Inspiration is a very particular thing….it comes and goes! Sometimes I have really nice ideas (I think!!), but the moment I have them there is no place to write it up so I don’t forget.

Yeah, I have a very short memory unfortunatelly, which is very annoying.

One thing I noticed today when I finally found the time to come here and post something, was that you don’t even know a little bit about myself. Well you know I love to bake and the feelings I share while baking. And I’ve already spread the news that I moved to Holland! But what else?

Well, I’m 23 years-old. I’ve studied Aquatic Sciences, which is my first passion and what I love to do for living. Although at this moment I’m not working in my specific field of studies, this is what I’ve choose to study and to do the rest of my life.

Ok, that’s enough information for now!!!!! Together with these small details of myself I bring you a very nice muffins recipe that I got from my mother’s recipe notebook.

Besides fluffy and smooth they have this kind of hard moisty texture. Each bite you take you can feel 2 flavours: the Marie biscuits and the chocolate. It’s strange because it looks like you are eating a Marie-biscuit but in a cake dough form, with a smooth touch of chocolat! But its a wonderful kind of strange.

I’ve bake them in a rainy, cold day, that I didn’t had to go out of the house. These muffins with the right person to chat, a cup of mint tea and Odetta’s singing on the cd player, Bob Dylan songs, are the perfect combination for a really nice afternoon of sharing stories.

Ingredients:

1 + 1/2 cup of sugar;

1 cup of sunflower oil;

2 cups of flour;

1 cup of smashed marie biscuits;

3 eggs;

1 + 1/2 cup of chocolat milk;

3 tablespoons of baking powder.

Separate the egg-white from the yolks. Mix the sugar with the egg yolks till you get a creamy mixture. Add this mixture to the smashed biscuits, mix it well and add the oil. Add the flour already mixed with the baking powder.

Whisp the egg whites till they get hard and firm. Add the chocolat milk to the flour mixture, and whisp it very well. To do the chocolat milk just heat 1 +1/2 cup of milk and add or powder cocoa (3 to 4 tablespoons), or melt 100 gr of dark chocolat.

At last put together the whisped egg whites to the dough and just mix them.

Pre-heat the oven at 200º C. Put the dough on the muffins baking pans and bake them at 200ºC for 25 minutes, or till they are ready.

Share, enjoy and love.

Regards,

Konrad

So it has been a while since I took time to sit, write and share some baking that I’ve made.

Coming to a new country and life, takes a lot of time and adaptations that normally you think is easy, but then you notice that it takes more that what it was supposed. Integration is kind of easy here in Holland, but the new job takes me a lot of time and effort, so when I come back home many times I just feel like laying down in my bed and sleep. Which it never happens because there is always something to do.

But tonight I finally got the time I needed to sit down and relax…with relaxation comes baking. I miss so much baking. I haven’t made a single a cake or cookie since my last post. That last baking session is not here yet, but you will see it don’t worry.

Today I came back with a very traditional recipe, that it i very common on the United States but also where I came from, Madeira Island. The difference is our recipe I think is not so sweet, it has less dough and that’s it!!!

Here comes a pumpkin pie…..yes the famous pumpkin pie. It is very suitable to post it at this time of my life, since we are with really cold weather for 2 weeks, and still there is no perspective of warming up. A slice of this pie right after being baked is the best end of the afternoon snack. With a nice cup of tea you can enjoy from the warmy couch thew beautiful snow falling down on the other side of the window. Side by the sweet and powerful voice of Etta James, is the best moment to relax, think and enjoy the good things that life brought you till now. And the smell of it when it comes out of the oven…hmmmm, it feels almost like paradise.

Ingredients:

500 gr of pumpkin, without skin;

400 gr of sugar;

2 eggs;

1 pack of fresh pie dough (that is the only part I didn’t enjoy, I like more to do the dough myself…but it was a lazy day);

100 gr of flour;

1 graded orange skin;

1 stick of cinnamon.

Cut the pumpkin in small pieces or squares. Put it in a pan at low fire, add the sugar and let it cook. Stir it every 5 minutes, and when it begins to get softer, start smashing it with a fork. Cook it till you get this moussy and soft mixture.

Add the cinnamon and the orange skin before it is completely cooked. When it is done, take the cinamon stick and let it rest for 5 minutes.

Add the eggs and the flower and whip it very well. Put the dough on the baking pan and fill it with the mixture.

Bake it in pre-heated oven a 180ºC for 30 minutes.

Suggestion serve it with a little string of sugar cane honey or maple syrup.

Share, enjoy and love.

Regards,

Konrad

So here we are again….

The start of a new season or year demands the use of cheerfull and hopefull themes, so I decided to try the Red Velvet Cake recipe. It isn’t a family recipe, but it was for a family celebration, and I had the help of my mother and younger sister, so in my point of view it isvery suitable to blog.

The Red Velvet Cake is a traditional American cake, that very commonly baked on the South states, specially in Texas. It has this beatiful red color inside and always a constrasting and mind loosing white frosting, that can be buttercream, white chocolate or cream cheese.

Since we didn’t had enough red colorant, we used for one layer the red and for the second the green one. So we end up with the Portugal flag!!!!

With Florence and The Machine new album as Soundtrack, we end up with this beautiful and full of new, positive feelings for the year of 2012.

Ingredients:

2 and 1/2 cups of flour;

1 and 1/2 cup of sugar;

1 and 1/2 teaspoon of powder chocolate or cocoa;

1 teaspoon of salt;

1 teaspoon of soda;

2 eggs;

1 and 1/2 cup of vegetal oil;

1 cup of buttermilk (to make the buttermilk mix 1 tablespoon of lemon juice with a cup of milk, and let it rest for 10 minutes);

1 tablespoon of vinacre;

2 tablespoons red colorant and 2 of green.

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. In a separate bowl, whip the eggs with the sugar, till you get a creamy white mixture. Then add the rest of the liquid ingredients except for the colorants.

Add the dry ingredients to the liquid ingridients and mix it very well. Now separate the dough in two equal parts. In one of them you color it with the red and the other with the green. Now whip the dough. Let it rest for 2 minutes.

Pre-heat the oven at 180ºC. Cover two baking pans with butter and flour and put the dough. Before baking, “smash” the baking pan to the table, so it takes the air bubles out. Now bake it for 20 minutes at 180ºC.

When its done, let it get cold and take it out of the baking pan.

Frosting

Ingredients:

100 gr of cream cheese;

100 mL of cream;

75 gr of powder sugar;

100 gr of grinded mixture of nuts, hazelnuts and almonds.

Put the nuts on a bakin pan, and springle them with sugar. Send them to oven for 5 till 7 minutes at 200ºC.

Whip the cream till they get really creamy. Now add the cream cheese and mix it very well. At last add the powder sugar and whip.

Now glue the two cakes with the frosting and the nuts. Then cover the rest of the cake with the frosting and cover it with the nuts, the way you wish.

I hope you reallu have fun and enjoy this cake. For us was really fun and we got to finish the year of 2011 with the best thing we could have…Sharing a really nice moment. When doing the frosting you will feel really tempted to taste it and spill it over your partners. I advice you to save some of the frosting to eat with fresh strawberrys…..it is delicious!!!

Share, enjoy and love.

Regards,

Konrad

Winter can be hard for some folks, less sun, cold, wind….but for other people, like me, winter is a lovely season.

There isn’t a better time to stay at home drinking a nice cup of tea, or coffee, or hot chocolate. To have a cold sunday outside, while you’re at home in your pijama, or just in sweatpants, cosy and warm….the highest of comfortability and joy. Join to this pack a really nice set up of music, like Al Green, and you have the perfect environment to create whatever you like.

This is what happened here….a normal winter day in Madeira Island, Christmas has gone by for a few days. My mother and I, just finished the morning task and we decided to try a chocolate tart recipe that she had on a recipe book I gave here for the holidays. But since I’m passionate about chocolate and cream cheese, we decided to improve the recipe to this level. It went really well. It stayed really smoothie, soft…a mix of flavors in your mouth that really I can’t describe.

And it had the approval of a lot of people, even from persons that say that don’t enjoy sweets very much (like my father). 

You see winter has this positive side too, it opens your taste glands to new kinds of flavors, specially chocolate flavors. I had the opportunity to try some new things to this holiday. 

We had at my parents hotel a couple that live in Norway, that gave us to try traditional christmas sweets made by the lady, that is called Semiha, and which some of the recipes where from her’s mother and law. You can check here blog here:

http://www.semilicious.com

Here goes two of the very delicious and losing eating control sweets that they gave us to try:

http://www.semilicious.com/bakehouse/lebkuchen/

http://www.semilicious.com/bakehouse/mincemeat-pies/

Ingredients:

2 200 mL of cream;

200 gr of chocolate (can be milk chocolate, or dark chocolate, the one you prefer);

200 gr of cream cheese

75 gr of butter;

250 gr of smashed butter cookies (or other kind of cookies you’ll like);

100 gr of butter.

For the bottom:

- Smash the cookies till you get a kind of flour. You can use butter cookies, crackers, or even corn flakes, what you wish. I advice toasted butter cookies, that aren’t too sweet.

- Melt the 100 gr of butter in a pan and add it to the cookie flour. Mix it very well with your hands, till and the cookies are moist by the butter, and you can make a kind of different shape when grabbing the “dough”.

- In a baking pan with removable bottom, spread the dough and press it really hard, making an uniformal bed of cookie. Pre-heat the oven at 200ºC, and bake this at 180ºC for 5-10 minutes. When it is ready take let it get cold for a while.

For the filling:

- Melt the chocolate on an pan with the butter, at a very low fire;

- When melted, add the cream, already whipped and stir it very slowly, with the pan outside of the heat. Stir it till you get an homogeneous mixture;

- In a side bold whip the cream cheese with the cream (I used soy milk cream for this one), till you get a unique mixture.

- Turn the chocolate mixture in the cookie bed and then the cream cheese mixture. With a stick, you can do the drawings you want. Send to the fridge 3 hours and it is ready to serve. 

I will advice you to let it stay on the fridge for 24 hours, it gets even better. The longer it stays, it gets more consistency but never loses the smoothie, soft touch and palate.

Share, enjoy and love.

Konrad