Sausage and chorizo rolls: a sunday's yummy dinner

Yesterday I made these rolls for me and my parents. I made 2 sausage and cheese rolls and 2 chorizo rolls, so that we could slice them and eat a bit of everything. With the remaining dough I made four little buns that went right into the freezer to be eaten any other day.

I got the recipe and the kneading intructions from dailydelicious. This blog is my favorite because it has yummy food recipes, beautiful photos and the blogger ilustrates all the steps (and that's the dearest feature for a dummy like me).
This was my fourth attemp at bread making (the previous three were just a disaster), and looks like I finally managed to make it right (thanks again to the step by step ilustrated intructions XD). The rolls were tasty and the bread was well done, not overcooked not undercooked, but I had to bake it for 3 more minutes than the recipe states.

Almond cookies

This week I was in the mood to try again to make almond cookies. It's not like the past attempts went wrong, it's simply that they were not "exactly" what I was looking for.
This time I improvised a mold with some aluminium paper and a rectangular pan, to try to give them a square shape. Well, as it can be seen, they're not perfect squares, but they're just what I wanted them to be (in terms of texture and tastiness). This cookies are a perfect accompaniment for coffee, tea or cocoa, because their flavour goes great with them. They're a bit too big because I wanted to put halved almonds in their tops as a mean of "decoration", but I think they'll taste even better if they're made bite-sized.

Ingredients: (makes 20-22 square cookies)

125g butter
70g caster sugar
130g all purpose flour
125g ground almonds
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Method:

1. Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
2. Add the egg and the vanilla to the mixture.
3. In another bowl, sieve together the flour and the ground almons.
4. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and mix to form a soft dough.
5. Shape the dough into small balls and place them in the baking sheet (they'll lose their round shape when baked because of the butter).
6. Bake at 180ºC for 25 minutes (or until they turn golden).
7. Remove from the oven and let them cool.

Happy Valentine's Day

As today is Valentine's Day I thougth to do something special for my boyfriend. Of course it had to be red, so I decided to make the 5 layer Valentine Jello that I saw some time ago in The Food Librarian's blog. This sweet is the easiest one I've made so far, and it's just perfect for my love as it's red & white, which are his (ours) team's colors, Athletic Bilbao!!!

My jello is made of strawberry jello + condensed milk jello. I didn't use any other flavours because the strawberry flavour is the only red colored one available here. Also, I'd have liked to make it heart-shaped, but I decided on this last friday and didn't had enough time to look for an appropiate cookie cutter so...well, you can see the final result.

Domokun cake

Last week my boyfriend and I celebrated our 3rd aniversary together, so I decided to bake a Domokun shaped cake as a present for him (he's such an otaku...XD). Well, here's the final result.

The cake itself was 2 layers of chocolate sponge cake filled with whipped cream and covered with chocolate ganache. I forgot to buy chocolate coated peanuts (conguitos), so I choped hurriedly some leftover chocolate to give it a round shape. I made the mouth with white chocolate and strawberry jam.

Ingredients:

250g cake flour

200g caster sugar

225g butter

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

4 big eggs

2 tablespoons warm water
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanila extract

Method:

1. Preheat the oven at 180ºC and grease and flour a baking tray with butter.
2. Mix together the softened butter and the sugar until fluffy.
3. Add the eggs one at time until well mixed. Add the warm water and the vanila.
4. In another bowl sieve together the flour, salt, cocoa and baking powder.
5. Add half of the flour mixture to the rest of the ingredients. Mix until well combined and then add the other half.
6. Pour the batter into the baking tray and bake for 10 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.

As I used sweet cocoa powder I filled the cake with pure whipped cream and made the chocolate ganache with bitter chocolate. For the ganache I followed this recipe, only that was careful to not use any metal spoons or bowls to make it as they'd have given a metallic taste to the chocolate.

My boyfriend loved the cake, he said it was delicious! ^^ (not that he had any other option XD).

Banana Chocolate Marble Bundt

Last week I wasn't able to spend much time with my boyfriend, so I told him that I would bake a bundt cake as a compensation ;-) I gave him The Food Librarian's list of bundts so that he could choose the one that he prefered. And the rest is history...

As in Spain there's no sour cream (or at least it isn't sold anywhere near my home or workplace) I had to make my own by adding 1 tablespoon of lemon juice to 250ml of heavy cream.

Finally, the bundt resulted super tasty! The recipe is here. This time I was lucky and the cake resulted nearly perfect at first attempt. The only flaw is that I should had left it 5 more minutes in the oven. Anyway, it was still delicious! ^^

Fresh start: Lemon Chiffon Cake

I usually can't get a nice tasting cake on my first attemp and this one it's not an exception. On my fourth attemp I finally managed to bake it right!

I got the original recipe from Happy Homebaking, but I made a few changes because I felt it was better this way. The changes were:

1. Instead of using 40g+40g of sugar I used 40g+20g+1 tablespoon of honey (don't you think that lemon & honey make a nice couple?).  
2. I didn't measure the amount of lemon juice, I simply use ALL the  juice of a medium sized lemon.  
3. The vegetable oil used was olive oil (it's the best you can find here, in Spain).  
4. The mold wasn't plain round or metalic, it's made of silicone and has a pretty flowery pattern ^^

So, my recipe it's as follows:

Ingredients:

100g cake flour
1 & 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 egg yolks

3 egg whites
60g caster sugar
1 tablespoon honey
50ml vegetable oil
50ml water
juice of 1 medium size lemon
zest of 1 medium size lemon

Method:

1. Preheat the oven at 170ºC.
2. Grease the bottom of the mould with butter.
3. Sieve flour, baking powder and salt together, set aside.
4. Separate egg yolks/whites.
5. Place egg yolks in a mixing bowl, add 20g of sugar and the honey in 2 separate additions and whisk till the mixture becomes sticky and turns pale (it doesn't really matter if the wisk is manual or electric).
6. Pour in the oil, whisking at the same time till the mixture is well combined. Repeat the same with the water, followed by the lemon juice. Add the flour mixture and whisk until flour mixture is fully incorporated into the batter. Add in the lemon zest and mix well.
7. In a clean, dry mixing bowl, beat egg whites with an electric mixer until mixture becomes frothy and foamy. Gradually beat in the rest of the sugar and beat on high speed until stiff peaks form.
8. Add the beaten egg white into the egg yolk batter in 3 separate additions, each time folding gently with a spatula until just blended.
9. Pour batter into the mould. Tap the mould lightly on a table top to get rid of any trapped air bubbles in the batter.
10. Bake in the pre-heated oven at 170ºC for 45 minutes (for me this is the exact time and temperature, but it can vary from one oven to another) or until the cake surface turns golden brown, and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
11. Remove from the oven and let cool completely before unmould (if you're using a metal pan then you should invert it inmediatly after taking it from the oven).

The resulting cake was moist and had a strong lemon flavour ^^