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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!

Misisippi...Missisippi... oh Mississippi!

Hey guys, I've missed you!

The last weekend and week has been such a busy time for me so therefore this post is a litte late. Hopefully you don't mind. :) I'd also mention that I started to work on Monday so I'll work really hard to get these posts here on time. I've made some sort of schedule for my bakings that I'd be on time with them. I'll try my best to post at least every weekend something. I also have a day off every Tuesday so there might be some extra every now and then. (;

Anyways, in last weekend I finally got to bake the mississippi mud pie. That was actually the first recipe which got me to start this blogging so I was very eager to finally make it! In the end, it was a basic mud pie with some fancy whipped cream and chocolate chips on top of it. Despite of its ordinary ingredients, the flavor knocked our socks off. The whole pie was gone in 2 days. Even though I had the right size dish for that, there was still some extra filling. Therefore I made some 1 portion size pies.This time there wasn't any problems with that filling like with chocolate meringue pie. Everything went nice and smooth .

I also tried my new macaron mat on the next day. Unfortunately it wasn't a success.. For some reason the macarons didn't cook as they're supposed to so I ended up to have 42 macaron halves stuck to the mat. I've had some problems earlier with other silicon products. They don't heat up in the same way than normal tins and pans so I've had lots of raw dough when I've used those. So that's the next problem I'm going to solve when I have some time. :)

In the end I want to say that when i baked all this, on Friday, it was all for my granny. She passed away exactly 3 years ago on that day. When I was little, we always baked together gingerbreads in Christmas, cinnamon rolls, and all kinds of pies. She basically got me into baking and I always had awesome time with her. I love you granny!

Uh Oh Daddy-O!

Hello there!

Yesterday was the time of celebration. My dad had his name day and as a gift, I baked some basic cinnamon rolls. Since there's not that much to celebrate in a year, I think it's nice tradition to have something special even on such a day as a name day. 

I had some troubles with the cooking time/ temperature since I forgot what I did in the last time. Haha, that's what you get when you don't write those down! Oh, there's also one good point about these cinnamon rolls. It's easy to put the "extra" ones to the freezer for the future. Nothing's better when you defrost one of those in the microwave and get a cup of milk with that! :3

I also did some shopping earlier on that day. I finally got myself a mat for macarons! :) It's definitely going to be easier to get perfectly round macarons with that so I can't wait to test it! I didn't want to buy that before I had made the first macarons. I wanted to be sure that I'm patient enough for macaron baking so I'd actually need the mat. The pallet knife and tart tin have also been in my mind for a long time. From those three the tin was the most challenging one to find. I had the measures for that but it seemed like none of the stores I've been to sells that shape. Luckily after long research I found it! It was supposed to be 30x10 (according to one recipe) but 35x11 was the closest one I could find. 

The actual shopping was terrible. I think I visited in three different stores and every time I had to remind myself "Just get what your looking for, do NOT even glance on anything else!" :D Because once I start looking around, it's a disaster. I start to go "Oh, I've always needed this! This would be great in my kitchen!" 

Oh well, more about this week. I'm sure there's going to be some sort of baking later on although the decision hasn't been made yet. Is it going to be macarons? How about some sort of pie? We'll see that. Maybe even a video! :)

But for now, I wish you all good night and chictastic time for the rest of the week! :)

We are the champions!

Delicious evening from the Pchic residence!

I've finally made it my chicsters. Here I present you the first macarons ever made by me!

It was a dark and stormy night.. Maybe that's too dramatic, let me try again.. At 9 AM this morning I woke up full of excitement. I headed straight to kitchen and got everything ready for my ordeal. I had read the recipe numerous times beforehand so I would be capable to make those in half asleep. There isn't any fancy colors etc since I was just testing these. The filling are lemon curd (on the left) and chocolate.

Usually I'm not that precise with the measures but since they really matter in macarons, I followed those very strictly. I even filtered the flours in case so there wouldn't be any clods. When I got to the point where you whisk the egg whites, I got worried. The recipe warned about whisking those eggs too much since the dough has to stay perfect. Not too hard, not too liquid. I kept whisking it with the lowest possible speed and checking every once in a while. It might have been beginner's luck but I still made it. :)

Next thing I know, I'm putting those in the oven already. Now that was tricky! They said how the temperature and time depended on the oven. Luckily I had four oven shelves so I had plenty of material to test that on. The first shelf came out pretty brown, as you can see from that lemon curd one. After that I baked the rest of them on the lowest point in the oven so they got little less brown. I still have to test the temperature in the future a bit since I already lowered the given 150°C (300 F) to 120°C (248 F)

Overall I'm so proud of myself. On top of the macarons, I also made the chocolate ganache (the filling) for the first time. Therefore how things went today, I'm definitely going to master the art of macarons.

I'd say this was perfect way to end this week! :) See ya my chicsters!

Baking square and fare

Yummy weekend for you all!

Yesterday I got together with my best friend by suggesting that we could bake something delicious for the weekend. Chocolate Caramel squares were the outcome. The recipe had some new ingredients which I've never heard of but everything went better than expected! :)

The squares were made in three different sections so we started off by making the dough for the bottom.

We measured 115 g (4 oz) of butter, 175 g (6 oz) of flours and 55 g (~1,9 oz) of fine golden sugar. Surprisingly this was totally a new experience for me. I've always worked on my doughs by hand but this... oh lawdy, this was so easy! I'm definitely going to use the mixer a lot more in the future! It doesn't even matter that our mixer is over 10 years old. It's still working amazingly well. The only problem we had was the size of the cake tin. I never seem to have the right size tins so we had to improvise itsy bit. Then again you have to remember when you're hardcore baking you can't avoid accidents. :D

Despite the little difficulties we were done with the dough and ready to move on to the caramel filling. At this point I encountered the most bizarre ingredient I have used so far. A can of condensed milk. I did some Internet research and found out that it's not that common product in Finnish grocery stores. The fact that you really can't replace that with anything else (you're welcome to prove me wrong!) made me even consider for a visit to the local Russian store. Fortunately I headed first to the biggest grocery store around and found what I was looking for! The next surprise was revealed at the point where I was opening the can. It was all gooey and I wouldn't call that good until I built up my courage to taste it.. The very common phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" was very clear to me at that moment. That gooey milk product tasted like vanilla pudding! I tried to convince my friend and brother to taste but I think the gooeyness was too much :D

Anyways, we added that can of condensed milk à 397 g (~14 oz), 175 g (6 oz) of butter, 115 g (4 oz) of fine golden sugar, 3 Tbsp of fructose corn syrup in the pan.

After heating it up and mixing for a while it got pretty thick so we were ready to pour that on the dough.

After pouring the caramel the masterpiece was put the fridge to settle until it was firm. It was already late and my friend left before I melted the chocolate for the top so I don't have any pictures of that. Although you can see from the first picture that they came out pretty nice. :)

What about the taste?

I'd say that these are perfect for big parties. These are pretty sweet and according to persons I fed these, said that one square is definitely enough. Overall everything went as expected and the outcome was very good. I'd definitely give 4 out of five stars for this recipe.

For tomorrow I've plans to make my first macarons so wish me luck! :) There isn't going to be any videos from that since I want to focus as much as I can in to the making process. All I can say that it's going to be awesome day tomorrow and I hope you guys have chictastic time until then!