about 25 minutes in 180 degrees.

This morning sliced horizontally, strawberries placed tightly around the edges, then all covered by the mousse. For the mousse I blitzed 400 g of strawberries with about 5 tbsps of sugar- less than in the recipe, I though 200 g was a bit mental.  I then passed it through a sieve to have it nice and smooth. Warmed up, melted 4 gelatine leaves in. Whipped around 350 ml of cream and added the strawberry mixture. And finally the top layer, which took a lot of time. I drew a template dividing it into 16 small squares, cut through some and filled in with strawberry jam. Sprinkled the other ones with icing sugar. Set in the fridge for a couple of hours.

The cake’s light, refreshing, easy to eat. It will be great in summer. Dustin has just licked the remains from Florek’s plate. 🙂

 

Good Food

Proper baked beans.

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Sometimes on Saturday mornings I finish my coffee and turn on “Saturday Kitchen live”.  In it I saw Tom Kerridge’s recipe for proper beans on toast. Tom said that once one tries it, there’s no way back to the canned alternative.  Well, there is a way back, I’d say, as canned alternative doesn’t take 12 hours of soaking the beans and then over 2 hours cooking. But it’s worth it. Super rich flavour and I still went easy on vinegar.

So, about 150 g of haricot beans were cosily soaking over night and most of the day. Then drained and boiled for nearly an hour.

Some bacon, chopped and fried on rapeseed oil, chopped onion and a crushed clove of garlic, then 200 g of passata, a splosh of ketchup, 4 tbsps of brown sugar, about 70 ml of white wine vinegar ( recipe called for red, I had none) and about 250 ml of water- all this went in and was brought to the boil. Then the beans went in and it all cooked down slowly for over an hour.

Tom also baked the soda bread to go with his beans, I served mine with rustic French baguette.  One thing can make it better- the marriage with some grilled chipolatas. Next week. 🙂

Good Food, Room for improvement

Beef Stroganoff.

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Jamie Oliver’s, from 15 minute meals.  I’m not sure how genuine a recipe it was, but we ate it all, it was good, but not amazing in any way. Not enough garlic? Boring( chestnut) mushrooms? Sirloin not awesome enough?

While my rice was cooking I chopped a red onion and a couple of gherkins, poured a bit of gherkin water on it and tossed well.  Chopped my mushrooms, fried them with some crushed garlic, added half of that onion/gherkin mixture to the pan. Then added my sirloin, thinly sliced, seasoned with salt, pepper and smoked paprika.  Finished with doubled cream, tossed well again. Jamie used yoghurt in his, I had no such ideas, yoghurt is good for breakfast, not for dinner. 🙂

Nice, tasty, no fireworks.

Dessert

Chatka Puchatka.

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From mojewypieki.com.  I actually felt like making something with 2 packets of the petit beurre biscuits I had in the cupboard and Dorota had just the answer.   I followed her recipe all the way, so below’s the link to her blog, plus the photo result of my effort.

http://www.mojewypieki.com/przepis/sernik-chatka-puchatka