Not another gingerbread cookie

This year it only took 8.5 hours. We're getting better!

Like I said last year, I have this tradition of baking gingerbreads with my good friend Marie. Usually we're not finished until early morning hours, because we take our time. And we mess with all kinds of stuff and ideas and stuff. Some day I will have the courage to speak about how pathetic amateurs we were at first...but I can't admit it just yet.

Now, trust me on this. YOU HAVE TO MAKE FILLED GINGERBREADS. We fill them with every possible thing we can find, but maybe it's safer to know what you're putting in your treats at first...


For sweet ones I recommend peanut butter and bananas, but also chocolate chunks, dried fruit, nuts, berries. Peanut butter is compulsory, by the way.
But be brave and try savoury ones too - liver pate is the best thing for savoury Christmasy snacks!
That's how we make them...


If you want to give some good candies as presents (or something small), you could try making these gift boxes.

Just bake 6 squares for each (and some spare ones too, we needed 4 spare squares for 5 boxes! amateurs!) and heat some sugar to a caramel on a skillet for 'glue'. Put together 5 of the squares, fill the box with desired treats and then 'glue' on the last one. Then it's time for the icing to make the boxes look real (this one here is quite ordinary, but you get the idea).

Gingerbread balls are still a favourite. These are the ones I nibble the most. Making them is like therapy and eating them is even more so. If you've bought or made dough that's too sticky or is difficult to handle by some other reason, just MAKE BALLS. Really. Save yourself from all that depression.

I don't think gingerbread baking is over for me just yet, we've still got plans on doing it at my granny's in the countryside. Perfect Christmas.

A glance back and a deeply unconventional sauce.

There's a food blogging veteran gene in me now. At least a small one. Because it was yesterday one year ago that I started writing on this blog with no high expectations but a lot of words in my head waiting to be written.

In between all this mumbojumbo I've left behind about 70 recipes, half of which, I guess, have been my own creations. I've eaten my full in Georgia and in Norway, met other Estonian bloggers and finally, quite accidentally, got into a cookbook with three recipes of mine. Not bad at all!

If I look back...I started off with an unusual rhubarb-kamacake, other favourites have been onion marmalade with balsamico, tosca cookies, lime cream tartelettes, honeyed onion and apple soup with caraway, poppy seed cake with curd cheese, curd cheese mousse with black tea, broccoli with pistachio butter, cashew nut fudge with rosewater, roasted spiced sweet potatoes, healthy onion tart. Ohh. Only droplets in a sea for me.

Thank you so much to everyone who's been visiting me! As I have the privilege, I'll just use it...is there something that you've liked particularly? Haven't liked? Is there something you've tried making? Something you'd like to say? I'm quite all ears:)

But now - on to the recipe. How would you like to make...

...this?

Applesauce aka Several cm thick black thingy in the bottom of the saucepan
(serves as a job for 2 people for several days)

4 dl applejuice
1 dl sugar
cinnamon stick
half of a vanilla pod

1. Measure all ingredients into a saucepan and heat them to a boil.
2. Go do some stuff. Let the sauce boil vividly, but check it out once in a while.
3. If the sauce has been boiling for 10 minutes, decide it still needs some more time and go do some more...stuff.
4. After some time, go check out the sauce.
5. Try to make and end to the thick smoke coming from the saucepan with the help of running water.
6. Give up and throw the saucepan out of the window, into the snow.
7. Swear.
8. Swear some more.
   
9. Open all windows in the house (don't forget to open the one you can't close later, so you have to turn the radiator on the maximum to avoid freezing to death in your living room).
10. Wave your hands to get the smoke out of the windows (doesn't help).
11. Fetch the saucepan from the snow and look into it.
12. Swear some more.
13. Try to clean it. Somehow. Or throw it away.
    

These things just happen, I know. I'm ashamed. Deeply. I am. But that is to show that not every day is a day of chocolate balls filled with apricots and marzipan.

But what's next here? There are piles of gingerbread cookies and candies downstairs and I promise I'll tell you about them as soon as I have the time. Yet I declare there will be a second year as surely as the first one's over now:)