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Sour yet satisfying

Hello my loyal readers!

Today (finally!!) is the time for some sour action. I spotted this amazing recipe from a bit older Finnish cooking book and thought I''d give it a try. I remember having this big bush of goose berries in our back yard for many years ago. The berries were tasty but unfortunately I wasn't a fan of any kind of sour berries back then. Therefore when I saw this recipe I was surprised. I have never seen any recipe using these berries. So let's get started!

For the crust you need:

150g (5 oz) Flours

100g (3,5 oz) Butter

50g (1,8 oz) Sugar

1 Egg yolk

1/2 the insides of an vanilla pod (I left it out since I didn't have one)

The filling:

700g (24,7 oz) Goose berries

1,25dl (1/2 cup) Water

200g (7 oz) Sugar

60g (2 oz) Potato Flours

40g (1,4 oz) Peeled and grated almonds (I was confused by this so I just used almond groats)

On top:

3 Egg whites

150g (5 oz) Sugar

+ 26cm (~10 inch) cake tin

First I did some serious cleaning up for those berries before the baking began. I can assure that it took me longer then awhile to do that! :D Then I mixed up the ingredients for the pie, wrapped the dough into foil and put it in the fridge to settle for 30 mins. After cooling down and letting the butter to harden it is noticeably easier to work with. So therefore I rolled the dough into a little bit bigger circle than the cake tin and put it in there. Before the filling, the crust had to be precooked in the oven (200°C, 400F) for 10 mins. Naturally cover the crust with greaseproof paper and put some dried peas on top of it to hold it down.

Next up there was the filling. By following the pictures you can see what I did. So first off, I boiled up the water and the sugar. The added the berries into it and let it boil in the medium heat for 15 mins. After boiling them, get the berry liquid and heat it up again. At this point, dissolve the potato flours into the tiny amount of cold water and then add it to the boiling juice. When the liquid starts to precipitate add the berries and almonds. I have to admit that it was pretty scary. I remember what happened with that corn starch so there was reason to panic! Hahah.

Anyways, everything turned out better and I was ready to spread the filling on the crust.

When the filling has cooled down enough it is time to create the beautiful mask for the lady! Froth the egg whites and add the sugar little by little to it. I followed the books picture, which came out perfectly the same, but you can always be creative when decorating cakes!

Bake the cake in 190°C (375F) for 20 mins until the meringue gets some color.

This is actually as easy as it looks, and I was very happy about the outcome! The meringue was a bit undercooked despite the color but it didn't ruin the taste. Even the almond bits were a nice plus since there was something to actually chew on. For this one I'd give 8/10 since I'm still not a big fan of sour food. :P

Thank you for your time and hopefully we'll see again soon chicsters!

Frosting away!

Hello my friends!

On Saturday it was time to bake something more traditional yet delicious for you. A basic coffee cake with lemon flavor, Lemon poppy seed cake. I'm a huge fan of these kind of cakes as long as they're moist and squishy. I haven't really baked those by myself that much so it was about the time to do it now! :) 

The recipes I've picked from foreign aren't so easy every time. Sometimes the cake tin is too small for the amount of ingredients, sometimes there's flaws in the recipe. With this one, I had a couple of remarkable changes. First of all, I'd leave the lemon syrup out. By pouring the syrup on the cake, it became all sticky and got a very strong lemon flavor. Therefore I'd recommend to leave it out. Secondly The ration between lemon juice and powdered sugar in the frosting is all wrong. I had to go through it in the hard way. I ended up having the cake swimming in the puddle of frosting. Oh well.. :D

I actually filmed a video from all of this for you to see. Unfortunately I just haven't had any time to edit that so I hope I get to upload that as soon as possible! In the meanwhile you can check all the ingredients from here and get ready for the yum!

The dough

85 g (~3 oz) Butter

245 g (8,65 oz) Sugar

1,5 Lemons' peel grated

1,65 dl (0,7 cup) Milk

235 g (~8,3 oz) Flours

2 tsp Baking powder

0,5 tsp Salt

3 Egg whites

The lemon frosting

2dl (0,85 cup) Powdered sugar

1,5-2 tbsp lemon juice

( I had to modify this afterwards so hopefully it works, if it gets too thick just add some more of the juice.)

When it comes to tasting, it was absolutely amazing! The cake itself was very moist but with mild lemon flavor. When you got some of that sour frosting with that, it was like a perfect combination! The poppy seeds didn't taste in the cake but I think they gave a nice visual effect on that. :) These type of cakes are very easy to bake so i recommend every one of you to try this. I've already made all of the mistakes for you, so you shouldn't hav anything to worry about. :D

A little something about the future. I have some great material of the next coming up creations so it's just a matter of time when I get to post them on here. So until then, have a chictastic time!