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.

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?!)

Apple cupcakes and cinnamon buttercream frosting

 

 

 

I hope everyone had a good Valentine’s Day weekend – or, if you don’t really celebrate it, just a regular good weekend, then. Good weekends are all about sleeping in, taking time for yourself to relax and maybe get one or two things done. Weekends also about cupcakes. Or they should be, at least. Cupcakes were without a doubt my first real baking love, and I’ve never quite gotten over them, or over how much fun it is to frost and decorate them.

These particular cupcakes were made using a regular pound-cake recipe. The mini!cupcake pan is new so I was excited to test it out (anything miniature sized is bound to be amazing). I added slices of apple to the regular sized cupcakes, and then added cinnamon to my buttercream. Apple and cinnamon are the best of friends, and the frosting was extremely yummy.

 

Earl Grey Chocolate Chip Cookies

 

 

 

I love tea. I think there’s not a single other hot drink that can come even close to giving the joy and comfort that a good cup of tea can offer. Not coffee, not hot chocolate – they don’t come close. Or for me, at least – weirdly enough I have a lot of friends that don’t feel the same way. Huh. My tea collection is ridiculously extensive, up to a point where I’m a bit worried that I’m never going to be able to make it through to the other end of it, at least not for another couple of years. Even though I love trying new brands and flavors, there’s a couple of teas – classics – that’ll always be on the top of my list. A good, simple Darjeeling with lemon is my personal favorite. I’m also very partial to Lipton’s Vanilla Green tea – there’s just something about that one. And then there’s Earl Grey. You just can’t go wrong with Earl Grey. When I saw the recipe for these Earl Grey Chocolate Chip Cookies on the Hummingbird High blog, I knew I had to try them.

I made them for a friend’s birthday and they were a pretty big success – I personally loved them to pieces, at least. Which I count as a big success!

Cookies and brownies

Last weekend we had the international Customer’s Day in Belgium. On this Saturday in September customers get treated with a little gift from (small) business owners. I baked brown-butter and vanilla, triple chocolate chip cookies (pffew, quite the mouthful) and brownies for the people who came into my parents’ restaurant on that Friday.

Beware of the strudel

I’m going to be honest and say that before last week I had never even wondered about what filo dough actually is, and what it’s made off – or most importantly: how it’s made. Filo has always been one of those things that I, firstly, rarely use and secondly, always buy. My mom had a really big bunch of apples, though, and demanded (asked nicely, really, cause my mom is really nice) that I make something. Now usually I would’ve made an apple (pound) cake because not only are those the easiest, they are also by far the yummiest. Briefly my mind also went to that brown butter gooey apple cake I love. But then I thought: no, make something new. Something exciting!

So I came across this recipe for an apple-strudel type bake. Made with filo pastry. Home-made. To say I was in a little over my head would be putting it lightly. All I had was a written (albeit good!) instruction, and a work space that was kind of seriously lacking in size. But off I went, very bravely. It wasn’t a big success. I under-worked the dough because I didn’t realize how important it would be to really work it well, and then I got extremely tired (and frustrated!) of stretching it out, so some bits were still a bit too thick. All in all the result was edible, but under-baked and soggy. But that’s how life goes: sometimes you are left with a soggy bottom.

I have since seen how you make filo on a baking show on TV, and while I actually am quite curious to try again – and see if I can make it better this time – laziness usually takes over because that was seriously a lot of work for something that’s not even my favorite thing to eat. So no recipe, this time, because I really am not the best person to instruct you on how to make filo dough and strudels. But pictures, because at least those turned out okay!

Layered chocolate cake

 

I made this extravagant chocolate cake after my mom was cleaned out a cupboard and found a couple of cooking magazines from a while back. Or rather Christmas 2011 back. It doesn’t need to be Christmas, however, to enjoy some chocolate. Enjoying chocolate is more of a 7/7 365/365 kind of job anyway, isn’t it?

This particular Christmas magazine, for full disclosure, was Woman & Home – Feel Good Food Christmas (and it definitely made me feel good!)