Strawberry jam recipe Jamie Oliver

In Munich it is still raining a lot so rather than being outside in the beergarden oder at the Isar river having a summer barbecue I've bought Strawberries to make strawberry jam and found a simple strawberry jam from Jamie Oliver recipe that I will try:

Picture: Living at Home

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You need:

• 500 g high pectin sugar (jam sugar) 
• 1 vanilla pod 
• 1 kg ripe strawberries , washed and leafy tops removed

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Instructions:

Before you start, sterilize the jars and their lids to get rid of any bacteria. Either put them in the sink (lids unscrewed from jars) and cover them with boiling water from the kettle, filling the jars with the water; or simmer them, completely immersed, in a very large pan of boiling water for 10 minutes; or lay the jars and lids on a baking tray in the oven and heat them at around 100°C/225°F/gas ¼. And if you have a good dishwasher with a very hot cycle you can sterilize them in there as well.

Halve the vanilla pod lengthways and scrape out the seeds. Put the seeds in a saucepan with the strawberries and the sugar. Mush it up with a potato masher to make a lovely slurry, leaving a few chunky bits of strawberry in there to add a bit of texture.

Place the pan on a medium heat, bring it to the boil then simmer for about 5 minutes. Turn the heat off, carefully skim any foam off the top of the jam then leave it to cool a little. After about 15 minutes, divide the jam between your sterilized jam jars. Leave to cool completely then cover the jars and pop them in the fridge. Once sealed, the jam will keep for about a week.

Mint ice cubes

One of the things that are really simply but look great is mint ice cubes. You can either use mint or berries and just put them into the tray add water and put it into the fridge. This is something that I always have in the fridge during summer.

Simple chocolate ice creme

We have an ice creme maker but sometimes I am too lazy and need a simple recipe that you can put into the fridge and then just enjoy :) A very simple chocolate ice creme recipe which I would like to share with you is the following.

picture: gutekueche 

• 1 tablespoon Nutella ( or any other hazelnut-cocoa spread or cocoa spread )
• 250 ml cream

Beat the cream until soft peaks form, either with a large handheld or if you are using an electric mixer, beat on medium speed, being careful not to overbeat (the cream will turn buttery), then fold in the hazelnut cocoa spread and put into the fridge for 5 hours.


.... and then enjoy :)

Pågen's Gifflar

If you grew up with 2 different cultures and live most of your life in one of the countries you miss the other culture very much. That's why I was really happy to find Swedish Pågen's Gifflar in the German supermarket today. It is a cinnamon bun and it tastes white good, especially with a glas of milk ;)

picture: Pågen

picture: Pågen

Dallmayr Munich

I am on a lot of customer visits currently and we always bring them a little gift and my favorite place to go for these gifts is Dallmayr. An also if you are visiting Munich it is one of the must sees and must buys :) . It is a deli food store that was founded 1700 and has its own branded high quality food and used to be one of the purveyors to the court of the Bavarian king back in 1900. It is very close to Marienplatz in Dienerstrasse.

Picture: Dallmayr

The furniture is still very old fashioned and I really like that. Even though the food is expensive, I like the atmosphere and the many different things you can buy and to be sure to buy good quality.

Picture: Werbefotograf- Muenchen

 You can also see in the logo that they are using that they were one of the purveyors to the court:

Picture: Dallmayr

If you are in Munich it really is a nice place to go ( but please not on a saturday as it will be crowded!)

Have a lovely day!

Isabel

Strawberry time

May is one of the best month of the year. The elderflowers and the lilac are blossoming and when I pass these on my bike I smell the sweet scent. It is like a perfume that fills the air in a very light way.  It is also the month where you can buy these sweet strawberries, my absolute favorite fruit.

Picture: Lantliv

Rose Strawberry Punch

On my way to Milano I bought a German Living at Home magazine and found this wonderful punch recipe. Haven't tasted this in a very long time but it is really refreshing and good after a long day ( I wish I had one now, maybe this is why it caught my attention :)) and I look forward to trying it.

picture: Living at home

This is the translation for you:

1 kg strawberries
1 organic lemon
Seeds from 1 vanilla bean
100 ml rose syrup
100 ml rose liqueur
pedals from unsprayed roses
1 bottle of  cooled dry white wine
1 bottle of cooled sparkling wine

Cut the strawberries and the lemon in slices. Mix the seeds of the vanilla bean together with the rose syrup and the rose liqueur in a bowl. Put the strawberries into a punch jar and add the vanilla-rose liquid. Wait 30 minutes and just before you are about to serve it add ice cubes and the rose pedals, the white wine and the sparkling wine.

If you would like to have a non- alcoholic variation use rhubarb spritzer instead of the wine and the sparkling wine.

Carrot Cake

I like to watch food programs and find new ideas and recipes for baking and cooking. This is a great recipe which I've found on the BBC food channel and which is the best carrot cake I've ever eaten. You need to try it !

picture: yelp

Ingredients

For the carrot cake:

450ml/16fl oz vegetable oil

400g/14oz plain flour

2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

550g/1lb 4oz sugar

5 free-range eggs

½ tsp salt

2½ tsp ground cinnamon

525g/1lb 3oz carrots, grated

150g/5½oz shelled walnuts, chopped

For the icing:

200g/7oz cream cheese

150g/5½oz caster sugar

100g/3½oz butter, softened

Preparation

For the carrot cake, preheat the oven to 160C/325F/Gas 3. Grease and line a 26cm/10in springform cake tin. Mix all of the ingredients for the carrot cake, except the carrots and walnuts, together in a bowl until well combined. Stir in the carrots and walnuts.

Spoon the mixture into the cake tin and bake for 1 hour 15 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and set aside to cool for 10 minutes, then carefully remove the cake from the tin and set aside to cool completely on a cooling rack.

Meanwhile, for the icing, beat the cream cheese, caster sugar and butter together in a bowl until fluffy. Spread the icing over the top of the cake with a palette knife.

Bon appetite! 

Isabell

Chocolate cake in a jar

It is snowing outside and I'm in a mood for chocolate today. Rich and dark chocolate cake… yummie. I have a really good and easy recipe which I've used today and would like to share with you.

You need:

3 jars ( preserving jars) 1/4 l volume each

100 g dark chocolate ( 70 % chocolate)

3 tsp of cream

100 g butter

3 eggs

100 g sugar

1 sachet of vanilla sugar ( or 1/2 tsp of vanilla essence)

a pinch of salt
200 g ground hazelnuts

1 tsp of butter

2 tsp of cacao powder


Preheat the oven to 160 °C or 320 °F. Butter the jars and add the cacao powder so that the entire jar is buttered and has a cacao layer.

Separate the eggs and beat the eggwhites until stiff. Heat the cream in a pot at low heat, break the chocolate into pieces and add to the cream together with the butter which you cut into small pieces before adding it. Melt everything in the pot until while whisking. Whisk it until everything is of a single consistency. Let cool down a little bit.

In a bowl, whisk together the egg yolk the sugar, vanilla sugar and salt until it’s all mixed up evenly. Add the ground hazelnuts and fold in the stiff eggwhites. Divide the batter evenly among the 3 jars, filling each about 1/3 full.

Put the jars on a baking sheet and slide into the oven. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

Serve warm with a little scoop of vanilla ice cream. :)

Vanillekipferl- Vanilla Christmas cookies

Since I was a child my Mum has baked Christmas cookies. "Vanillekipferl" is my favorite, that is a vanilla/hazelnut dough that are crescent shaped. I've baked these this weekend as these are also Tim's favorite biscuits:

Ingredients

· 260 gr flour

· 1 pinch of backing powder

· 125 gr sugar

· 2 sachets of vanilla sugar

· 3 egg yolks

· 200 gr butter

· 125 gr ground hazelnuts



· Powdered sugar

· 2 sachets of vanilla sugar

Preparation


Mix the butter with the sugar, the flour, the egg yolks and the ground hazelnut, add the backing powder. Work the ingredients until a smooth, homogeneous dough is obtained. Let it rest in a cool place for 1-2 hours.

Form crescent and put them on a backing plate, bake for approx. 5 Minutes at 200°C , let them cool a little but not too much. Mix the powdered sugar and the vanilla sugar and turn them in the sugar mix.

Let them cool down before keeping them into a cookie jar.

Rice pudding ready to give-away

Each year I'm inviting my family to a pre Christmas dinner, mostly around the 6th of december. And every year I've had a small present for them standing close to the place card. This year it will be something different to chocolate or gingerbread. I found this rice pudding from a company called Michelsen and I decided that it's going this year's present the moment I saw it:

Picture: michelsen-versand.de

Kram,

Isabell

Fig Jam

One of my favorite desserts is warm goat cheese with either honey or fig jam. October is the season for many nice fruits, like apples, pears and figs, so I should hurry up to make some fig jam. I've found a new and easy recipe which I would like to try:

Picture TV4

Here is what you need:

1 litre fresh figs
2.5 dl sugar
1 vanilla bean
2 table spoons of water

Rinse the figs with fresh water and cut into pieces ( do not peel). Split the vanilla bean pod lengthwise into two halves and scrape the seeds. Put the figs, the pod and the seeds together with the sugar and the water into a cooking pot and let simmer for ca. 30 minutes until the figs are tender. The jam needs to cool down a little before filling it into sterilized jars.

Kram,
Isabell

Back in autumn time

I know, it's been along time since my last post… but I'm back now from my summer holiday. I truly needed it, the new job had been more stressful then I thought it would be. I'm happy to be back and I'm looking forward to autumn, to all the colors and season of apples, pumpkins, plums and baking.

picture: lantliv.com

The picture you see above is Swedish buns with cinnamon, it's called "Kanelbullar" in Swedish and I'm going to bake them today and this week and use different recipes. I'll get back to you with the winner ;)

Have a lovely sunday!

Isabell

Saffron cardamom bun - Leif Mannerström's recipe

This weekend I've been longing for something with saffron and cardamom and I found a recipe from Leif Mannerström, who is a famous chef in Sweden with these 2 ingredients. So I had to try these :)

100 g butter
1 g saffran
5 dl milk
50 g yeast
250 g curd cheese
2.25 dl sugar
1 msk cardamom
0.5 tsk salt
1.5 l flour

1 egg

Melt the butter and add the milk. Pour mixture into mixing bowl and allow to cool until “finger-warm” (still quite warm, but just cool enough to touch). Stir in yeast and let sit for 10 minutes. Add sugar, salt, curd cheese, cardamom and saffron.

Mix 7 dl flour into liquid. Add enough of the remaining flour to form a soft dough (just until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Don't add too much flour as the dough gets dry). Put the dough to a large bowl and cover it with a clean towel and allow to rise until doubled, approx. 1 hour.

Take the dough after 1 hour and knead two or three times on a floured surface. Take small handfuls of dough and roll into buns. Place on a baking sheet that is covered with a backing paper and cover with the towel again, and let rise until doubled (approx. 1 hour).

Brush buns with beaten egg, and bake in preheated 225 °C oven about 6-8 minutes, just until brown.

Hope you like it too!

Kram,

Isabell

Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins receipe

When I was in Texas I've had a lemon Poppy Seed Muffin every morning together with a cup of coffee. I miss that very much now, these were very good! So I'm currently trying to get a good receipe for it, I found one from Leila Lindholm, which I would like to try this weekend.

Photo: photobucket

These are the ingredients:

3 eggs
200 gr sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla sugar
100 gr butter
100 ml milk (full cream)
200 gr flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 pinch of salt
lemon zest of 2 lemons
lemon juice of 1 lemon
40 gr poppy seeds

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Stir eggs, sugar and vanilla sugar and heat the milk, let the poppy seeds soak in the warm milk. Melt the butter and add to the poppy seed milk. Mix with the egg/sugar dough. Add flour, backing powder, salt and the lemon zest and juice.

Fill into the muffin forms and bake in the middle part of the oven for approx. 15 minutes.

If you like to add a frosting:

60 gr soft butter
300 gr icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
zest of 2 lemons and juice of 1/2 lemon
100 gr cream cheese

Mix these ingredients and add on top of the cooled muffins with a piping bag.

Let's try it on the weekend! :)

Isabell

Pineapplesalsa with Chocolate Fondant (Leila Lindholm's recipe)

This year I don't want Christmas to stop at all, I still turn on the lights in the Christmas tree and in every candle holder when I get back from work. And everyday I watch a Christmas episode of one of the Swedish cooking series, so yesterday it was Leila Lindholm's turn and I saw a fantastic dessert she made which I want to share with you and which I would like to try this weekend:

Photo: leila.se

For the Chocolate Fondant you need:

2 eggs
1 dl sugar ( for dl please refer to my post about Swedish measuring cups)
100 g butter
1/4 dl milk
1 dl flour
½ dl cocoa

For the Pineapplesalsa you need:

1 fresh pineapple
1 bunch of mint
2 msk light muscovado sugar
(2 msk white rum)

vanilla ice cream

Chocolate Fondant

Preheat the oven to 200ºC/gas mark 6/400ºF. Stir the eggs with the sugar ( but it should not be fluffy). Melt the butter gently in a saucepan add the cold milk. Sift the flour and the cocoa over the egg-butter mix, add the butter-milk mix and stir until you have a smooth mixture, fill into a silicon muffin baking tray and put into the freezer until frozen.

Place on the middle shelf of the oven and cook for 10-15 minutes, remove from the oven, run a knife round the edges, invert and tip out on to serving plates.


Pineapplesalsa 

Peel and cut the pineapple into 1/2 cm pieces, chop the mint and add to the pineapple together with the moscovado sugar and the white rum into a bowl.

Serve with the warm Chocolate Fondant and vanilla ice cream.

Bon appetit!

Isabell

Baking Lussebullar

I bake a lot of Christmas cookies and I like them a lot, but for me the best thing during Christmas is "Lussabullar" a Swedish Saffron bun. As soon as they are baked and have cooled down a little I put them in the freezer and every morning I heat 1 or 2 and eat them with salted butter. The recipe is from my family and I've already baked these with my grandma in Sweden early in the morning when it was still dark outside in order to wake up my parents with freshly baked Lussebullar.

Kram,

Isabell

Lemon - Ginger Tea

This is the cozy season, but also the season of sore throats, colds and flu. One of the best hot drinks in the cold season is lemon-ginger tea with honey. The heat and the ginger warms you right up, the lemon and the ginger soothe your scratchy throat.

Photo: natuerlichkreativ.blog

Here is what you need:

1 Tbsp. freshly grated ginger (no need to peel it)
1 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 Tbsp. honey, plus more to taste

Preparation:

Put the ginger in a medium sized bowl. Pour 1 cup boiling water over it and let steep for 3 minutes. Meanwhile, put the lemon juice and the honey in a large mug and strain the ginger tea into the mug.Stir and add more honey or lemon juice if you like.

Kram,

Isabell

Wasa Kanel knäckebröd - Wasa's cinnamon crispbread

It's high time for all the good spices like cardamom and cinnamon! I found a shop online which has all the Swedish food I like and delivers it right home to me and one of the things I was really longing for is Wasa's cinnamon crispbread or how we call it in Swedish: kanel knäckebröd. The moment you open the package, you can smell the great flavour of cinnamon and you can just eat it like it is or what I do is to add salted butter. I love the mix of salty and sweet, be brave and try it ! :)

What I also like is of course the way the paper wrapped around the cripsbread is decorated, with the Swedish Lucia, Santa Clause, the Christmas tree... great to have it when you can't already start to decorate. It wasn't me  :)

Have a great evening!

Isabell

Homemade bread rolls for breakfast

Isn't it nice to have homemade bread rolls for breakfast? When I bake these Rosenbröd I always put some in the freezer immediately after they have cooled down and like this I can have fresh bread rolls everyday for breakfast. I simply put them in the microwave for 30 seconds. Some salted butter and they are perfect. This is the recipe for Rosenbröd and this time I've added poppy seeds.

Kram,

Isabell