Recipes, DIY, travel, health, random lifestyle thoughts & more.
Category: Food
Chocolate. One food almost everyone loves. Just like everyone loves rich in flavour and delicate in texture chocolate mousse. Would you imagine that you can eat chocolate mousse every day… and actually provide your body with vitamins and nutrients? Chocolate mousse doesn’t have to be full of fat, sugar and – in result – empty calories. There’s a way to make it healthy – though still delicious! Here’s a recipe for quick and healthy chocolate mousse.
Christmas time is over. Most of us enjoyed loads of scrumptious, indulgent foods. Delicious, for sure, but maybe a little bit heavy (and perhaps eaten in huge amounts). In case you’re looking for something a bit lighter and healthier – yet still sweet and tasty – I’m coming with a recipe for a delicious fruit crumble.
I think I can now officially close the season of Christmas cookie decor. I still need to bake two cakes (I’ll do that a day before Christmas though, they have to be fresh!), but when it comes to cookies – which can be baked and decorated in advance – they’re all done and dusted. I thought I’d share a recap of all my Christmas cookies from this year. Well, maybe not all – I made hundreds of gingerbread cookies – but I have photos of all types of toppings I used. This will be lovely to return to in a few months, to reminisce Christmas time.
Continue reading “Annual Christmas Cookie Decor 2018 – Recap”
Staying in the Christmas spirit – it’s time for a simple recipe for those who don’t have much time but want to get in the festive spirit through festive food.
A simple gingerbread mug cake! Ready in under 5 minutes.
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!
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!
Alphe's Corner 