Peanutbutter cookies

Hi everyone. It’s been a long, long time. But life happened. More precisely: I got a job in the middle of June. It’s been hard trying to juggle everything. It’s my first real full time job, so I’m still trying to figure out how to divide my free time. It’s not that I haven’t been baking at all, but I haven’t been taking pictures and editing them so much.

I really want to get back in the swing of things and these really delicious peanut butter cookies are the first attempt to get back at it :) they’re easy to make and so yummy. You can find the recipe right here! I hope to be updating again soon, so keep an eye out for it!

Apple cake

It’s been a while again! Life just sometimes gets hectic, doesn’t it? It’s been a really busy couple of weeks for me – running around to get a lot of errands done and having a lot of fun with friends. Jess came down from Sweden to celebrate her birthday with us in Belgium, which was amazing. My parents were on vacation so I was in charge of all the house work. And I’ve been intensely looking for a job – it’s slow going but I’m booking progress, little by little.

There has been time for baking, though. Just not a lot of time for editing pictures and making posts. I’m going to try to change that soon though. First I bring you these pictures of a simple pound apple cake I made for my aunt a couple of weeks ago. I just love a good apple cake, and those little fondant red and green apples really lifted the cake up, I think. It was for my cousin’s school bake sale and apparently the kids liked it too! Success!

Peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies

 

Sometimes what a person really needs is a cookie. Sometimes, after a tough job interview, what a person really, really needs is a peanut butter chocolate chip cookie. I got this recipe from a Sainsbury’s magazine with 20 quick cakes and cookies.  And yeah, not only were these really quick, but also super easy to make. And so good. 300 grams of Calvé peanut butter, and three different kinds of chocolate chips. Yeah, this one really hit the spot, I must say.

The original recipe (by Lorraine Pascale) didn’t have chocolate chips, but lightly toasted peanuts on top. I made one with peanuts on it for my mom (she’s a big nut lover). I think the combination of chocolate and peanut butter is a sacred one, though. So I decided that the only way these cookies could and would get any better was with chocolate!

Easter cupcakes

My mom came home with these marshmallow chicks a couple of weeks ago. She was completely over the moon over them. “You can use them to decorate some cupcakes,” she said, “When Easter comes around.” But how could she not love ’em? Look at them. They’re adorable. That’s probably one of my favorite things about Easter, baking things and making them look and feel all spring-y. All the colors and all the chocolate. Amazing!

I’m hoping to bake a couple of more things this week to celebrate Easter. We don’t really have a big family thing planned this year, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make the most of it! I’m thinking Easter Egg shaped (and decorated) cookies. Maybe a pie? I’ll keep you posted! But for now I hope you enjoy the pictures I took of these cupcakes!

Rhubarb crumble

 

When I found a bag of rhubarb in my freezer I felt like making that amazing buckle from two summer ago. There’s just something about rhubarb that makes me feel like spring. The weather’s been really nice here lately as well, warm and sunny. So I’m sure that had something to do with it as well. The crumble turned out really great. I swapped the cake recipe from the original post for a simple pound cake one. I made a little less – cause my family wasn’t up for eating a whole buckle. Instead I used my favorite round cake dish. It turned out really lovely and super yummy. Great for a cold night with some tea.

Alice In Wonderland

 

Here is my three-tier Alice In Wonderland cake! :) I had so much fun making this – it was the first time I made a three tiered cake, and the first time I covered cake with fondant like this. I learned a lot – mainly that it’s not easy to line a cake with fondant. I’m pretty sure this is gonna take a lot of practice to get completely right! But I’m really pleased with how it turned out, and more importantly: my aunt and cousin liked it as well. And since I made the cake for them (my cousin’s school, more precisely) that’s what matters most!

The bottom cake is the chocolate cake I posted about here, the top two tiers are pound cake. All cakes were cut in two with butter cream in between, and the lathered with more butter cream. All figures are handmade (my mom made the caterpillar and cards though, she loves doing that stuff.) I’m really fond of the hat I made :D (tutorial here)

Two tier chocolate cake

 

I’m making a tiered cake tomorrow for my aunt (more explanations, and pictures, will follow soon!) I’ve never actually made a tiered cake before, actually. Not really, with the different size cakes stacked on top of each other, and such. So I thought I’d test it out first, make a test cake, if you will. I needed to check to see if this particular chocolate cake recipe would be solid enough to take another tier (it was). This cake worked out beautifully, and I could finally try my hand at the rose-icing technique I’ve been wanting to try forever.

As luck would have it, my friend came by that evening so I gave her the cake and told her to take it to work with her. The text she sent me the next day saying “my coworkers are big fans!” made me smile all day.

One dough – three cookies

I have such a weak spot for big, gooey cookies. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise, seeing as my cookie tag contains 23 posts – a really big share of them being gooey chocolate chip cookies. There’s just something so comforting about biting into a big, soft chocolatey cookie. Now I’ve made M&M cookies before – an adaptation from my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe that uses brown butter, yum! – but when I saw this post down at the Pinch Of Yum blog I knew I had to try that recipe as well.

While I was making these cookies it soon became clear that I didn’t have enough M&Ms to make sure the dough had enough pieces of yumminess in it. I decided to go through my cupboards and see what else I could put in these cookies. It was all quite adventurous! I ended up going for, aside from one batch with M&Ms, a batch with Reese’s mini peanut butter cups (white and milk chocolate) and a batch with chopped up Geisha chocolate. These cookies suddenly got very international. I’d bought the M&Ms in Sweden, because the package was so cute, and I really like their logo and M&M mascots. The Geisha chocolate was a gift from a friend that she got in Finland. The Reese’s peanut butter cups I’d bought in the UK a while back.

All three kinds were extremely good, and I packed up a lot of them to take with me on my weekend trip to go see a friend who had her birthday the previous day. It was the perfect travel snack during my train ride, where I saw the landscape woosh by while I snacked on chocolate.

Chocolate layer cake

 

One of my brother’s friends is having a birthday party tonight. Every guest is supposed to make  something sweet; of course my brother took the easy route by asking me to bake something. He said I could make whatever I wanted. It can get a bit overwhelming, when you get complete free range like that, can’t it? There are so many things I want to bake, and sometimes it’s hard to decide. Especially when you’re not the one who will be doing the eating. What if my brother’s friends – and the birthday boy! – don’t like what I chose? In the end I decided to go with chocolate. Because, honestly, who doesn’t like chocolate? I’m very pleased with the end result and, to be honest, slightly bitter that I have to give this whole cake away without being able to have a taste!

I took this Devil’s Food cake recipe from this post; I decided to go with a vanilla butter cream instead of the meringue frosting they used. I got some inspiration for the decoration from this lovely post but ended up using (store bought) meringue to top off the cake instead of piping even more butter cream on top of the ganache. I was afraid it’d be a bit of a butter cream overkill!

Semla

 

 

 

What I love about having met all these amazing online friends is that it’s given me the opportunity to learn about different places, and to travel to countries I normally maybe wouldn’t have ended up in. Before I met Jessie I never would’ve thought I’d be spending so much time in Sweden, but almost four years (and about six? Seven? trips there) later, here we are.

I really like Sweden. Jess is there, for starters, but it’s also the European home of the moose, and if I’m lucky I get to see some snow (I wasn’t very lucky in that regard this trip around. Hopefully next time!) Semla is also a big reason why I love going to Sweden so much. This tasty treat, sadly enough, isn’t always available . It’s a traditional fettisdagen (mardi gras) treat so it’s usually available in and around February. This year “Fat Tuesday” is March 4th so you still have time to whip up some semla for yourself!

It’s made up out of bread-like buns (made with flour, a little bit of sugar, butter, milk, yeast and flavored beautifully with cardamon.) The insides have a marzipan/almond filling and then it’s topped off with whipped cream. 100% delicious. I found a great recipe, and a beautiful instructions video, on the call me cupcake blog, here. (Seriously, how gorgeous is that video?!)