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:)

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.

Savoury Turnovers

I love savoury pastries... Quiche, steak&kidney pie, pot pie, pizza, petits fours... Love them all, and they make great comfort food!

Yesterday night I tried to make turnovers, based on a recipe from realsimple.com (didn't know the name, just recognized it as yummy stuff from the photo!).

So my version included (for 4 turnovers):
- 2 store-bought pie crusts (the puff pastry kind)
- 350g beef&pork mince (I used 450g, but I found that was a bit much) - it would work well with 100% beef mince as well
- 2 carrots
- 4 shallots
- 250g fresh spinach (which is really a lot nicer than the canned version imo)
- 50g parmesan (add more if you want it really cheesy, I just wanted a hint of taste)
- 1 egg
- some rosemary
- salt & pepper

So here's how you go about it:
1. Slice the carrots and soften them in a bit of olive oil. Let them color a little.
2. Slice the shallots and add them to the pan. Season with rosemary. It will start smelling very good:)

3. Add the spinach little by little, and stir well each time.
4. When the vegs are cooked but still crunchy, transfer to a big mixing bowl and put the meat in the pan.
Season with salt and pepper (skip the salt if you're going to use a lot of parmesan, as it'll get too salty otherwise), and cook through.
5. While it's cooking, preheat the oven to 200 degrees celsius.
6. Add the cooked meat and the parmesan to the mixing bowl. Correct the seasoning if needed.

7. Cut the pie crusts in 2, spoon the meat&veg mix onto one side of each half-circle, leaving a 1cm border.

8. Wet the borders with a little water, fold the dough over to form a quarter-circle, and press firmly to seal (I crimped it with my fingers).
Cut 3 slits in each turnover.

9. Beat the egg and brush it over the turnovers (so they get nice and golden in the oven).
Transfer to a baking sheet with baking paper (I used the baking paper that came with the pie crusts) and cook for 15min (or until risen and golden brown).

There you go :)