today's breakfast

Trying the blogger app on my phone. Thought
I'd share my yummy breakfast. 

I had an egg and bacon sandwich with avocado and  salsa.

Swedish waffle day!

 Today is Swedish waffle day! Waffle day is celebrated on March 25, the same day as the Christian holiday of Annunciation (used to be a public holiday). Why we celebrate waffle day today is because Annunciation used to be called Vårfrudagen (Our Lady's Day) in swedish and that sounds like Våffeldagen (waffle day). Våffeldagen also marks the beginning of spring and end of winter.

I learned from wikipedia that we've been eating waffles in sweden at least since the 15th centuary, so you can imagine how many recipes there are. My favourite comes from Vår kokbok, a cookbook that can be found in almost every swedish home. We've got the 19th edition, printed 1996.

Waffles 

100 g melted butter

400 ml milk

10 gram yeast

300 ml flour

Heat the milk until it's 37 degrees C. Mix yeast and half of the milk, then add the flour, then add the rest of the milk. Let it rest in room temperature for about 30 minutes. Mix with the melted butter. 

Bake in the waffle iron.  

Serve golden brown with jam and whipped cream. 

If you want to know more about strange Swedish traditions i can recommend Sweden.se's lifestyle section.

Lemon and poppy seed cupcakes

Last weekend i made the yummiest cupcakes ever! Thought i'd share the recipe with you!

The cupcake recipe is from one of my favourite cookbooks "Rosendals trädgårdscafé" from 1994 (Rosendal's garden café) by Monica Ahlberg. Rosendal's garden is a beautiful place in Stockholm, well worth a visit.

Blue and yellow lemon cake


175 g butter
300 ml sugar
2 egg
zest and juice from 1 lemon
(2 tablespoons candied orange peels)
75 ml blue poppy seeds
200 ml flour
Melt the butter, and let it cool a little bit. Mix it with sugar, egg, lemon and flour. Pour in to cupcake cases (or a cake tin)
Bake for about 10-15 minutes (if you make a cake you need about 35 minutes) in 180 degrees C. Let them cool.

The cake is really good on its own or with some whipped cream. But this time i made cupcakes, so i covered them with yummy icing. I found the recipe at the blog Made by love. 


Lemon Cream Cheese Icing


70 g soft butter
1 cup icing sugar
Zest from 2 lemons and jucie from 0,5 lemon. 
120 g philadelphia cheese. 
Mix it all together, and cover the cupcakes.

Enjoy!

Pho review

This was just okaaay... From Mandalay Bay on Brunswick St. The chicken was kind of weird- too thick and dry. It sounds strange but it wasn't oily enough. The stock tasted ok though.

Phometer: 6/10




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Naked for Satan

I am SO full. Like Christmas full. And I only spent $3.50. And I'm not in Thailand.

Camille and I had lunch today at Naked for Satan, Fitzroy- it's a gourmet vodka bar or something like that, with lots of copper sculptures and exposed brick and awkwardly named cocktails. That aside, it serves amazing food in the form of Pintxos- Spanish tapas style snacks.

Cold Pintxos are displayed on trays near the bar and hot ones are passed around by staff. Each Pixtos usually takes the form of a piece of bread topped with something amazing held together by a toothpick. You help yourself, collect the toothpicks and then keep them in a little plastic cup. When you're achingly full you present your little cup at the counter and they add up your toothpicks. During weekday lunchtimes, each toothpick = 50 cents YES 50 cents.

I have taken quite a few people here because it is yummy, filling, well-presented food and yes, only 50 cents a serve. I think the most I've eaten was $5 worth. When I brought a certain hefty Swede, he spent an unimaginable $12.

Here's what I ate today:

Tempura eggplant, blue cheese and honey: OMG amazing.
Blue cheese, quince paste, walnuts and cos: anything with blue cheese is obviously amazing.
Pureed cauliflower and garlic prawns: VERY garlicky but so good.
I also had an anchovy, caramelised onion and olive one that I ate too quickly to photograph.

This was some kind of chorizo sausage and relish, it was flavoursome, but not spicy enough.

This was a pork and fennel sausage on caramelised onions.

By this stage I was pretty full after all that bread and sausage and we decided that we'd had enough. Just as I was about to get up the girl brought over this fried sardine aoli thing. Camille and I nearly bit her hand off. It was so salty, fishy and garlicky. Why don't I eat sardines more? It's really satisfying eating another creature's tiny bones.

Birthday cake

It was my birthday this week, so I baked a cake! I had problems deciding what to bake, but then I remembered an old favourite, that was actually in one of my cookbook's.

I baked Marängtårta (Meringue) from the book Svenska folkets 100 bästa recept ur Allt om Mat (1989) (the Swedish people's 100 best recipes from Allt om mat). Allt om Mat is a really good Swedish food magazine. I got the book from my mum, i guess around the time when it was published, and i have actually cooked a couple of things from it.

In the book they cover the meringue with a chocolate custard, but i wanted lemon and found a recipe on Allt om Mat's website.

I covered the meringue with lemon custard, whipped cream, raspberries and blueberries

It was yummy!!! 

You can find the recipes here: 

Kripig marängtårta med citronkräm (in Swedish)

Rice Krispies Meringue Cake with Lemon Custard (in English)

Ida's cookbooks

I've got a kitchen full of lovely cookbook that i never cook from. I love to look at the pictures and read recipes for inspiration, but i never actually cook anything from them. So one of my goals with this blog is to actually cook something from every cookbook that i've got.