It's time for celebration!

[Note: This actually happened a week and a half ago]

Celebrate good times, c'mon! My parents had their 20th anniversary so I was immediately going through my cookbooks. I picked this beautiful rose hip - cinnamon meringue cake. I admit that this was the first meringue cake I've ever made so be gentle! :D Despite the easy building up, you want to have some time for this cake. Unless you bake the meringue layers beforehand.

Meringue:

6 Egg whites

A touch of salt

4dl (1 2/3 cup) Sugar

2 tsp Corn starch

2 tsp Cinnamon

1 tsp Dark Aceto Balsamico -vinegar or White wine vinegar

Filling:

4dl (1 2/3 cup) Whipped Cream

100-150g (3,5-5 oz) Dark chocolate

2 Jars of rose hip baby food

Start by whipping the eggs and salt together. When it gets thicker, add the suger little by little and mix at the same time. Try to do the upside-down trick and if it works, you're good to go. Add the corn starch, cinnamon and vinegar into the meringue.

Create 3-4 big circles of meringue on the baking tray and bake those for 5 mins in 150°C (300F) on convection. After those 5 mins, turn the oven to 50°C (122F) and let those circles to be there for 1,5h.

At this point you have to be careful! After being baked, those meringues has to get off very smoothly since they break into pieces easily. I used some spatulas for that. Once you're done, you can start to stack them up. Place the first meringue layer on the plate and put some whipped cream, that rose hip puree and roughly chopped chocolate on it. Repeat this 2-3 times, depending on how many layers you have made.

For me, it was hard to have it together so I ended up with Leaning Tower of Pisa.. oh well :D After dinner, the whole cake was just a big pile of meringue-chocolate-rose hip-whipped cream mush. We didn't figure out how to cut nice slices of it!

So we had some leftovers from that. The next day when we ate it was a nice surprise. The meringue had got all moist so it felt like we ate the same cake with cinnamon mousse, haha!

I'd give 8/10 for this cake. One slice was definitely enough since it was waaaaaaaay too sweet. Afterwards I'd say that there could be more of that rose hip puree to balance the sweetness. Overall the evening was chictastic so congrats mom & dad!

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!

Didn't expect this..

Well hello there chicsters!

It has been a week since we cooked together and for this time I wanted to have something more challenging. Perhaps it was too challenging when looking back for that. :D Chocolate Meringue Pie. Oh how delicious you looked in the picture. I have to admit that when I saw the 'corn starch' in the recipe, I had some second thoughts. I've always been pretty bad at using that in cooking. Whenever I even try to make some kind of sauce, I always end up to have very watery sauce. The picture above gives a great illusion of a perfect pie but of course it's far away from that!

So back to the Sunday's disaster. If you have seen the video, you can see how everything's going great in the beginning. I had high expectations and I was so keen to taste it later. Suddenly I find myself from adding crazy amounts of corn starch into the filling but nothing changes. It was so frustating! I felt like "here we go again" -.- When I filled up the cake tin I tried to stay positive and think: "well after it's been in the oven, it's gonna be great!" Well longer I had it in there the meringue got darker and darker but the filling was being the same ol' liquid self. After 18 mins I had to take it out before it was going to burn. The result was a mess as you can see..

Eventhought the sight was horrible, the pie was gone in 2 hours! The taste was absolutely amazing so therefore I promised to remake that someday soon. Hopefully with better success. :)

Then to the other news from P-chic's life. Today I launched the Chictastic Baking facebook page. I wanted to make it easier for you, my chicster, to follow my actions and latest videos. Feel free to give feedback and development ideas on there!

I also got this great sushi book yesterday. At first I borrowed it from library. I really wanted to buy that but since it was a lot of money (in my scale) I decided to let it be. Fortunately I found the exact same book from another store and it was on great sale! Oh, that was a happy day. :) 

Therefore I wish you have chictastic time until we meet again and hopefully there's going to be a sushi episode soon! :3

Check this out!

Chocolate Meringue Pie