Recipes, DIY, travel, health, random lifestyle thoughts & more.
Month: Dec 2018
These cookies are a perfect alternative for traditional gingerbread ones, if you’re bored with those. They are also great to use with cookie cutters – they hold their shapes perfectly, better than the best of sugar cookie recipes I’ve tried. Extremely delicate and soft, they just dissolve in your mouth. And the taste is simply divine! It will surely please all walnut lovers, I can guarantee that. 🙂
I have to admit, this discovery was a side effect of a failed experiment. A rather happy failure after all, though, as I’m absolutely delighted with this! Here, I will show you, step-by-step, how to make chocolate dust in any colour. It’s a perfect sprinkle for cakes and cookies – it looks amazing and tastes even better (chocolate!).
Continue reading “How to Make Coloured Chocolate Dust – Homemade Chocolate Sprinkles”
This cake is the epitome of Christmas. The raisins, candied orange peel, the rum and marzipan… Could we possibly get any more Christmassy than this?
Although I’m not German, this cake is always present in our house at Christmas. We first discovered it in German chain stores (namely Lidl, I believe). My dad fell in love with it, and I made a resolution to find a good recipe and bake the cake at home (which is always better than store-bought cakes with who-knows-what inside).
A few years have passed, I’ve been baking this cake once a year, for Christmas, and I believe I now have a recipe good enough to share, with all adjustments made over the past years.
Continue reading “Christstollen – Traditional German Christmas Cake”
Christmas season, for me, is filled with baking and decorating cookies. And I’m sure I’m not the only one! Through the years, I’ve experimented with so many different piping tools… From regular plastic sandwich bags, through plastic store-bought piping cones with and without nozzles, fabric cones, even special icing pens. And always, always, something was wrong. Having to clean a multiple-use bag was a nightmare when I only had one and wanted to do various icing types and colours in one afternoon. Nozzles were too small or too big. Plastic bags would break open and I’d be left with a sugar-coated catastrophe…
And then one day, I came across this simple method for making your own piping cones out of baking/parchment paper. And dear God, what a life changing discovery that was. I did all of my Christmas cookie decor with these cones with zero accidental splash out disasters. I always had as many fresh cones at hand as I wanted to. And those dozens of cones cost me a grand total of… £1, perhaps? I don’t think I’m ever going to return to other methods, not when it comes to simple cookie decor with royal icing or chocolate at least.
I’ve recently posted an extensive guide for working with chocolate. Now, it’s time to have a look at another popular cookie decor medium – royal icing. In this guide, I will show you how to prepare royal icing, how to adjust its consistency, how to use it for cookie decor and also how to prepare little decorations in advance, to use them on cookies at a later time. So, without further ado, let’s get cracking!
After the wave of recipes and food related posts, time to return to some DIY. I believe we have the majority of our gifts purchased already, and that means… wrapping time! And isn’t it nice to make our gift wrapping a bit more personalized? We can achieve that by making cute little personalized Christmas gift tags ourselves!
Continue reading “7 DIY Christmas Gift Tag Ideas – Quilling”
These cookies are what Christmas tastes like, for me. Although they’re incredibly simple to make, we only have them once a year – for Christmas. And that might be the reason why I love them so much and never get bored with them. I always have to wait a whole year to have them again. But they’re certainly worth the wait! Any almond lovers out there? I guarantee you’re going to love these too!
Always give credit when it’s due – and this time, it goes to the great Tesco themselves. I found this recipe on their website (it’s gone now) and decided I had to give it a go with only a few adjustments. The cookies turned out even better than expected! It’s not the taste of my Christmas yet – I made them for the first time this year – but I have a feeling they will return to my house next Christmas. I’m sure you could replace tangerines with oranges in this recipe – that’s what I plan to try out next time. Lemons should work as well, provided that you sprinkle them with a truly generous amount of sugar, to break the sourness!
Continue reading “Tangerine Cookies with Coconut – New Taste of Christmas”
Although seemingly simple, working with chocolate can be an unforgiving task. One mistake, one drop of water, and you’re left with a bowl of dry, lumpy, somewhat chocolatey blob. Not the worst in taste, perhaps, but visually unattractive and useless for any form of cookie decor. That’s why it’s crucial to follow a few rules while working with chocolate. In this article, I will show you how to properly melt chocolate. I will also show you how you can colour it with powdered food colouring. I will also share some ideas for chocolate cookie decor and how to prepare your chocolate decorations in advance. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Christmas is coming and I’ve just completed my Christmas gingerbread cookie baking. And that means it’s time to share my trusted recipe, in case some of you are still looking for a recipe to try out this year. My Mum has been using this recipe for years – probably over 20 years now, so I believe we’ve tested it enough to swear by it.
Alphe's Corner 