Chocolate rum-raisin cookies

Delicious, delicious chocolate. Oh, oh my. You know, sometimes, a girl has to eat chocolate. And when there's no chocolate in the house, chocolate cookies made with the best cocoa you can find will just have to do!

Last night, as I was scouring the shelves of our cabinets trying to find something, anything chocolate related, I happened upon a very old bar of rum-raisin chocolate. Old, as in, the packaging felt brittle. Yeah. How that managed to survive this long in our cupboard without being eaten, I have no idea. It certainly is a miracle, in this house. But it gave me an idea! I grabbed a bottle of rum, a bowl of raisins, and made rum-soaked raisins to go into a fluffy, soft, pillowy chocolate cookie.

This chocolate cookie base is based off a recipe by The Pioneer Woman, my go-to website for comfort food recipes, and I think you could add practically anything that even remotely goes with chocolate, like nuts, other dried fruits, oatmeal, more chocolate... I was thinking of trying these with mocha beans, the sharp coffee flavour would be excellent in combination with the full, rich chocolate cookie base.

Oh man... I might have to get a box of mocha beans now.

Chocolate rum-raisin cookies
Makes about 18, depending on size

You will need:

- 1/2 cup golden raisins
- enough dark rum to cover
OR
- 1/2 cup rum raisins

If you want to soak your raisins yourself, put them in a bowl and cover them with the rum. Let sit for at least 24 hours. If you're in a hurry, you could try my method: Put your raisins in a bowl with a lid, cover with the rum, and close the lid. Then put the bowl in a larger bowl filled with hot water from the tap and let it sit for as long as possible. When you're ready to add them to your dough, drain them off and pat dry with paper towels. They won't have the punch of real rum raisins, but there will be a definite aftertaste!

- 140 grams of softened butter
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 6 tablespoons of cocoa
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon of salt

Preheat your oven to 175 °C and prepare a cookie sheet with baking paper or a baking mat.

Cream together your butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla extract and stir well until combined.
In a different bowl, mix your flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt. Sift it into your wet ingredients in batches and stir each time until just combined.
Drain your raisins if necessary and fold them into the batter.
Drop tablespoon-sized heaps of batter onto your baking sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes or until the cookies seem just set. Allow to cool for a few minutes on the sheet before transferring them to a cooling rack to further cool down. Be careful when transferring them, the cookies are pretty delicate!

Enjoy!

Lunch time: Couscous salad

Aw man, my poor neglected blog! I have been so incredibly busy, I have had little to no time to even think about blogging, let alone attempt to write something! And I was so keen to post something! Anything! I bought a new camera (a real DSLR! Yay! I've got a Real Camera for Grownups now!) and I've been dying to use it on some pictures for the blog! I'm still fiddling with settings and getting used to taking pictures with it but hopefully you can see some sort of improvement. So for my lack of posts: my sincerest apologies

But what I won't apologise for is that delicious bowl of golden yellow, enticing green and popping red, orange and pink at the top of the page. Oh boy. One of the perks of working from home has definitely been that I am able to make my lunch fresh at lunch time and since I like a bit of variation every now and then, salads have been my go-to lunch for a while now. They're so versatile! I always follow the same formula for my lunch salads: a good base, with a huge helping of veggies (usually tomato, cucumber and bell pepper), and a nice heaping pile of protein. Apart from that, it's usually a free-for-all, depending on what I have in the fridge and what I'm craving at that moment.

This salad follows my formula to a T, and then adds a few dashes of extra-special to bring it right up to the top of my favourite lunches! Have you ever eaten couscous? I hadn't, until recently. It's a semolina-based Arabic staple dish with a texture not unlike rice. Fresh couscous is made of tiny semolina pellets that are then steamed. Most supermarkets don't sell fresh couscous, however, they sell pre-steamed couscous pellets that take next to no time to prepare, making it an excellent alternative to rice or pasta. The texture is very light and fluffy, making it the perfect base for a salad dish as it's delicious both cold and hot from the pan.

This delicious lunch salad is a cinch to put together. Simply bring some water to a boil, take it off the heat, tip in your couscous, stir some spices through, and combine with the rest of the ingredients. Done! One delicious and filling salad in next to no time! And with the slight heat from the spices, the crunch from the cucumber, and the sweet and sour from the apricots and tomatoes, this is the perfect little salad for a summer day.

Couscous salad
(filling lunch salad for 1)
------------------

75 grams dried couscous
80 ml water (roughly, but follow the instructions on your packet of couscous to be sure)
5-8 cherry tomatoes, quartered
1/3 cucumber, cubed
3 slices of turkey deli meat, stacked and sliced into cubes, or a small piece of turkey breast, cooked to your liking and cubed
4-6 dried apricots, cubed
1 teaspoon hot curry spices
salt and pepper to taste

Cook your couscous according to the instructions of your packet. (It will most likely be a variation of 'bring water to a boil, take off the heat, tip in your couscous, allow to stand for 3 minutes, stir to separate and make fluffy') Once done, add your curry spices and salt and pepper to taste. I like mine spicy so I usually add about 1 teaspoon, followed with a small amount of salt and a reasonably large dash of pepper. Stir through to combine the spices and the couscous properly, and place your couscous in a deep dish or bowl. Add your veggies, meat and apricots and stir to combine. Taste and adjust spices to taste, if necessary. If not: Enjoy your lunch!

Chocolate Coffee Cake

Read that title again. Go on, I'll wait. Yes, that's right: Chocolate. Coffee. Cake. If that's not the perfect combination of ingredients I don't know what is. A week ago, Tim and I went to the city hall to get our marriage pre-registered, as is required in The Netherlands. While we were both a bit so-so about the whole thing our parents thought this called for celebration, and I jumped on the occasion to get my baking stuff out!


My mother made a special request, more on that in a later post, but because I knew it was a request that not everybody would enjoy, I made 2 cakes. This one was special. I had this thing in mind where I wanted to combine deep, intense, dark chocolate flavour with the bitter bite of coffee, but couldn't quite wrap my head around how to do it. I tried looking into instant coffee added to the batter, but the idea of the little coffee bits getting stuck between my teeth made it less appealing. And then I found this recipe on The Tart Tart for a chocolate coffee bundt cake, that called for freshly brewed coffee in stead of the raw deal.



There were (of course) a few adjustments made in the recipe because I can't leave well enough alone or because I ran out of ingredients (of course. I'm such a bad planner!). I originally thought I'd cover the top in melted dark chocolate, too, but the end result was so rich in flavour and had such wonderful hints of chocolatey coffee that lingered long after the crumbs had melted on our tongues, that I decided against it. It would be overkill. This one is perfect as it is.

Chocolate Coffee Bundt cake

Makes 1 standard-sized Bundt cake. (I didn't measure... But I think we got between 15 and 20 generous slices out of it!)

Ingredients:
1+1/4 plus 1 tbsp cups of freshly brewed (strong) coffee.
1 cup cocoa (my carton of cocoa had a hiccup so I poured in more than the recipe called for. Happy accident, I assure you!)
2+1/4 cup white sugar
1+1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
1+1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp milk
3/4 cup oil (I used walnut oil, and less than the recipe calls for, because I ran out!)
2+1/2 cup + 2 tbsp all purpose flour
2 tsp vanilla extract

Pre-heat your oven to 175 degrees Celcius, and butter and flour your Bundt pan thoroughly.

Pour the fresh coffee into a pan and combine with the cocoa. While whisking frequently, bring to a boil. It will be quick, because your coffee is hot, so whisk until smooth and take it off the heat to cool down.

Mix the sugar, salt, baking powder, eggs and the egg yolk until it's creamy. Add the milk, oil and vanilla and mix again, for about 1 minute. Add the flour in batches, making sure the mixture is completely smooth before you dump in the next batch. Add the coffee mixture, and mix again until it's smooth. Then mix for about 5 minutes on an average speed or as fast as your hand can manage with your whisk (it's quite the work-out, I can assure you).
The batter will be very loose and liquid, but that's okay.

Pour your batter into the prepared cake-tin. Bake for 60-70 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. My oven runs a bit cooler than it should and it took about 75 minutes before it was done.
Let the cake cool in the tin before you turn it out onto a cooling rack, cutting board or serving plate.

This cake is absolutely delicious freshly baked and served with a bit of whipped cream and fresh berries. It's actually even more delicious the next day (and even the day after that) because it becomes a bit more moist, and it keeps well in a sealed container, in case there's anything left after you serve it the first time, that is.

Appetisers

Hey! That doesn't look like an appetiser!

Oh, you guys, I have been so busy it's unreal! First, there was work-related busy. Then, I was busy with wedding stuff. Then I got busy with the flu for a couple of days, followed by more wedding-related busy-being, then it was suddenly already February and I was busy with festival-related preparatory stuff. (The ticketsale for Lowlands 2013 began last Saturday. We spent the morning getting horribly stressed out because of the waiting line on the website, there was some stress involved in the actual purchasing of the first 4 tickets when we finally got through the waiting line, then we spent some time verifying with the others that were in that same digital waiting line that we indeed got all 12 tickets needed for this year, and then we went over to my parents' house to celebrate with everyone of our festival-group (brother, sister, mother, significant others, and a bunch of friends) that we all got tickets and that we were really going! Whoo!)

That sort of looks like food...

No excuse to neglect my poor little blog, of course. So please take this post as a kind of appetiser, with a handful of previews of stuff I made, am working on, have devoured with gusto, you get the idea, with some actual blog content to follow in the next few days!

Yep, that looks like actual food content. Hmmm... Food...

I promise I won't keep you waiting too long!

Recipe: chocolate cranberry cookies

Christmas is already over! Wow, those days zoomed by, didn't they? Gone before I knew it. The days before Christmas were hectic and stressful, so I very much looked forward to the days off, even though the stress was partially to blame on something not work-related! You see, we had a special announcement to make this Christmas.

Who are engaged and freezing on a seaside cliff? These two!

We are getting married!

 

What does that have to do with cookies, you're probably wondering. Well, if I get stressed, I often find myself in the kitchen to bake cookies. As a form of stress relief, you see. Delicious, delicious stress relief. And seeing as we got engaged on the 15th of December but picked Christmas as the date to tell our families the big news, I got quite stressed in those 10 days of waiting! So I baked Christmas-appropriate cookies to go with the news!

I wanted to write 'We are getting married!' on the cookies in melted chocolate, but the melted chocolate was too thick for the nozzle on my squirt bottles (booh! I'm pretty sure I ruined one by clogging the nozzle with white chocolate!), so as a back-up plan, I covered them in the white chocolate and drizzled dark chocolate all over them. They were a big hit! And so was the news!

These relatively simple cookies are based on a recipe from the wonderful blog I Am Baker. In stead of adding white chocolate chunks to the dough, though, I added dried cranberries. In hindsight, I should have given them a chop, because the cranberries were rather large and impossible to cut through with a cookie cutter, making for some rather uneven and wonky cookies here and there, and I ended up with a lot of cookie dough crumbs and dough-covered cranberries on my workbench. Which is how I found out that the dough itself is absolutely delicious. Really, be careful you don't eat the whole batch raw because the chocolatey flavour from the cocoa powder and the somewhat acidic pop from the cranberries will make you go back for more!

But trust me when I say this: They're even better when actually baked.

Chocolate cranberry cookies

adapted from I am Baker
Makes a hell of a lot of cookies. I stopped at 60.

Ingredients:
-1 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- 2 sticks room temperature butter
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 cup cocoa powder
- pinch of salt
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries (chopped)
- 150 gr. white chocolate (2 bars)
- 75 gr. dark chocolate (1 bar)

Cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy.
Stir in the egg and the vanilla extract.
Stir in the flour in small quantities at a time, until fully incorporated.
Stir in the salt.
Stir in the cocoa. Be careful, it'll floosh up if you stir too roughly and coat EVERYTHING in cocoa powder. I speak from experience.
Stir in the cranberries until mixed throughout the dough.

Cover the dough in cling wrap and place in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes to firm up before you roll it out.
Pre-heat your oven to 175 C. Roll out your dough (it is quite sticky, so place it between two sheets of waxed paper to roll out) until it is about 1 cm. thick. Cut out your cookies using a cutter. Mine is scalloped and has a 5 cm. diameter.
Place your cookies on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven for approximately 10-12 minutes. The original recipe says 8-11, but this depends heavily on your oven. My oven doesn't actually run as hot as it should, so I placed them in there for the full 12 minutes.

Once they are done, fish them off the sheet and place on a cooling rack to cool off completely before decorating them.

When it's time to decorate your cookies, melt your chocolate in a microwave-safe bowl or mug in short intervals, stirring in between each nuke until the chocolate is fully melted. Cover your cookies with chocolate, and allow the chocolate to dry at least half-way until you decide you can't control yourself. Only then can you eat one. Or two. Or five. I won't judge, I've eaten at least 20 on my own.

Enjoy!

Cheese biscuits

My dad has some health issues and needs to go into surgery soon. Nothing serious, don't worry, but serious enough to warrant some treats!

The only problem is... He doesn't have a sweet tooth. How he and I are related, I still don't understand, but he does not like sweets. Candy, cookies, biscuits, cake, ice cream, pie.. Doesn't like it. So what would you make a man that does not like sweet stuff?!

Savoury things, of course! Cheese biscuits! These are delicious little morsels and are great on their own, but could go great with some cream cheese-esque substance or garlic butter, or a mustard dipping sauce, some bacon or other salty meat... Or anything, really, because these are delicious!

I found a recipe for home-made goldfish crackers on Smitten Kitchen but they are made with cheddar and my dad happens to not really like cheddar. Thankfully, I live in the land of cheese, so I made these with regular Gouda cheese. The cheese itself is relatively sharp and salty, but creamy enough to make the dough hold up. The rest of the dough? Easy as pie! Some butter, some flour, and some salt and onion powder!

While the recipe calls for only 12 to 15 minutes in the oven, these were in for 25. Not only are mine bigger than the goldfish, but my test subject, the BF, likes his cheese biscuits really nice and crispy so I flipped them over after 20 minutes and baked them for another 5. The result? Delicious, crispy, crunchy biscuits, with a nice, salty, onion-y flavour.

------------------------
Cheese biscuits
(makes +/- 25)
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

1 1/2 cup coarsely grated cheese (I used Gouda 48+)
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon onion powder (keep in mind that this is most likely a concentrate so be careful with adding more! I used 1/4 teaspoon and it was very overpowering.)
A pinch of salt, depending on how salty the cheese you are using is.
A pinch of pepper, depending on taste.

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix until it forms a ball. It will be slightly crumbly, but keep mixing, it'll come together quick enough!
When the dough is formed into a ball, wrap it in foil and stick it in the fridge for half an hour. In the mean time, prepare a clean surface by dusting it with flour and preheat your oven to 175 degrees Celcius.
When your dough is sufficiently chilled, carefully start rolling it out until it is about 1/2 cm thick and cut out your biscuits with a cookie cutter! Mine was about 3 cm in diameter and yielded me 25 biscuits. Place your biscuits on a clean cookie sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes until they are turning golden around the edges, then flip them over and bake for another 5-10 minutes. Take the sheet out and let cool on a rack before transferring the biscuits to a bowl, bag... or your stomach, I won't judge.

Lunchtime: turkey salad

I have some serious salad issues. As in, I really, really love salads. It's becoming an issue.

Nah, who am I kidding, there is no such thing as too much salad! I have been on a bit of a salad kick recently and have been eating salad for lunch a lot. Normally, I hide it by wrapping it in a tortilla, but tortillas aren't exactly the healthiest of foods. So I left out the wrap and put it in a bowl! Then put a bird on it. That's how I roll. (and apparently I'm a poet and I don't even know it.)

This salad is the easiest of salads because it requires just 5 minutes of your time to throw together and requires only a tiny amount of cutting and chopping. You could even do it without the cutting and chopping. And with a total of 300 calories a bowl (give or take a few, my calculations say 308) it's a perfect lunch that'll keep you going for a while. For dinner, I want to make this with grilled chicken breast, maybe marinate it first, and more tomatoes, maybe some peppers, maybe a decent dressing... Maybe even some grains to bulk it up.. The possibilities are endless, people, endless!

 I know this is so easy it doesn't require a recipe, but here is one anyway.

What you need:
1-2 cups of rocket lettuce
3-4 cherry tomatoes (I think I used 4 here)
2 slices of turkey lunch meat
50 gr. light feta cheese (This is Arla Apetina)
1/2 tablespoon olive oil (0,075 ml)
salt
pepper
dried Italian herbs
(optional) 20 gr. pine nuts (leave these out to cut calories. I would, but I love these so so so much..)

What you do:
If you are adding pine-nuts, they're best slightly toasted. Grab a pan, pop it on the stove with the burner on low, wait until your pan is relatively hot, throw in the pine nuts and toast them lightly, stirring or shaking occasionally, until they turn more golden and fragrant and are luring your boyfriend into the kitchen with their enticing scent to come see what you're cooking. Turn off the heat, shake occasionally until you're ready to use them. (And be mean like me and waft some of that enticing scent down the hall to the study where he's sitting.)

Grab a small bowl, add your oil and add a dash of salt (don't overdo it, there's plenty in the cheese and turkey!) and some pepper and Italian herbs to taste. Stir well and set aside.
Slice your turkey slices into squares. Quarter the cherry tomatoes.

Fill your bowl with your lettuce. Then start topping up! Add your turkey, tomatoes and feta cheese, top with the toasted pine nuts if you have them, and drizzle the dressing over the top. Done! Enjoy your tasty, tasty lunch!

Peanut butter fudge

Fudge. Who doesn't like fudge? Well, I know a few people, but they don't know what they're talking about, obviously. Creamy, chewy, delicious fudge, I could eat you any day of the week. I won't, but I could.

It's my brother's birthday today and I wanted to give him something fun. I bought him a Lego storage head (they're really cool, and stackable too!) and decided to fill it with fudge. Fudge has become somewhat of a running gag in our circle, ever since one of their friends watched their house and cats while my brother and his girlfriend were on holiday and hid about half a kilo of fudge in little bags all around the house. When we went on holiday to England two years ago we came home with more fudge than we could ever eat. This, plus the fact that he eats a lot of peanut butter and only one specific brand, made me decide on peanut butter fudge.

Now, I have made fudge before. I made some chocolate fudge, with sweetened condensed milk, and that was pretty good, but I did not know how to make peanut butter fudge. Tastespotting helped me in the direction of this recipe on Some Kitchen Stories, which I adapted slightly. I thought the mixture tasted too much of powdered sugar and could barely recognise the peanut butter, so I added some salt to bring out the taste some more. I think it succeeded in bringing out the peanut butter more and you can certainly recognise the flecks of it in the fudge, but they are still horrendously sweet. They are also very crumbly, but, looking at the original recipe and pictures, I think that's normal.

Peanut Butter Fudge

1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup smooth peanut butter
4 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
a pinch of salt, to taste

-----
Prepare a square dish with aluminium foil (the original recipe says an 8x8 inch dish, though bigger will simply mean thinner pieces. I actually lined a larger oven dish but was able to shape the mixture very well, so only 2 sides of the slab were actually connected to the dish.)

In a microwave-safe bowl, combine the butter and peanut butter. Cover the top of the bowl with microwave-safe cling wrap and nuke on high (750 watt) for 2 minutes. Fold over the wrap and stir with a wooden spoon until combined, then replace the cling wrap and nuke it for another 2 minutes. It will be steaming hot, be careful!

Stir until the mixture is completely lump-free (though it will probably already be completely smooth) and add the vanilla extract. Start sifting in the powdered sugar and stir well. It will become increasingly more difficult to stir but keep at it!
When combined, taste (careful, it may still be hot), and add salt if needed. I added a large pinch because of the extreme sweetness, but if that's to your liking, then leave the salt out. Stir thoroughly when adding salt though, since it's already quite doughy, it might stick to one spot in the mixture and make for one rather unpleasant piece of candy.

Grab your prepared dish and spread out the mixture evenly. Place it in the refrigerator for at least one hour before cutting into squares.

Enjoy!

When life gives you crumbles...

Lunchtime usually means crackers and cheese spread for me. I pair it with a handful of cherry tomatoes or a bowl of grapes, but it mostly comes down to two crackers and some cheese spread. And some cracked black pepper, if I'm feeling fancy. This is mostly because I'm too lazy to fix something else for lunch, and since I'm the only one in this house that actually eats lunch (the birds don't count), there's not much in the house in ways of lunch-appropriate goods, anyway.

So what happens when I open the pack of crackers and the last two crackers come tumbling out.. well.. as shown above?

Swearing, for one. Because who the hell stepped on my crackers?! Followed by a frantic search in the cupboards and fridge for something else to eat because really, try spreading some cheese spread on crumbles. It's a challenge, I can tell you that. And not one I'm in the mood for when I'm hungry and cranky.

I managed to fish a bunch of cherry tomatoes from my fridge and a package of leftover mini-mozzarella bulbs (they're so cute and tiny! And great to use as a topping on your pizza.), so those crumbles...

Got turned into croutons! Paired with some fresh basil from my balcony garden and a simple olive oil dressing with some salt, pepper and Italian herbs, I saved my lunch! And in a delicious, delicious way, I might add.

Pizza-night

You know how every once in a while you get that craving? The unshakable urge to just indulge in a big pizza? I know you do. Everyone does. Right? I've only once heard of someone not liking pizza. We cut all ties after that. I can't live around someone who doesn't like pizza.

(I kid. A bit.)

Pizza has been a staple in this house for a while now, since we're both lazy and often can't be bothered to make a decent meal. Now, with my change in diet, I can't eat normal pizza of course. (in fact, I don't think I have had normal pizza for weeks!) Normal pizzas often clock in at 800 or 900 calories a piece! And don't even get me started on the so-called American pizzas, with their thick crusts and abundance of cheese and toppings.  But a low-calorie pizza? That's right up my alley!

I found this recipe in a diet book I've had lying around for years but never took the time to really look into. While the original called for blue cheese and roasted peppers as its toppings, two toppings I really do not care for at all, I liked the idea of using a simple tortilla as the base instead of a pizza crust. We kept the toppings simple and tasty, and kept the toppings on mine to a bare minimum and added some more for the BF's pizza. The wrap base turns into a very decent, albeit somewhat thin and flexible, base, with a very tasty and crunchy edge. So tasty, in fact, that the BF ate every single last crumb, whereas he normally would leave the edges because he doesn't like bread.
The pizza base, just the wrap and the tomato-pesto sauce, works great with almost any topping and I am definitely making a roast chicken pizza next time, and want to experiment with other kinds of cheese, lower calorie meats, maybe a veggie pizza... Think of the possibilities!
While the original recipe clocks in at about 450 calories, with the adjustments we made, in particular the regular mozzarella and the salami, but also the addition of the pine nuts, I think this one comes closer to 550, 600 calories. Still miles away from the 900 I would normally chow down, though!


Wrap pizza

ingredients:
-1 large wrap tortilla
- 1 carton of pureed tomatoes
- pesto
- mozzarella (you could go for light mozzarella, but the only one they sell in our supermarket tastes like rubber bands, so we went for the regular one)

- pine nuts
- thinly sliced salami
- pepper
- rocket/rucola lettuce

Preheat the oven to 200 C.
Mix your tomato puree and three teaspoons of pesto. Spread about 2 tablespoons of the mixture on a wrap. Slice your mozzarella reasonably thin. Top your pizza with a couple of slices of salami, some mozzarella, followed by a sprinkle of pine nuts and some pepper.
Bake for about 10 minutes until the cheese has melted and the crust is crispy. Top before eating with a big handful (or two, if you're like me and eat it off your pizza before eating the actual pizza) of rocket lettuce.

Enjoy!

Spicy garlic chickpeas

We were unbelievably uninspired at dinner time this week. It was almost painful to watch, I am sure, the way the BF and I were standing in the supermarket, staring at the coolers with meats and wandering back and forth between the veggies and the frozen pizzas... I'll be honest, I have not been feeling very well this week and to say that I wasn't exactly in the mood to do some actual cooking is an understatement.

So we settled. We had some pre-baked Egyptian pitas in our cupboard somewhere, and they're awesome with shoarma and garlic sauce, but that's not really a healthy option for me, so the BF took home the shoarma, and I made myself some spicy garlic chickpeas! It was an experiment, because I had read some recipes that sounded pretty great, but I did not follow one at all. They turned out so unbelievably delicious though, so I'm sharing the recipe.

Spicy garlic chickpeas

- 1 can of chickpeas, washed and drained (I used the 425 ml can from Bonduelle)

- 3 cloves of garlic / pre-minced garlic with olive oil
- olive oil (if you're not using the pre-minced stuff)
- 2 teaspoons of spicy curry powder
- rocket lettuce
- cherry tomatoes
- pita bread

For the garlic sauce

- 1/4 cup of Non-fat Greek yoghurt
- 1 clove of garlic
- pinch of salt and pepper


Wash and drain your chickpeas thoroughly. I don't know if this is typical for the brand, but mine always have this top layer of nice, loose chickpeas followed by a thick layer of squishy-looking peas in a jelly-like substance, which just looks grody. So rince thoroughly!
Finely mince your garlic cloves and add to a pan on medium heat with about half a tablespoon of olive oil, and let simmer for a minute or so. If you are using the pre-minced stuff (which I was using since the garlic in our supermarket looks like it's about to start talking), don't add any extra oil.
Add your curry powder and mix to combine with the garlic. Then add your chickpeas and stir to coat with the curry-garlic mixture. You can taste one to see if you need to adjust the spices. Keep to one or two though, if you're like me, your pan will be half-empty before it reaches the table...
 Keep the heat to medium/low and, stirring occasionally, cook your chickpeas for 8-10 minutes.
In the meantime, bake your pita bread, wash your lettuce and chop your tomatoes in quarters.

Then grab a bowl and make your garlic sauce:
Add the yoghurt to the bowl. Mince your clove of garlic, add the salt and pepper and stir to combine. Taste and adjust flavours to your liking. I love garlic, so I always add at least one more clove, but if you like subtle tastes, stick to one!

To assemble, slice open your pita like an envelope, grab a spoonful of garlic sauce and spread it around inside and up the sides of your pita. Then add a handful of rocket salad, a few quarters of tomato, and several spoonfuls of the chickpeas. Top with some more tomato and a few dollops of garlic sauce.

These make a delicious and easy dinner, and I can say from experience that it tastes even better the next day for lunch!

Enjoy!

Upping my game

I seem to have hit a plateau. It's not a solid, sturdy plateau, since I see my weight bounce up and down a bit (I am still weighing every day and really should not do that...) but it's making me a bit annoyed. According to the BF, it's because I am now building up MAD MUSCLES YO, meaning that my weight might go down slower now that my body is adjusting to more muscle tissue. If so, this is of course a good thing. We'll have to wait and see. I have been taking down measurements this weekend and will compare next weekend to see if there is any difference.

Even though my mother (who I have casually informed of my change in diet and subsequent weight loss, as she came with me to the gym yesterday and I had to discuss it with people there) thinks she can see some difference in my tummy, I am not really noticing any difference in my overall appearance yet, though I have noticed a slight difference in a certain area. My boobs are not their bountiful self! In fact, if I have a couch-potato day (hey, we all have those every now and then, right?) they feel particularly tea-baggish at the end of the day. So yesterday I asked for some more exercises that target the chest muscles, to help them perk up a bit more while I lose weight.

That was yesterday morning. I am now really, really sore... Making me realise that I had little to no real exercises that target that area! It's a good thing I asked.

While the trainer was explaining my two new exercises, I asked him about planking since pins like these have been making the rounds on the fitness-boards recently and I was curious. According to various pinners, this exercise could also do wonders for your chest, but my trainer informed me that, while this exercise will engage a lot of different muscle groups, it is mainly meant to strengthen your core, and is not a good exercise if you want to build up overall muscle. He even told me that, with my training schedule and the 3 workouts a week I have planned, there was no real need to include workouts at home on the off-days. It was an interesting conversation, to say the least, because it was contradicting to a lot of things I had thought I learned over the past few weeks. I might keep up the sit-ups and exercises at off-days, though. It feels good to do them.

Another interesting conversation I had yesterday, was with my physical therapist. While I was doing calf raises to stretch my deeper calf muscles, the source of my injury, he was explaining about nutrients and how common knowledge about them was severely outdated. We have a saying in Holland (originating from a commercial from somewhere in the Nineties): 'Two ounces of veggies, 2 pieces of fruit, they'll keep you fit for a long time!' (that's a very liberal translation, by the way, of "Twee ons groenten, en twee keer fruit, dan hou je het een heel stuk langer uit!") However, the decline in nutrients in fruit and vegetables over the past years makes it so, that you'd need a hell of a lot more than two ounces of veggies and 2 pieces of fruit a day to reach the recommended daily intake of nutrients that are most common in fruit and vegetables. He thinks that it would be in anyone's interest to include multivitamins in their daily diet. Once again, interesting perspective on what I always thought to be common knowledge!

He also explained another up-side to my change in eating habits and diet that I hadn't actively noticed: due to the taut muscles in my calves, I got a lot of midnight cramps in my legs, at least as often as once a month. However, when I switched to a different diet and included a lot more nuts and fruit into my daily intake, I started to take in certain nutrients that counter this effect! I haven't had any crampy legs these past three weeks. (Though I must add, not thanks to midnight cramps. Those calf raises yesterday were killing, and my legs were so painful that it took a lot of effort last night to find a pose in bed to sleep comfortably.)

To make a long story short, I am still on the right track. With the help of proper exercises and therapy, I might just be able to make my goal of losing those 30 kg before the end of the year, but not only that, it'll also help me with other issues I did not even realise were caused by my bad health and habits! And that idea is making me pretty excited to see what the future will bring.

Eating habits

So. One week in. One week without sodas, sweets, crisps, fried foods and bad habits. And it's feeling pretty good so far! I thought I would miss the sweets and snacks, but I'm doing pretty good so far, snack-wise. I even survived my secondary school reunion barbecue without stuffing my face with bread and satay sauce and bad, fattening meats. I did kinda stuff my face with fresh pineapple. (My god, that pineapple. Oh, oh, oh, my, that was one deliciously sweet, ripe, gorgeous pineapple.) But that's a good thing!

I went against the weight loss tips and weighed myself every day, (I know, even against the advice of my physical therapist, bad me!) but I only saw a slight rise in the line on Friday morning, the morning after I ate a bigger meal than I had planned. It was a bad meal, too, with a creamy sauce and a lot of pasta. So far, I have lost 2 kg this week, a massive amount if you take into account that I did not do a lot more than normal, except change my daily food intake and watch my calories a lot more.

I installed a nifty app on my mobile phone called the Calorie counter by Fatsecret, which is really helping me in keeping an eye on what I eat during the course of a day and to keep my total number of calories below the maximum number I allow. I set myself on 1500 a day, which gives me some wiggle room with my evening meals since the physical therapist told me to stay between 1600 and 1800 a day. I know that eating less than I should sounds bad, but I've hardly been hungry this week! The only time it really hit was on Thursday evening, and I had a very unpleasant evening trying to chug as much water as possible while telling my body to sod off and stop asking for food. I know it wasn't hunger, but it sure did felt like it. Oddly enough, this also was the one evening I ate too much for dinner!


Here's a rough outline of what a daily meal plan looks like for me.

Morning: (at 8:30, unless it's a gym morning)
- 1 bowl of muesli
- 1 piece of fruit (usually an apple)
- 1 glass of milk mixed with the muesli and apple.

Lunch:
- 2 crackers with lean cream cheese
- a handful of cherry tomatoes

Snack:
- 1 apple with peanut butter

Dinner:
- Grilled chicken and green veggies, and a handful of potato-somethings. This week, it was mostly baked potato cubes.

Evening:
- a handful of almonds

During the day:
- 2 litres of water

Depending on what I eat for dinner, this usually adds up to roughly 1500 calories. I have been trying to find more healthy, low-calorie dinners that will satisfy both me and the BF, but he's a picky eater, so it's making it somewhat more difficult than I had anticipated. Plus, I want him to eat well, but he's being exceptionally supportive of my mission and is insisting I eat what I need to, and he'll just fill up on snacks during the evening if the meal doesn't do the trick. He's got a very active metabolism, and has trouble maintaining his current weight of 50 kg. It is making this whole thing somewhat more complicated. I've got some plans for this week, though, to keep him satisfied (and let him eat some of his favourite foods), where I can just substitute part of the meal with something healthy for me!

I'm thinking...
- Shoarmawraps for him, with shoarma and garlic sauce, like he loves to eat it, and spicy chickpea-wraps for me!
- Grilled chicken with a sundried tomato basil vinaigrette, served with a salad and some baked potato, where I just leave out the potato!
- Roasted veggies (curried cauliflower or broccoli with garlic, for instance), with more veggies instead of potatoes for me!

Any tips? I would love to hear more!

Most dieting tips I see tell me to aim for 3 meals that fill up, and add 2 or 3 snacks during the day, aiming for some food every 3 hours. However, my breakfast always fills me up until pretty much 1 pm, when I eat my lunch. At 4, I eat a snack, and I have one more in the evening if I feel like it. Funnily enough, the snack-habit is the easiest to kick: even with the BF sitting across from me, munching on crisps, I don't feel the need to grab something for myself to snack on.

So. To conclude week one:
 I lost 2 kg (from 112 kg to 110 kg.).
 I had little trouble kicking it off, with one hickup on Thursday evening after a bad meal. I'm pretty sure it was because of that meal.
I went to the gym twice and got good advice from an expert, who will be helping me with my weight loss and will keep an active eye on my progress. 

In the following weeks, I want to learn:
- what are bad 'healthy' foods and what are good healthy foods to have at mealtime, so I can put together a better, healthier, leaner meal that will still fill up me and the BF and won't leave us hungry after an hour
- how to better spread out calories during the day without having to cut in portion size during dinnertime, because I want to eat properly to avoid getting hungry in the evening
- how to include exercise in my everyday routine, including good exercises I can do at home during the day, that won't do any harm to the injury in my leg. I read that doing jumping jacks are awesome, for instance, but I know that doing jumping jacks will hurt my calf.
- if I can go to the gym three times a week. I want to start tomorrow with going in the evening after dinner, and see how that works for me, and to go on Wednesday and Friday morning.

How to drink those 8 cups of water a day like a pro

It can never be stressed enough to say that you should drink enough water. While the debate on whether those 8 cups or 2 litres a day are actually necessary is still in full swing and seems neverending, it still is important to drink plenty of water. Especially when you are trying out for a healthy lifestyle and exercise a lot, you'll have to keep your body sufficiently hydrated.

But what if you're like me, and you start to hate the taste after a few sips? Or what if you loathe the taste to begin with? How do you work those 8 cups down your throat, then?!

It's easier than you think, actually. Here's a few tips on how I like to enhance the flavour of water without adding any sugar or calories! (remember, I'm not a dietician, nor am I a scientist or have I studied this, so this is based on personal experience and taste.)

- Drink sparkling water. Somehow, the taste of sparkling water or soda water is so different from regular water, yet there's nothing more in there than a few bubbles! Plus, it tickles on your tongue. Double bonus.

My favourite brand of sparkling water is Spa, in particular the Marie Henriette. It's only slightly fizzy, and I love the subtle taste. Plus, the bubbles are caused by natural carbonation, and not added manually. I don't know why this makes such a difference, but hey, it does!

I would say, steer away from the brands with added flavours, like Crystal Clear, but that's out of personal preference. I think they taste like butts and leave an awful taste in your mouth...

- Add fruit. A few slices of a type of citrus fruit will add a ton of flavour, without adding a grain of sugar. A related tip would be to freeze chunks of fruit into ice cubes, and pouring your water over these ice cubes, or even to pour it over frozen fruit! Many supermarkets these days sell boxes of frozen fruit that are perfect for making smoothies (because you can leave out the ice) or to use as a tasty alternative to ice cubes. And on a related note...

- Drink your water cold! The taste of water seems to change significantly when it's nice and cold. Keep a pitcher in your refrigerator (you could add those ice cubes I was talking about before, or cut up a lemon and add the slices to the pitcher) and keep refilling it whenever you pour yourself a glass.

- Drink through a straw. Go ahead, try it. Grab a glass or a bottle of water, stick a straw in there, take a few big tugs, and see how much you already drunk. I always drink way quicker when I drink through a straw!

- Always keep a bottle close. Whether you are on the road, during a commute, or behind your desk, whether you're running or lounging on the couch, always keep a bottle of water within hand's reach and preferably within sight. I always have a one litre bottle on my desk and when I'm sitting on the couch, I have one standing next to the coffee table. It's within reach, and within sight, and I have found that having a bottle near me will greatly diminish the craving for a different type of drink (such as that bottle of coke that the boyfriend keeps on his side of the coffee table...).

(Photo: Undressed Skeleton via Pinterest)

- I found this idea floating around the Pinterestverse and love it! Take two water bottles, mark them up in regular intervals, fill them each morning, and make sure you empty each one before the marked time!

In other words, there are plenty of ways to ensure you drink your 2 liters of water, too! Do you have any tips? Share them with us in the comments!

Dinner plans

In order to lose weight, you can't just rely on any diet. As someone at the gym told me today, losing weight happens when you focus on what you shouldn't eat, and just don't eat those. (or as my grandmother used to say, every pound goes through the mouth. It's better in Dutch, it rhymes.) Now, I think there's far more to it than that (otherwise, dieticians would not exist), but it's a start. So I have decided that the first four weeks, I will focus on those things that I ate that I shouldn't, and simply not eat those things. No more crisps or bowls of peanuts at 11 pm, or second helpings of lasagna, or cleaning out the pans after dinner because throwing it away would be a waste. No open bags of M&M's within hand's reach when I'm behind the PC, especially when I'm working on a website or gaming. Those geeky hobbies of mine are killer on the thighs...

No, instead, I will be feasting on fresh food. Tomatoes, carrots, apple, cherries... Any craving I can't shrug off (I'm going to focus on that as well) I will quench with veggies and fruit.

But that's not the only adjustment I will make to my eating patterns. I want to focus on healthy cooking, low-fat and tasty without too much fuss so we can commit to it. Because I'm also cooking for my boyfriend, I want to make sure that I don't deprive him of his favourite meals (though I am hoping I can make him some new ones!), but I will make healthy adjustments to them. Add a salad to the lasagna, so instead of pigging out on cheese-covered pasta, I can feast on greens. Leave out the potatoes. Roast meat in the oven, instead of baking it in a butter or oil-laden pan.

I want to know what kind of difference a different eating style will make on my weight. So these next four weeks, I will mainly work on getting fit by reducing the amount of food, and the bad foods, I eat, or replacing them with healthy alternatives.

My first step has been made with tonight's meal: We had a delicious chicken rollatini and a green salad for dinner.

Chicken rollatini (makes 4 small rollatinis)
based on a recipe by Skinnytaste.com

2 chicken breasts
a handful of cherry tomatoes
1 ball of mozzarella (light, if you are so inclined)
3 sprigs of spring onion
salt
pepper
toothpicks
oil (olive) to spray or brush on

Preheat your oven to 175 C.
Slice your tomatoes into quarters, slice out the seeds. Slice your spring onions. Slice your mozzarella thinly, or shred it.
Take your chicken breasts and clean them up. Open them up (unfold it) and cut it, lengthwise, in two thinner cutlets. Pound them out until they are even in thickness and, if possible, size. Lay it on your cutting board, sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper and place slices of mozzarella, tomato and onions on top so it makes a thin layer. Remember, a little goes a long way, and you need to be able to roll or fold! Carefully roll up your chicken cutlets, starting from a smaller side and rolling halfway, then fold up the other end until it meets. Secure with toothpicks.
Place the chicken rollatinis on a lightly oiled baking sheet and spray or brush with a bit more oil. Sprinkle on some more salt and pepper.
Bake for approximately 25 minutes in the oven. And don't forget to take the toothpicks out before you eat!

I served this with a simple green salad.

Recipe: Spicy honey-sesame chicken

My sincerest apologies for the mad radio silence all of a sudden! I was busy last week, see. I spent the week here:

 

Indeedy, I was in London for the week. I was supervising a massive group (110 students in total!) of 1st year students (secondary school, so that's year 9, or 12/13 years old) from my old secondary school on the annual trip to London where we:

- visited an English school

- took a Hop-on-Hop-off bus tour through the heaviest of London traffic I have ever witnessed which resulted in me having a pretty nasty sun stroke at the end of the day

- Went to the London Dungeon where I ended up sitting out most of the tour because some boys got sick (booh, hiss, shall remedy that someday soon)

- Went to St. Paul's Cathedral and climbed up all 528 steps for a magnificent view over the capitol, on one of the hottest days of the year so far (I think it was about 28 degrees but it felt a hell of a lot warmer in that tower!)

- Walked for miles and miles through London with my group of rascals

- Walked atop the White Cliffs of Dover on our way back home

And I did all that without warning any of you that I'd be gone! So, in order to make up for that, I hereby present you with a little recipe that you NEED to try. It's the easiest and most delicious of quick-and-easy recipes the BF and I have tried in the past few years and I can't wait to eat it again! I found it on a lovely blog called A Full Measure of Happiness where the lovely Lauren posts delicious recipes and weird cat-pictures. And this was one of them! The delicious recipes, I mean. Not the cat-pictures.

While the recipe in itself is delicious enough, I tweaked it a bit by adding some spice in the form of 2 red chilli peppers. The honey and soy combination tastes really good, while the crunch from the sesame seeds and the spice from the peppers make it more interesting. The coating on the chicken is so easy, but keeps the chicken much more moist, while also soaking up the sauce perfectly. This is such an easy dish that it can be made in about 15 minutes!
I have been told the leftovers also taste good cold, but we never had any leftovers to speak of, unless you count some stray sesame seeds stuck to the side of the pan!

Spicy Honey-Sesame chicken
(recipe adapted from A Full Measure of Happiness)
Serves 2

2 chicken breasts cut in chunks
2 chili peppers, thinly sliced in rings or strips. Discard the seeds if you want to tone down the spicy, otherwise, leave in and burn away, baby!
3 spring onions, thinly sliced
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 egg
4 tbsp honey
3 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp sesame seeds
oil ( I used special wok-oil, a mixture of peanut oil and some light spices. You can just use regular oil, though)
Noodles. (I used thin rice noodles)

Cut your chicken, peppers and onions.
Combine the egg and cornstarch and mix it with the chicken chunks until all the chicken is covered. It will look weird. Don't worry.
Combine the honey, sesame seeds and soy sauce in a bowl and set aside.
Bring water to a boil for your noodles.
Cook the chicken chunks with a bit of oil in a wok or frying pan until nicely browned. Add the onions and peppers and cook for another minute, then add the honey-soy mixture and mix thoroughly to coat all the chicken chunks with the honey sauce. Let simmer for a minute or two on medium heat while you boil the noodles, and leave it on (while stirring occasionally) until your noodles are boiled, strained and ready to eat. It doesn't take long!

To serve, simply fill a plate with a healthy helping of noodles and pile the chicken on top. Make sure to get plenty of that lovely, sticky sauce!

Birthday cake: Carrot cake!

Oooh, carrot cake. I love me some carrot cake. My first time eating it was two years ago, when we were on holiday in the South-West of England, enjoying an afternoon tea (the hot drink-type, not the dinner-type) after a long walk through the countryside. We sat down in the shadows of a large tree in the back garden of a miller's house-turned-teahouse, ordered our drinks and cake, and sat there for a good hour and a half. Not just because it was so lovely. Also because the slices of cake they brought us were HUGE. And carrot cake, in case you didn't know, is very filling.

We're not a very veggies-in-our-sweets type of people, us Dutchies, so things like carrot cake aren't eaten a lot. I wish they were, though. It's a great cake! So I made it for my birthday this past Tuesday (I turned 24! Holy crap, 24!), and we loved it!

Walnuts. A good carrot cake needs some more texture than just 'cake', so I added some walnuts and a good two handfuls of golden raisins.

Then I grated my carrots. All my fingernails turned bright orange! (And even after washing them twice and scrubbing thoroughly, they still had a hint of orange on them... That carrot juice man, it stains!)

This is the cake batter, right before I poured (pushed, scooped, shook... It's pretty thick for a batter!) it into the cake tin.

And the cake, right after it came out of the oven! Golden brown, nicely domed and oh.. that smell... Hmm....

A good carrot cake needs a cream cheese frosting! I made this one not too sweet, because it can get so overwhelming when it's too sweet, so I just added sugar until it tasted just right to my buds.
Hmmm.. Take a bite! I know you want to...


-----------------------------

Recipe: carrot cake (based loosely on "The loveliest carrot cake in the world" on Let her Bake Cake.)

Cake:
- 4 eggs
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 cups flour
- 1 tbsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 1/4 cup butter, melted
- about 9 carrots (medium-sized), grated
- 100 gr. walnuts, chopped finely
- a large handful of raisins (golden)

Frosting:
- 250 gr cream cheese
- 125 gr butter, softened
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup powdered sugar (or extra, according to taste)

For the cake:

- Preheat your oven to 175 C. Butter a 9-inch spring form pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. (Cut a rectangle that's somewhat bigger than your pan, place it over the top of the bottom of your pan, place the sides over the paper and close the spring form. The paper is now held firmly in place by your spring form pan and you can trim down the edges!)
- Mix your eggs, sugar and butter together in a mixing bowl until it's fluffy and light.
- Add your grated carrots.
- In a separate bowl, mix together your flour, salt, baking powder and cinnamon.
- Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in batches and mix until combined.
- Fold in your chopped walnuts and raisins.
- pour into your prepared pan and pop it in the oven! Bake for approximately 45 minutes, until golden brown and a skewer, when inserted in the middle, will come out mostly clean (a few crumbs is no problem. A good carrot cake will be slightly moist. Mine was actually a bit overbaked and slightly dry, because I thought it wasn't done and added an extra 5 minutes to the baking time!)
- When the cake is done, take it out of the oven and allow to cool completely.

For the frosting:

- Mix together the cream cheese and the butter until soft and fluffy.
- Add the vanilla extract and mix until incorporated.
- Mix in the powdered sugar in small steps and taste regularly, until it is as sweet as you like it.
- When the cake is completely cooled, frost the cake.

The cake can be made up to a day in advance. I frosted the cake half a day in advance and kept it in the fridge until about an hour before serving.

This & That: creative ways

This week, I've found myself longing for my hobbies. To take my mind of things. I usually cope with stressful situations in creative ways: I bake, or crawl away in the corner of our couch and crochet. Starting a business on your own when you've only ever worked, let's face it, low-level jobs, is quite scary sometimes. I've found myself in the baking aisle more often while doing groceries. So today I caved and baked cookies during my lunch break. By hand. There's something quite therapeutic about furiously pounding butter and sugar into one glossy, glorious mess with a big wooden spoon.

But apart from that, I've also decided to start working on something quite special for a friend. Can't say much, all I can say is 'yes, that is WoW-related', and 'yes, that does indeed look a lot like a cow'. It's a new project, though, and it's quite special, and I'm quite thrilled to have something like this to go to and relax with when I'm done working. And it gave me a reason to go yarn-shopping soon, yay!

The weirdest thing I have ever baked

Really, without a doubt. The strangest, weirdest, oddest of oddities that ever came out of my oven.

Mochi.

Japanese snacks, made from a rice cake cut up into squares and dusted with potato starch, or, if you like your snacks to be on the sweet side, powdered sugar. This weekend, I'm off to a friend's house to watch tons of anime with a bunch of people, and, as is somewhat traditional for these marathon weekends, we bring snacks. I thought that it would be a lovely idea to bake something Asian, and my eye fell on these brightly coloured little morsels. They look so cute! And bitesized! And since I always bake either cake or cookies and these count more as candy than cookies, they were perfect!

It's a very simple process to make these, really. All you do is sift rice flour into a mixing bowl...

Behold, Mount St. Rice Flour!

*ahem*

You mix in a bunch of other stuff, like lots of sugar, coconut milk, water, and food colouring if you want. Then you mix it all together until it's a smooth, pinkish liquid-looking substance...

Correction, a really, horribly pink-looking substance...

And then bake it in an oven for 1 hour. After that, you pull it out, let it cool for an hour at least, turn it out on a cutting board sprinkled with a bit of potato starch or powdered sugar...

Cut it up in 1-inch squares, and dust them with powdered sugar or potato starch.

Done! Mochi!

Now, trust me when I say that this is unlike anything you'd ever expect to come rolling out of an oven. When I cut the cake, I had to keep rubbing powdered sugar on my knife to ensure it wouldn't stick to the cake so bad that I couldn't move it at all. The texture, while described in the recipe as 'chewy and with a yummy rice flavour', reminded me an awful lot of cutting up raw meat or fish. It was kind of squishy and sticky. I dusted the pieces with powdered sugar but, perhaps because the cake hadn't cooled off completely, the first pieces were only covered on the top and bottom, and not on the cut sides, where it had melted a bit.

Eating one was a weird experience as well. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but the texture reminded me the most of gummy bears, only with a weird taste to go with it.

I don't know whether they are supposed to turn out like this. This was the first time I have ever tried anything like it, and since I didn't even know what they would taste like, I simply chose to just go for it and see how they turn out. They look fairly similar to the ones in the pictures of the recipe so maybe I did it all okay, but because of the weird texture, I am somewhat unsure.

I did not change anything to the recipe apart from using powdered sugar to dust them with, so if you still want to give it a try after reading this, go! And report back here. I love to see if yours turned out as... unusual as mine!

Deliciousness and gorgeousness, all stuffed in one cake

I did something today... that was absolutely nuts. I made almond milk! (ha, see, nuts! I crack me up.)

Almond milk is the easiest thing to make, if you don't take into account the fact that you have to let your almonds sit in water for a whole night. It's rough. I know. But as your almonds are soaking, think of the following: nutty, delicious, tasting like almonds, gorgeous when cold.. Almond milk!

But when my almond milk was all done, I wanted to use it. You know, because it's milk! So I made the following cake.

Hmmm.. Oh, if you think that looks good, you should smell it! Divine! Divine I tell you! And so easy. It's an easy apple/cinnamon/almond cake. It would be an even better cake if I hadn't used up all my almonds to make the milk and had some left over to chop up and add to the cake, but hey. You can't have 'em all.

The cake is lovely and moist, tastes slightly of almond and somewhat more of cinnamon, but that's tweakable.

Gorgeous though, isn't it? Sweet, juicy bits of apple, accompanied by those lovely little flecks of cinnamon...

There's only one thing you can do now. Make this! Make it for your loved ones, your next door neighbour, your teacher, or better yet, make this for yourself!


Cinnamon Apple Almond cake
------------------------------------

1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp cinnamon
1/2 cup almond milk (I used this recipe from See You In the Morning)
1 apple, chopped in reasonably small bits
2 tbsp cinnamon sugar

Preheat your oven to 175 C.
Combine the apple chunks and the cinnamon sugar in a bowl and make sure the sugar covers the apples well. Set aside.
Butter and flour your cake tin.
Cream the butter and the sugar.
Add the eggs and vanilla extract and mix to combine.
In a different bowl, combine the flour, cinnamon, salt and baking powder.
In alternating turns, add the flour mixture and the almond milk until all is incorporated.
Add the cinnamonsugar-covered apples.
Pour your cake batter into your prepared cake tin and pop it in the oven. Bake for approximately 45 minutes or until a wooden pick comes out clean.
Let the cake rest for a few minutes in its tin before you turn the cake out on a plate or board.

Enjoy!