Sunday 11 December 2011

Pearl brooch

I've decided to try my hand at making a brooch... I bought a few brooch pins and some pearls at Veritas, and used some "fishing line" pearl thread I already had.

Then I just threaded through the pearls, wrapping around the brooch pin in between the pearls a few times to secure them. Triple knotted at the end. That's it!
Really not hard, and I love the look of it:)

Wednesday 7 December 2011

Gâteau au Yaourt (Yoghurt Cake)

This is a childhood favourite... and the only thing I could bake until recently:-D
It's dead easy, I'd say "suitable for ages 6 and up";-)
You don't even need a kitchen scale or measuring cup as everything is measured in a yoghurt pot...

I usually follow this French recipe. Here's an English translation:
  • 1 yoghurt
  • 2 (yoghurt) pots of flour
  • 2 pots of sugar
  • ½ pot of sunflower oil (or melted butter)
  • 3 eggs
  • ½ pack (5.5 g) of baking powder
  • 1 pack (11 g) of vanilla sugar (optional)
 Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven at 200-220° C.
2. Pour the yoghurt in a mixing bowl.
3. Clean the yoghurt pot and use it as measure to add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl.
4. Mix well.
5. Butter your dish, pour the dough and bake in the oven for about 30 min.
To check whether it's cooked, stick a knife in the thickest part. If it comes out clean (wet but with no dough on it counts as clean), the cake is ready!

Latkes

So... I haven't posted anything for over a month (oops!), but I do have some recipes and pictures and stuff in store!!
Let's start with some latkes that I just made (I have the day off today, yay!). That was my first attempt at latkes and I was without a grater, but they still turned out quite nicely:-)
I used a recipe from yumsugar (one of my fave websites for food-related stuff), but didn't all do the keeping in water/keeping warm in oven stuff as I was only making a small batch for myself...

So I took:
- 2 potatoes
- 1 medium shallot
- 1 egg
- 1 tablespoon flour (I didn't want to bother converting to metric so I just used what I thought looked like the content of a tablespoon)
- 1/4 teaspoon baking powder (idem, but it's trickier for really small quantities!)
- some rosemary, salt and ground black pepper

The works:
1. I mixed the egg, baking powder, flour, rosemary, salt, and pepper.
2. I cut the shallot into pieces as small as possible (since I didn't have a grater handy, I used multi-blade scissors I got in the food area of a lifestyle fair recently).
3. I peeled the potatoes and gave them the knife + multi-blade scissors treatment too (disclaimer: they needed to be sliced pretty thin... anything over half a cm thick gave me trouble with the scissors).
4. I mixed the shallots + potato pieces with the rest.
5. I heated some oil in a pan and formed little pancakes, which I regularly turned (I think they took about 10-15 min to cook).
This gave me 5 latkes.