A sweet mosaic of cookies

I just couldn't resist buying the Australian cookbook Sweet Food when I first browsed through it in a bookstore (actually it was the second time, but first sounds so much more poetical). For me a big deal of the recipes inside are exotic, using ingredients that are unusual in an Estonian kitchen - macadamia nuts for example, which are quite often in the ingredient lists. Ask an average Estonian what a macadamia nut is - you'll probalby hear the answer 'Misasi?' or - in English - 'A what?'

One of the first recipes that caught my eye was of cracked cookies (the name may differ in the English version, as I'm re-translating the recipe from Estonian). Their appearance is just so...wow that I was sure I'd be making them before I'd even read through the recipe. The cool look is achieved by rolling balls of cookie dough in powdered sugar before baking - that will leave a two-coloured cracked effect.

I substituted the allspice in the recipe with a double amount of cinnamon and pecan nuts with walnuts. I do have a budget, you know.


Cracked chocolate cookies
(adapted from Sweet Food)

125 g soft butter
370 g soft brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs
60 g melted chocolate
80 ml milk
340 g flour
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
salt
85 g chopped walnuts
powdered sugar

1. Beat together butter, sugar and vanilla until the mixture is light and creamy.
2. Add eggs one by one
3. Add chocolate and milk (I was afraid that chocoalte would turn lumpy when added to the cool mixture and mixed it with warm milk first).
4. Sift flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, cinnamon and a pinch of salt onto the butter mixture and mix well.
   
5. Add chopped walnuts.
6. Cover the dough and place it in the fridge for at least 3 hours (you can also prepare the dough the evening before)
7. Preheat the oven to 180C and slightly grease 2 griddles.
8. Use a teaspoon for measuring and make balls out of the dough (the recipe said this technique would make about 60 cookies - I got over 80 though I scooped quite much dough every time)
9. Roll each ball in a small bowl with powdered sugar so that it's covered well and place the balls onto the griddles, leaving enough space between them
   
10. According to the recipe you should bake the cookies for 20-25 min. I baked my best batch only for 18 minutes - the edges shouldn't look very dark when you take the cookies out of the oven. Even if they don't get burnt - too much time mean rock cookies.
11. After removing from the oven, leave for about 3-4 minutes, then place on a rack and let cool.

I subconsciously tried to find the cookies I had baked for 18 minutes afterwards - they were softer inside and seemed to have more taste. The cookies were moderately sweet and had a charming scent of cinnamon. This is rather a cacao-holic cookie than a chocoholic one, if I'm allowed to say such a thing! And I do believe one can't refuse eating something that looks like a sweet mosaic. Even if he or she has accidentally used a too long baking time and it cracks under the tooth like a real one:)



I wouldn't say these were the best cookies ever, but they were good and looked like A-class celebrities. That's great enough for me!

TGRWT#5: Meat with chocolate - are you kidding?

To try and eat meat with chocolate – that’s no easy challenge. Like – no way. But the more I thought about it, the more tempted I felt. Not only to test myself but also to shock others to see what they’d say and if they’d have anything to say at all. Well, they had. Amrita’s challenge for this months TGRWT#5 – combining meat and chocolate – has been the most intriguing one this far.

A traditional mole would have been a safer choice, I guess, because it’s widely known that it has chocolate in it and people actually eat it and like it and they actually do. No mole this time, amigos. I used an Italian recipe (Cinghiale in agrodolce) that actually called for wild boar (not a good idea to spend a pile of money if you’re mixing meat with chocolate for the first time – trust me), but used pork, I also lessened the amount of red wine vinegar. Otherwise I followed the recipe, word for word. Quite a scary afternoon.

Pork in chocolate and prune sauce
(adapted from Hans Joachim Döbbelin’s ’Italy’)

100 g prunes
75 g big raisins
600 g pork chops
75 g bacon
3 tbsp olive oil
salt
50 g bitter chocolate
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 dl red wine vinegar
3 laurel leaves
cinnamon

1. Soak prunes and raisins in lukewarm water
2. Cut the meat into slices
3. Chop bacon and heat it with olive oil until transparent
4. Add pork chops and fry them on both sides, then add salt and fry for additional 10 minutes on lower heat.
5. Drain prunes and raisins and grate chocolate (for me it was easier to just chop it into little pieces)
6. Heat sugar, laurel leaves and red wine vinegar on a pan until sugar dissolves, then add the mixture to the meat
7. Also add raisins, prunes, chocolate and some cinnamon, then heat almost until boiling point (don’t let it boil!)
8. Mix meat and sauce well and heat everything for another 15 minutes, not letting it boil.
9. Serve with pasta or be a traitor like me and serve with rice instead.

I don’t imagine eating something like this with pasta. Really really really. Pasta with sweet and sour chocolate sauce? No. Rice was definitely much better.

Cooking this dish filled the kitchen with overwhelming vinegar smell – that was a bit alarming, especially for my mother. ’If I had known you were going to use it for meat, I wouldn’t have bought you this bottle of vinegar,’ she said when she came home. And also – ’If you asked me to buy meat I thought you’d be making something really good, but you made something sour.’ Okay, not a very bad start.

The dish is best described as sweet and sour chocolate meat. The taste of chocolate, most of all, is strange. It may be strangely good, but it’s still strange, strangely chocolate-y. What I actually like the most, are the prunes – delicate, soft, somehow maintaining a good balance between tastes. I’d rather eat the meat and pick out the prunes (into my mouth, of course), adding some yoghurt to my rice instead of chocolate sauce! The meat has an interesting accent to it, but isn’t flavoured by the sauce in a taste-killing way.

When my parents came home, I kept repeating, ’Really-really, you don’t have to eat this, you can just have rice with smoked chicken, really. Really.’ But strangely this time they wouldn’t listen, although I refused to reveal the components of the dish and hid myself in my room, doing all kinds of, you know, important stuff. After they’d called me for several times to go and explain the mystery, I heard the words ’this meat was good’.

I’m in awe. I’m confused. Something’s wrong in the world.
My parents liked meat in chocolate sauce.

Curd cheese mousse with black tea

Desserts flavoured with tea sound so exotic and exciting for me. Everything flavoured with tea, actually. I have made different experiments and in addition to my yoghurt sauce and green tea cake with cottage cheese I had another really successful one a few days ago.



Curd cheese mousse with black tea
(4 servings)

400 g curd cheese
2 eggyolks
2 eggwhites
2 dl milk
1 dl sugar
4 teabags
vanilla

1. Heat milk together with the teabags (use a teflon coated saucepan). When it has started to boil, remove it from the heat, cover and let stand for 5 minutes.
2. Discard the teabags, but try to press all the liquid you possibly can out of them.
3. Beat eggyolks in a bowl and add the mixture to them.
4. Pour the milk-eggyolk mixture back into the saucepan and heat (over medium heat) until it thickens, stirring to avoid clumps. Let the mixture cool down in the fridge while you prepare other ingredients.
5. Mix curd cheese with sugar and vanilla.
6. In a clean and dry bowl beat the eggwhites with an electric mixer until stiff peaks form.
7. Mix the tea mixture with curd cheese, then gently add the eggwhite foam (add half of it at first).

For serving I’d recommend fruit or berries and lots of them! The more fruit the better goes for all dishes, right? I like to mix the mousse with apple cubes as I have plenty of apples lying around in the kitchen. At last. One small apple diced and mixed with each serving – now that’s delicious. I believe I’d like it with ice cream too.




The mousse has quite a strong taste of black tea, it’s moderately sweet and has a really light foamy texture. At the same time it’s a real pleasure for all you curd cheese lovers out there (although it’s my modest opinion that Estonian curd cheese is the best in the whole world – it’s the one thing besides our rye bread that I just couldn’t live without if I moved abroad).

Have you got any favourite fabulous recipes using tea?
My next idea is to make a layered hazelnut cake with black tea egg-buttercream filling. Just hope I have any time to cook in September...

Back to when I was five years old ... a childhood dessert reconstructed

Waiting at the small kitchen table.
'Is it ready yet?'
-'Could you just wait a little more?'
And then, after some time, mom gives me a soup plate filled with white milk kissel with blasting vanilla flavour. The excitement! The sweet taste of a favourite dessert!

There was a time when milk kissel would have been my first (and last) choice for a dessert and this is the scene that come's to my mind whenever I'm remembered about it. But, unfortunately, my memories about the dessert end with that time. Milk kissel hasn't come around for - let me see - ages. It might be just that we've grown out of it, so I figured the dessert needed some reconstruction.


Here - renovated, all new, a modern milk kissel - here you go!

Coconut milk kissel
(adapted from '100 Magustoitu' by Lia Virkus and Pille Enden)
serves 4

1/2 l milk
1/2 l coconut milk
1 dl sugar
3/4 dl potato/corn starch
1 tsp vanilla sugar

1. Bring coconut milk and milk to a boil in a saucepan, add sugar
2. Dissolve starch in a bit of water and add to milk, stirring vigorously.
3. Let the kissel reach its boiling point, but don't let it boil, remove it from the heat
4. Flavour with vanilla
5. Let the kissel cool down, stirring occasionally to prevent the forming of 'kissel skin'
6. Serve with jam or with cinnamon sprinkled over the dessert.


To create the dish I just substituted half of the milk in the original recipe with coconut milk - the taste came through in perfect proportion with everything else. The dessert is silky, sweet and has a lovely scent of vanilla. I prefer eating it when it's still a bit warm, but it's also great when it has cooled down completely - especially on a hot day like this! And on a hot day like this it's essential to spend more time outside and enjoy quick meals - this dessert is one great example.

You know what? One day my kids are going to ask me for this milk kissel!:D

Brunost : Norwegian sweet brown cheese

Yes, I do mean sweet when I say so!

Before visiting Norway in July I had never-ever heard of something like that and when I first encountered it at a hotel breakfast, my reaction was 'oh, cool, smoked cheese!'. Well...it wasn't. And I saw the guy beside me place a slice of it onto a chocolate spread sandwich!

The next encounter took me further. At a boat trip we bought waffles and guess what came along - the same brown cheese. I asked our guide about it and she said that they, Norwegians, would rather refer to it as 'caramel'. Aha! Still, days later we almost witnessed the making of the cheese at a museum and I learned more about the background of it - this time believing every word.

Brunost (Norwegian for 'brown cheese') is made by boiling whey, milk and cream together. The process is quite long and and finally almost all of the water will evaporate and lactose (milk sugar) will caramelise, giving the cheese its sweet taste. The mixture will then be cooled.

But buying brown cheese at a Norwegian supermarket for the first time can be difficult (or rather - it was) because there's so much to choose from. Products differ according to their (fat) contents and texture. The most popular is Gudbrandsdalost - some goat's milk is added to its contents. Geitost is wholly or partly made from goat's milk. Fløtemysost only uses cow's milk. There is also a spreadable version of the cheese that is achieved by using a shorter boiling time - this is Prim.

The most ordinary way to eat Brunost is with a slice of bread. Actually, Brunost and cheese slicer go together like rama lama lama ke ding a de dinga a dong, because it's the easiest way for handling the cheese - it's quite sticky, you know. True, it can be sliced with a knife when it's been taken from the fridge but after some time at room temperature it much rather resembles plasticine. Wonderfully and strongly tasting melting-in-mouth plasticine, sweet but at the same time a bit savoury, tasting both of caramel and of cheese, reminding a bit of certain toffee candies.

Deeply addictive!
If there's anyone who's got an actual recipe - I'd be delighted if you'd share!