Canadian Goodies

Canada Day was... well, over a month ago (July 1st).

I thought it would be fun to bake some typical Canadian goodies and bring them to work. So I started to search the good ol' net to find the most popular Canadian desserts that would also be easy to bake and share.

I knew I would make Sucre à la Crème, because I have an awesome recipe for it and it is a very typical recipe from Québec.

However, I was delighted to learn about Nanaimo bars. These come from the town of Nanaimo in British Columbia and may I say that they are absolutely divine. They were the biggest hit and I look forward to get more opportunities to bake these mouth-watering treats. The recipe I used it found here and is apparently the best version of it, after a contest held by the city to find the very best Nanaimo bars.

Traditional Christmas Tables

One of the things that I found to be quite different in Sweden is food traditions around the main holidays (Christmas, Easter and Midsummer). I find it fascinating how anchored it is in most Swedes and how important it is for them. The julbord, or Christmas table, is almost a ritual. It is usually served as a buffet and you visit it three times, plus a fourth for desserts. Of course, you can go as often as you want, but each round has its own purpose: herrings and other fish, cold meat then warm meals. Dessert comes last, of course. I won’t go into more details as this is not the goal of this post.

These strong traditions eventually leads my Swedish friends and coworkers to ask me “What’s traditional in Canada/Québec” and I find myself asking the same thing. I suppose turkey is an obvious answer for most, but my mother was never found of the big bird so I only recall eating it once – the year my father was gifted one by his company as some Christmas bonus. I know there is a traditional meat pie for New Year which we call tourtière. It was served everywhere and we had left overs for a while. I think we even ate some at Christmas, so they lasted for at least a while week.

I have come to realise that I never really paid attention to the food we ate around the holidays, so to me, there is not strong tradition except this tourtière and… the “bûche de noël", or Christmas Log/Yule Log. It also occurred to me that I had never baked one before, nor had any since I moved to Sweden aside from the rare Christmas I spent back at my folk. Well, for some odd reason, they popped back into my head this year and I managed to make it three times: Once for work so I could test the recipe (my poor coworkers are blissfully unaware guinea pigs, although I have never heard them complain), once for our Christmas celebrations with the bf`s family and once for our New Year celebrations with friends. I have to say, I was quite pleased with the recipe and I will definitely try it again next year!

The Yule Log is mostly a frosted sponge cake which is rolled up like a log and frosted on the outside as well with the same frosting. That is the simple version, which is usually more than enough to be enjoyable. The sponge cake is usually chocolatey and the frosting… well, that is where it can vary a lot. Mine was chocolatey too (what a surprise!) but you can have vanilla, etc. There must be hundreds of different versions. It also seems to be a French thing as these cakes are well known not only in Québec but also in France and Belgium.

So, without further ado, I present you a picture of my Yule Log, baked with love and eagerness for the New Year, an hour or two after our car broke down on the way to the chalet we rented with some friends.

  

I tried to make it look a bit like a log with a branch. These little white things covered in chocolate are supposed to be mushroom. The reason it is called a log is because the rolled cake, when cut, makes it look like one. Some cake are much thicker but, as I mentionned, there are lots of variations.

Oh! The recipe is on the net, although it is in French. If someone might want a translation, just contact me and I oblige :)

The recipe is found here.

My new Doctor Who shoes

I'm not really a shoe girl. I like mine to be practical first, then nice looking second. That might be why I mostly own running shoes and sport sandals. They're comfy, I'm happy! I'll never understand the appeal of high heels with the way they can ruin your back and knees and.... enough babbling/whining, this isn't about it after all. =)

I'm a Doctor Who fan. Lately, I've noticed that the 10th doctor wear Converse shoes. Since then, I've seen them everywhere. It's madness. Amy Pond wears them, some people in Torchwood wear them, they are plaguing me. So a few weeks before my trip to Canada, I started to obsess : I need me a pair of Converse. The doctor wears them white, maroon or red, which are none of my colours. I'm a fan, but let's not go bonkers. I wanted marine blue and my quest took me to many shoe stores in Sweden where I found that the price for these sneakers was quite high (easily 699 :-/98 $CAD, yikes!). To compare, those in Canada were selling for 35 to 45$ before taxes, so half price more or less. Anyway, apparently, girls ONLY want to wear white, pink or some other girly pastel colour. Blue is for men, yarr! Well, sucks to be me. Okay, I'm a little harsh. They did have a nice dark purple that was quite fine, but if I wasn't gettig blue, I was only settling for green. I think they just had selected colours left as even those that were available had very few sizes remaining.

So I figured I'd check in Canada as my trip was so close. Half price, yay! But still not my colours as they were out of stock nearly everywhere. I finally stumbled upon a small shoe store selling fake ones for 9.99 $CAD (or 85 SEK with taxes). White, black or pink... I grabbed a pair of white with a wicked idea in my mind.

This is Mr B guarding my newly bought shoes.

I have to admit, this new plan had 2 great advantages.

1) No Converse sign. They cover them in the series as they arent allowed to do publicity.

2) I could now customise them to my heart's desire!

So I bought some fabric pens and paint. I considered a bit what I'd write and draw and finally, after practicing on an old t-shirt, I took a deep breath and went ahead with the Dr Who shoes!

I decided to draw half of a TARDIS on the right shoe's outward side, and the new Doctor Who logo on the left shoe's outward side. It was just easier with the colours and the design. Then I made a scratch with the black pen while making the letters, so after a bit of "oh crap, I ruined them!", I noticed it could make a nice letter S and turned that into "Spoilers!" as I really like the character of River Song.

To add a bit more of fun, I wrote two words on the front of each shoe "Wibbly Wobbly" and "Timey Whimey". 

On the tongues, I wrote "Bow ties are cool" and "Are you my mummy?"

Finally, I had 2 quotes I quite liked during the brainstorming but were a bit long. So I decided to put them in the inward sides of the shoes.

"Hello, I'm the Doctor. Basically.... run." from 11th

and

"You and me

Time and space

You watch us run" from River

The front

The right view

The left view

Here is a view with Mr B, the shoes, and the pair I got for my good friend Mia.

Here is a picture with Mr B who took a liking to the shoelaces.

Birthday cake!

Well, it seems it's more than time to update this blog! I've had a few pictures laying around but I've just been too lazy to do anything about them.

So, with 3 months delay (maybe 4, but who's counting really?) I give you my birthday cake! It's a Charlotte and it's quite fruity, which makes a nice change from chocolate. Mind you, there is nothing wrong at all with chocolate, but if I had to choose between fruits and that... hmm... chocolate fruit fondue? *grins* That might be cheating...

I've forgotten exactly what the inside consists of. I think it's probably a vanilla parfait and a strawberry ice cream layer, with that soft layer of cake, but as I don't have access to my recipes at the moment, I cannot look it up.

Oh yes, Swedanian is in Canada at the moment. HEATWAVE! Woohoo! Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go dive in the nice pool with Mister B, who you will be introduced to in my next update (I'll try to write that before Christmas ;) )

Sweet tears

This comes a little late, but here is a cake I made in February for the boyfriend's mother's birthday. I had only a few days of warning; it was to be made for a Friday evening and both my Wednesdays and Thursday evenings were rather full. I picked the recipe on Wednesday based on the fact that it could be done during one afternoon. This is a cake made with 6 rings of meringue acting as 6 layers, which are filled with chocolate whipped cream and strawberry whipped cream, the whole covered thing by lovely puffs of vanilla whipped cream. It looked nice and easy enough despite its 3 stars rating (I've made cakes with similar ratings before, but they tend to take 2 days).

So, I picked up my ingredients on Wednesdays, I made the meringue rings on Thursdays and I pulled up my sleeves on Friday afternoon  after getting home from work. It started well... until the first ring broke while trying to paint it with chocolate. Ok, no big deal right? By the way, painting brittle meringue is not an easy task. I choose the wrong kind of brush, very likely, so it did not help. Anyway, I patched it somehow while using melted chocolate as glue, but I managed to break the second too... crap. The concept is to staple them on top of each others, THEN when the rings are later filled with the creams, you rotate it and they should hold it all while standing. That's where the 3 stars rating come, me think, because it just would have collapsed into an horrid mess. My cake at least. Here is a lovely picture that almost brought me to tears as I tried not to panic, with 2 hours left  before the birthday dinner. (The picture below shows them laying. Imagine rotating that... Instant mess!)

I don't think the rings can be called that at this point. They are mostly a gathering of meringue segments more of less arranged into a circular fashion with some strange cross in the middle. What to do with that mess? Start a new cake? Out of butter and one egg left, I won't go far with that. Hmm... I could cover up the mess with the whipped vanilla cream and hope for the best.

That sort of worked. It is rather plain for look but no one can tell the disaster it is hiding! Luckily, it was also a very delicious cake so the taste went down in history, while its appearance was quickly forgotten.

Olympic Canadian Cupcakes

I keep meaning to add a post, only to realise "Oh, I should add this first and then that and then..." So in the end, nothing gets added. Typical me! *grins*

Well, I'll jump over a few things (and I can always get back to them later on after all) to show off some cupcakes. I was wondering about doing something special for the Olympic Games that are still going on in Vancouver. Seeing as I was born and raised in Canada, albeit on the opposite coast, I am particularly interested in the Games. I would even watch it if we were not 9 hours ahead timewise, meaning that every happens when I sleep or am heading to work.

Anyway, what is typically Canadian when you think about good? MAPLE SIRUP!
What do I have in great quantities? MAPLE SIRUP!
So I seached through all my books to no avail for some delicious maple tasting muffins. Finding nothing, I ended up on the internet and finally found someone sharing the perfect recipe. I will not give a link as I doubt she has the rights to reproduce it, but I will let you know that it's in Martha Stewart's Cupcake book, which I definitely hope to buy when I have the chance (my good friend Mia owns it and I was able to flip through it when I saw her last. Some of those cupcakes look truly amazing and delicious).

Here you go, maple sirup cupcake with maple sirup buttercream and M&Ms for the traditional Olympic Rings. You can see a sample with the little Royal Canadian Mounted Beaver guarding my computer.

As an aside note, well done to all the athletes during the games! Canada and Sweden have much to be proud of. All's left to do is get that gold medal in men hockey (no, I'm not a hockey fan but I'm still Canadian and I cannot deny my heritage *grins*).

Another birthday cake

I love birthdays because it gives me a chance to bake cakes! Lucky for me, my “sambo” gained an extra year of wisdom recently. However, he likes whipped cream, which means I end up making the same cake every year. In a way, it is still a great way to practice on the same style and I even managed to find a fancy recipe with lots of whipped cream to make him happy on his special day. I also happened to do it this summer (the picture is in one of the earlier posts). It is a very delicious cake as well. If you are curious and know Swedish, you can find it in the book “Desserter” by Jan Hedh, whom I adore. It is called “Jordgubbsvaniljvacherin”. I tried to take a few pictures of the process but most of them are fairly uninteresting (like a bowl of red liquid that will turn into a yummy strawberry ice cream).

Meringue can be tricky when you have never done any. I remember being told to keep on whipping a few times by a teacher even though I was fairly sure to be done. It can be quite fascinating too when you turn the bowl over and nothing falls or even move. I could have shaken that spoon and the meringue would not have fallen off! You can even notice the spikes going upward against gravity. Meringues are fun!

This is the assembled cake, with the bottom layer of meringue, the layer of strawberry ice cream, then the layer of vanilla parfait and the final top layer of meringue. It will be all covered by whipped cream.

In the book, they stop at the whipped cream after adding some strawberries and the small lines of meringue. Sadly, in January, the only ones I found looked fairly dried out and were quite expensive too. Beside, I like chocolate and I just had to play with my favourite toy. I used some red chips and spread lines of melted red chocolate on a plastic ark which went into the fridge while I prepared the dark chocolate. Once it was warm enough, I covered the lines with it for a nice effect. The red turned out to be more of a dark fuchsia but it still looks very nice with the dark brown.

The final result. I had to snap the final pictures rather quickly as we ended up running a bit late and our guests showed up just as I was putting the last touches in a panicky state. They all enjoyed it (of course says the cocky chef *grins*) and I even got a request to make a cake for the next weekend. A tiramisu, among all things. I plan to practice that this weekend to make sure I am able to make a edible one. It would be embarassing to mess it up as it is for his mother... eek!

Christmas time is soon upon us

The reason I never started a blog before is that I never know what I could write about. Can I find a subject I can update that frequently? Well, I seem to have failed with chocolate as I have already incorporated cake and muffins. I guess I will keep it general and see where it goes from there.

Christmas is approaching and I have been busier than ever this year. I had the idea that I could make my own cards for once. Which was very fun and rewarding but boy did it crave time! They might not be flashy, but I like the way they turned out to be. The imbedding of the patterns was the lengthiest part, but I loved doing the calligraphy. I need to practice a lot more though, but I have gotten a few good starter tips a while back by my friend Mia the photographer (Her link is to the right side. Even if you don’t know Swedish, they do say that a picture is worth a thousand words and she sure has an eye for proving that saying right).

Anyway, here are a few pictures of the cards. I used a Shapeboss from Fiskars that I recently bought. Along with their patterns, I also created my own pattern of a snowflake for the front. I did the English and French versions first, as I needed to send them much earlier than the Swedish ones. By then, I had bought another pen and so I added a few more colours to the snowflake.

The English and French versions are above. The Swedish version is below.

Another thing I tend to do a lot around Christmas is my mother’s truffles. I made some for my co-workers last year and last week, they hinted about how good they were and how nice it would be to get some again. It made my day, but little did they know that I was already planning to do it. Since truffles and chocolate are inseparable, here are a few pictures of the process.

First of all, you need a recipe. There are plenty of them on the internet and in various books, so bear with me if I choose to keep my mom's for myself. You might catch a glimpse of it next to the stove.

First of all, the melting of the chocolate yummyness. Use a water bath (Bain-marie / vattenbad) which will help preventing the burning of the chocolate. Since you usually end up mixing it with other ingredients, I find it much better than the microwave in that case (and in most cases unless you need something in small quantities, something done quickly, or feeling too lazy).

After some cooling, it is time to make the truffles! Since the mixture is a bit hard, I find it easier to use a spoon to gather the right quantity, then use my fingers to form it into a ball that I then roll into cocoa powder spread on a baking sheet. I then store the goodies in a tin can that will eventually return into the fridge.

Keep them far.

Or keep them close.

However, some of them will always end up melting on your tongue even when you bake them for your friends and family. Such is the curse of the truffles.

After Christmas, I will try to post a few more things I did. It would be a bit of a spoiler if I did it now. I do apologise to any friend who received these hand made things. I'm sorry, I didn't know what I was thinking. It all looked better in my head, really! I fear my hands are rather poor at reproducing my mind's best plans.

Halloween cupcakes

This comes a little late given Halloween was over 2 weeks ago, but better late than never!

For halloween, I was hoping to have lots of time and lots of ideas to bake something every day. Then I realised that my boyfriend and I couldn't afford to eat so much goodies in a week. Afterward, I also realised that while my coworkers have a sweet tooth from time to time, they prefer not to stuff themselves every day of the week. With a heavy heart, I decided to do two things for this year.

First one was inspired by the blog Do it myself! which is in the link to the right (amazing cakes!). The author has made spider cupcakes which I found to be very beautiful. However, she uses a lot of royal icing and sugar paste, which I tend to avoid (mostly because I don't like the taste and... I'm not very good at it). I decided against my traditional chocolate to try a new recipe : apple spice muffin, which turned out to be delicious. For the web, I went with meringue since I find it tastes better. I was hoping to have chocolate balls for the spiders but it's darn impossible to stick legs into those things (mostly if you were hoping to use marsipan to do that), so I had to resort as a last minute plan to plastic spiders for pure decoration purpose. The icing puzzled me for a while and in the end, I found a recipe for vanilla icing. The muffin being quite neutral, it was perfect with a more sugary icing.

Beware the spider invasion!

Apple Spice Muffins (gave me 12 biggish medium-sized muffins)

Preheat the overn to 200 C.

Mix together:

500 ml of flour

67,5 ml  of sugar

3,5 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Then add and stir in:

192,5 ml of chopped apple (peeled!)

Make a small hole in the middle, add and combine:

1 beaten egg

250 ml milk

62,5 ml vegetable oil.

Bake for 20-25 minutes and enjoy!

Past Attempts II - Halloween

My favourite "holiday" has always been Halloween. For a few years, I have held a small party with friends. I do miss it. There is something different about people dressing up, perhaps because I love doing it myself and pretend to be some sort of monster for a few hours (pretend lightly, of course). I also enjoyed greatly doing the cooking and trying to find some original and spooky ways to make cakes (someone with incredible talent has a few over here).

My attemps were a lot more humble and probably childish in their appearances, but they were delicious none-the-less!

This was the second year. I made some kittens in chocolate (only one dared to chop their heads off with the knife), a zombie arm, witch fingers (yummy almond cookies) and a few other chocolaty things along with the finger punch.

The third year, I added what I think was a tiger cake dressed up as a white spider. This time, I sacrificed the poor kitten right away, covering it with its blood raspberry sauce. The baby spiders are coconut balls. I had the usual witch fingers, small other chocolates and the zombie arm.

With fewer guests on the 4th year, probably due to imposing a theme of reversed genders, I opted for a choclate cake cut as a vodoo doll, with marsipan rats having the first go. I really enjoyed that idea as it was quick and simple to make, while being really good with the raspberry sauce (if you spill that on the floor, expect a mess to clean up). You can see the lovely chocolate pumpkin in the back made with coloured chips.