The Rest of Jacki's Cooking Adventures and Recipes

Yesterday I made beautiful cookies.

Today I made ugly ones!
These cookies have been made in my family at Christmas time for at least four generations. My great grandmother taught my nana how to make them. My nana taught my father how to make them and my father taught me. We have other traditional foods that we make at Christmas, but these are my favorite, so every year I take an afternoon to bake and think about my great grandmother whom I was lucky to have many years with. She moved to Canada from Denmark when she was young, in the 1920's I believe, and lived on a farm in New Brunswick with my great grandfather for the rest of her life.

The cookies are like rocks if you try to eat them as is. The only liquids in them are honey and smidge of lemon juice, so they will hurt your teeth if you chomp down on one. But, dip them in a hot cup of coffee or tea (4 seconds is the perfect amount of time) and they become soft and spongy. The icing melts a little and the center of the cookie is nice and chewy. Not to mention it sweetens your hot drink a little. I always like to let my tea cool for ten minutes or so before I drink it, so what better way to pass the time than with a cookie? They are a little bit spicy and a little bit sweet, one of my very favorite Christmas treats.

I wanted to share this family recipe so that hopefully some of you will add this to your Christmas baking list. Let me know if you do!

Recipe: Lebkuchen (Big Cookies)

Makes approximately 2 dozen

Ingredients

1 cup honey
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 beaten egg
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 Tbsp lemon rind
1/3 cup chopped citron peel
1/3 cup almond slices
2 ½ cups flour
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp allspice
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp cloves

Bring honey to a boil, pour in a bowl and let cool.

Add sugar and remaining ingredients. Mix well and store overnight in the refrigerator.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Turn out on floured board and roll out 1/2" thick and cut into 2” circles with a circular cookie cutter or a drinking glass. The dough will be sticky, so flour the rolling pin and board frequently to prevent sticking.

Space well apart on cookie sheet. Bake 8 to 12 minutes. Be careful not to burn. Cookies are done when one or two start to brown along the bottom edge.

When completely cool, ice with almond icing and decorate with almonds and citron. Serve with coffee or tea.


For the icing, I usually make sort of a poor man's buttercream. About 1/4 cup butter, 2 1/2 cups icing sugar, 1 tsp almond extract and enough milk to make it easy to spread, all mixed together until smooth but not until fluffy. Spread a thin layer on the cookie and allow the icing to harden. By not using as much butter/shortening as with a regular buttercream, it crusts much faster which is the effect you want.

I'm not sure if the boiling honey is an old way of pasturizing it for safety, or what the purpose is exactly, but I do it anyway. At the very least, having warm honey in the dough makes it much easier to stir, but I'm not sure it's actually necessary to bring it all the way to a boil.

I made two batches so I can leave out half a dozen or so for snacking before putting the rest in the freezer until Christmas.

So far my Christmas baking is shaping up nicely!

Posted by Jacki at 10:59 PM 4 comments    

Ok.

I waited as long as I could.

I've had the Christmas baking itch for weeks now and I haven't made anything. Finally, yesterday I decided it was close enough to start on the freezables.

It's snowing cookies!!!


Anyone who knows me knows that I go nuts for blue snowflake-y things at Christmas. I scour the stores for blue and silver wrapping paper with matching tags. I have snowflake decorations on my tree and throughout my apartment. With the exception of the decorations on my Christmas tree, my apartment is decked out in silver and blue for the holidays.

I'm going to be putting together gift baskets of baked goods for a lot of my loved ones this Christmas. I have gorgeous blue boxes with silver snowflakes that I found at Winners, and clear cellophane with blue snowflakes that I found at the dollar store, so I thought a snowflake cookie would tie it all together.

I've been wanting to make sugar cookies with royal icing for a while now, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity! I was inspired by the Wilton website to pick up one of their cookie cutters and start baking!

The cookies are plain sugar cookies, made using this recipe from allrecipes.com. The are amazing! I rolled them out to about 1/4" and they baked up light and fluffy. Perfection.

I used the royal icing recipe I learned in Wilton Course 2:

Recipe: Royal Icing

1 1/2 Tbsp meringue powder
2 cups icing sugar
2.5 Tbsp lukewarm water

Mix on low/medium speed with an electric mixer for 7 minutes. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth while working with icing because it dries out very quickly.

I separated 1/4 cup of the icing and coloured the rest with royal blue icing colour.

These took quite honestly the whole day to ice. My hands were absolutely aching by the end of it and for a while I thought I would have to split it over two days, but I stuck it out and made 40 gorgeous cookies. I am so impressed with how beautiful they turned out. I make a lot of cute foods but I think these are my favorite of anything I've ever made!

The cookies are not particularly sweet, so I find the sweetness and crunch of the icing complements the soft cookies perfectly.

To ice these babies, first I waited for the cookies to cool. Next, using a #2 tip, I piped the outline of the snowflake on each cookie in blue. I added a few teaspoons of water to the remaining blue frosting until it was of a pourable consistency, but not too thin. The trick is to add the water a teaspoon at a time and check it by pouring a spoonful of icing back into the bowl. If it melds into the rest of the icing in about 10 seconds, it's thin enough.

Next I piped the thinned blue icing inside the outlines using a #4 tip, and used a toothpick to smooth it out the edges to create the smooth blue surface. Don't worry if the surface doesn't look smooth at first. It smooths out as it dries and most of it will be covered with white anyway.

The last step is to pipe on the snowflake with the white icing after the blue had dried. I used the #2 tip for that as well and placed a silver ball in the center of each snowflake while the icing was still wet.

And that's it! Not to difficult, but very time consuming and hard on your hands.

So these guys will live in the freezer for the next two weeks and make their grand appearance at Christmas. I have at least two more types of cookies to make, so I will post them as I go.

Posted by Jacki at 11:08 PM 5 comments    

As I've mentioned previously, my sister and I started taking Wilton cake decorating lessons at Michael's back in October. Last week we finished Course 2 and I was really happy with how my cake turned out, so I thought I would share.

The reason I started to take these courses was because I had tried making flowers out of icing and fondant a few times and wasn't having much luck, so I figured I could use some direction. In the first class we just covered the basics, but in Course 2 we focused almost entirely on making flowers from royal icing and learned a few new borders.

Here is the top of the cake. As always, click on the picture to get a closer look.
Lots of flowers! The roses, daffodils and daisies should be easy to pick out. The orange flowers are chrysanthemums, the large yellow and purples ones are pansies, the small purple ones are violets, the large pale pink ones are primroses, the small pink ones are apple blossoms and the tiny pink ones are rose buds. All of the flowers are done with royal icing, and the cake, leaves, borders and basketweave are done with buttercream (Don't tell my instructor, but I used my own buttercream recipe instead of the Wilton one!).

BF was impressed with how I balanced out the colours and arranged the flowers. He said he bets I learned those skills from making so many bento lunches.


Here is a side picture to show a flower arrangement on the side of the cake.And here's a front picture to show the basketweave around the sides of the cake as well as one of two run-out birds made from royal icing.

The royal icing recipe we used for the course consists only of icing sugar, meringue powder and water. The result is an icing that is stiff and holds its shape well as you mold it. It then hardens into a crunchy sort of candy. Some people don't enjoy the taste I guess, but I think it's yummy. Although this is the only icing we used for the flowers, I think a stiff butter cream would also work, although it might not hold all of the minute details. It would probably have to be kept cool as well so that it would hold its shape.

Overall, I'm really pleased with what I learned in this course and the value for the cost. The course itself was $21 and the course supplies kit was $40 but I had a 50% off coupon. I already had all of the rest of the decorating equipment I needed (piping bags, practice board, cake turntable, cake board) from Course 1 so it was just a matter of picking up a couple of bags of icing sugar. And now I know how to make gorgeous flowers! Course 3 isn't offered until January, so we get a month off (so I can get back to making cupcakes!!) and then we'll be back at it.

My understanding is that their are Michaels stores across North America, so I definitely recommend taking the classes if you have any interest in making pretty things with icing. It's an easy way to learn some new practical skills. Before I took the classes, piping swirls on cupcakes with a 1M tip was pretty much the extent of my cake decorating repertoire. I don't necessarily think that The Wilton Method is the be all/end all of cake decorating, but I do feel that the amount I've learned is definitely worth the 2 hours per week investment. Like anything in life though, I would suggest getting several different perspectives and choosing the method you like the best. For me that means using my own recipe for buttercream frosting and using a traditional variation on royal icing for icing run-outs rather than purchasing the Wilton Color Flow powder.

I love learning!

Posted by Jacki at 9:38 PM 6 comments    

I love to look in the sweets case at the grocery store. Little truffles, tarts and cakes all lined up, so cute. I peeked in it today while BF and I were shopping and saw some carrot cake cupcakes and absently muttered to myself "I should make a carrot cake..."

BF stopped in his tracks, looked at me and said "You can't joke about that, because I'll won't be able to help but run over and grab a bag of carrots and hope for cake."

Of course I told him to go get the carrots.

Here are some slices all ready and lined up for him to take to work tomorrow. We can't eat a 9 x 13 cake all by ourselves!

The recipe is adapted from one I found online. It is incredibly dense, moist and flavourful. One of my favorite things about making carrot cake is watching all of the ingredients going into the bowl because you put about twice as much stuff in there as you do for normal cakes, but it goes into the same size of pan.

I originally planned to make cupcakes, but after some soul searching, I realized that for me to enjoy carrot cake to its fullest potential, it should be served in cubes. So instead of piped swirls of frosting, I just made a really thick layer on the top of the cake.

Recipe: Carrot Cake

Ingredients:

4 eggs
1 1/4 cups vegetable oil
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
3 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
3 cups grated carrots

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9x13 inch pan.

In a large bowl, beat together eggs, oil, sugars and vanilla with an electric mixer on medium speed for three minutes.

Mix in flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Stir in carrots. Pour into prepared pan. Bake in the preheated oven for about an hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely.

Recipe: Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients:

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup), room temperature
1 8 oz package cream cheese, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla
3 cups icing sugar

Cream butter and cream cheese together with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy, about three minutes. Add vanilla and mix. Add icing sugar and blend until consistency is uniform.

The little carrots were made by colouring 1/4 cup of the frosting orange and 1/4 cup green. The carrots were piped with Wilton tip #5 and the green parts were piped with Wilton tip #3. The rest of the frosting was exactly enough to frost the cake.

Posted by Jacki at 8:50 PM 3 comments    

Twice in the past week I've been walking down a street and seen a sign outside a restaurant advertising potato and leek soup. I love potato and leek soup, but I didn't go in either time.

This morning, BF and I headed to our regular brunch haunt (Halifax Residents: Check out brunch at Luxx in Park Lane. It's Halifax's best kept secret brunch in my opinion) and sure enough, the soup of the day was potato and leek. I had my heart set on eggs benny though, and I knew that although I believed at that moment I had room for both, my eyes are generally bigger than my stomach so I should just stick with the eggs.

Lucky for me though, the restaurant was directly across the street from the grocery store, so you can guess what my next stop was.

It turned out to die for. Soooooooo good!

Here's the recipe:

Recipe: Creamy Potato and Leek Soup

Ingredients:

4 good sized new potatoes
3 cups chicken stock
1/2 lb bacon
1 bunch of leeks
1/2 cup heavy cream

Peel potatoes and cut into bite sized cubes. Bring chicken stock to a boil in a large pot and add potatoes. Boil until potatoes are cooked through.

Cut bacon into 1 inch pieces and fry over medium heat until crispy. While the bacon is cooking, remove bottoms from the leeks and cut the tops into small slices. Remove bacon from pan and drain about half of the bacon fat from the pan. Saute the leeks in the remaining bacon fat for about 8 minutes.

Once the potatoes are cooked, reserve 1/4 of the potatoes. Allow the rest of the stock and potatoes cool a little bit and then transfer to a blender and blend until smooth. Return the mixture to the pot and return the reserved potatoes to the pot. Reheat the soup over medium heat and add the bacon, leeks and cream. Mix until combined. Enjoy!


As an aside, a bowl of soup at brunch today cost $6.

To make this soup, I spent $2 on potatoes, $1 on leeks, $1.75 on bacon, about 40 cents on cream and about 25 cents on chicken bouillion for a total of about $5.40. It made 4 bowls, so that works out to $1.35 a bowl.

I love to eat at restaurants, but luckily I also love to cook because it's definitely more economical!

Posted by Jacki at 8:22 PM 2 comments    

I enjoy when I get a request to make something. It's fun to have an opportunity to try something new that you would never have thought of on your own.

For example, I had no idea that squash and raisin muffins existed.

I sent BF with a batch of cranberry lemon muffins (sweet, familiar flavours) to share with his coworkers earlier in the week. One of his friends mentioned that he liked homemade squash and raisin muffins which BF then passed on to me. The concept sounded so foreign and counterintuitive to me (eww, squash as a breakfast) that I had to try it. The logical parts of my brain reassured me that pumpkin and sweet potato both make delicious desserts (pie, anyone?) but the instinctive parts of my brain were grossed out.

The verdict? While these are not my favorite muffins, I managed to make them fluffy, moist and nicely textured, using a recipe adapted from allrecipes.com. I actually worked to bring out the flavour of the squash by roasting it rather than boiling, and by easing up on the spices, so the end result is a fairly complex taste that I'm sure would be enjoyed by fans of squash.

As for me however, I will wait until I have leftover squash already before making these again (although that has yet to happen in my 27 years, I'm sure it has to happen eventually!) To me, these muffins weren't worth the extra time to roast the squash. I can make many other kinds of delicious muffins much quicker!
Recipe: Squash and Raisin Muffins
Makes 12 to 15 muffins

Ingredients
1 cup cooked and mashed butternut squash
1 cup all-purpose flour
¾ cup uncooked oatmeal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 ½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ginger
¼ tsp allspice
¼ tsp nutmeg
3/4 cup milk
1 egg, beaten
1 cup raisins
Brown sugar


To prepare squash:

First peel, seed and cube the squash. Toss with 1 Tbsp olive oil and ¼ tsp salt and bake for 30 minutes at 400 degrees, turning once, half way through.


To make muffins:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Line or grease muffin cups.

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, white sugar, salt and spices.

In a medium bowl, thoroughly mix together milk, egg and butter. Stir in squash. Fold the squash mixture into the flour mixture just until moistened. Fold in raisins.

Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin pan, filling cups about 2/3 full. Sprinkle with brown sugar. Bake 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.

Cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then remove from muffin pan and cool on a wire rack.

Posted by Jacki at 11:59 PM 1 comments    

I was craving something creamy and chocolatey.

My thoughts immediately turned to chocolate mousse, but the honest truth is that I've never really been comfortable with the raw egg whites present in an authentic mousse.

Then I found this recipe for chocolate bavarois that solved all of my problems! (Well this one at least) It's light and fluffy like whipped cream, but more stable thanks to a little gelatine and definitely rich! The recipe says to use 8 oz glasses for each serving, but it is so rich I could only eat half of that at a time, so you can definitely stretch out this recipe.

*sigh* I miss BF's camera...I can't seem to take a good picture with mine...

Recipe: Chocolate Bavarois

Ingredients

• 200g (6 ½ oz) good quality dark chocolate
• 1 ½ cups milk
• 4 egg yolks
• 1/3 cup icing sugar
• 1 Tbsp gelatine
• 1 ¼ cups whipping cream
  

Combine the chocolate and milk in a small pan. Stir over low heat until the chocolate has melted and the milk just comes to a boil. Remove from the heat.

Beat the egg yolks and sugar until combined. Gradually add the hot chocolate milk, whisking until combined. Return to a clean pan and cook over low heat until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Do not allow to boil. Remove from the heat.

Put 2 tablespoons of water in a small bowl. Sprinkle the gelatin in an even layer over the surface and leave to go spongy. Stir into the hot chocolate mixture until dissolved.

Refrigerate until the mixture is cold but not set, stirring occasionally. Beat the cream until soft peaks form, then fold into the chocolate mixture in two batches. Pour into six 250 ml (8 fl oz) glasses and refrigerate for several hours or overnight, or until set.

Posted by Jacki at 8:32 PM 2 comments