Chocolate Chip Buckwheat Cupcakes

I was having some chocolate with some multi-cereal bread earlier on today, and I noticed I really liked how the chocolate taste combined with the malty taste of some of the cereals...

Then I remembered I had those dark chocolate chips that were almost as savoury as sweet: quite some bitterness from the dark chocolate and a bit of salt (they put a bit of salt in most things to underscore the taste, but this was a bit too noticeable), and very little sweetness. I thought that they might work well with something with a malty taste, like, say... buckwheat... Which I happened to have in the closet:-)

So this is another riff on my trusty banana bread recipe (which I really should post as is sometime;-) ).

Here we go:
- 300g buckwheat flour
- 100g white flour
- 12g baking powder
- 200g white sugar
- 200ml milk
- 3 plain yoghurts (pots of 125ml)
- 3 eggs
- 70g butter
- 275g chocolate chips
(This is what I happened to have on hand, you could play around with a quantities and see what it gives you... but I really liked the result so I'm putting it on the record as is).

Prep:
1. Mix the dry ingredients (except the chocolate chips).
2. Add the wet ingredients and mix some more (tip: melt the butter in the microwave so it combines more easily with the rest).
3. Stir in the chocolate chips.
4. Preheat your oven to 200 (fan)/220, and divide the batter into your cupcake tins (I got some individual ones from my mom which are very handy since my 12-cupcakes tin doesn't fit in our small oven/microwave/grill).
5. Bake for 15-20 min (depending on your oven, ours is a bit slow so it needs 20 minutes).

Result:

These are the ones I baked (I can only fit 12 at a time in our oven). The recipe gave me about 30, I froze the rest.

Very yummy, especially right out of the oven... And quite a different taste than regular cupcakes (which are often too sweet for my taste).

The chocolate chips are at the bottom!

Mini woolly hat with pom-pom

Not really the season anymore I know, but I'm gradually learning more knitting skills... This helped me practice the purl stitch, and learn decreases (knit 2 together and purl 2 together... which do what they say on the tin).

The pom-pom - which turned out super duper fluffy if I may say so myself - I knew how to make from kids camps years ago. Basically you only need a bit of cardboard, yarn and a needle (no need for a pom-pom maker!).

You can find a tutorial here (I didn't bother measuring the circles, I just eyeballed it).

So why a mini hat? Well there's this campaign every year where they put mini woolly hats on smoothie bottles and give a fraction of the profits to charity (original UK version here).

Here are two from smoothies I bought in January:

I really like the red one. The cream one kinda looks more like a condom, but hey it's possible that it was the idea...

Anyway, I thought it was kinda cool, and since they've published knitting patterns for people to make them, I thought I'd try my hand at the beginners' one:)

If someone else fancies giving it a try, it's the first one on this page (that one's in French, though you can find a pretty similar one on the UK website).

I'm really hoping they run the same campaign again this autumn, so I can send it in... And it'd be really cool to spot it on a smoothie on the shelves;)

Roasted Sea Bass with Minneola

You probably read this as "Roasted Sea Bass with... What?". You're not alone. I also hadn't heard of minneola before making this.

Basically a minneola is one of these new citrus fruits made by crossing other citrus. This one is a cross between a grapefruit and a tangerine. And it is closest to the tangerine (it looks like a small orange but is sweeter and juicier).

So the "inspiration recipe" is something I found on my laptop (I bought a new laptop with Windows 8, that has "tiles" with different kind of things, one of them being food and drink, with recipes. I was quite chuffed to find that my new laptop came with a collection of recipes!!). 

It was sea bass with herb butter sauce and lemon, and looked scrumptious. So we decided to make a version of that. Kristof thought it was with orange, so he brought a minneola back from the shop (and I'm glad he did, that definitely made it more interesting:) ).

Ingredients 

2 filets of sea bass

1 minneola 

fresh pasta (we used 500g but that was a bit too much, so I'd say 300g)

200-300g fresh spinach 

olive oil 

oregano

ras-el-hanout

Preparation 

1. Slice the minneola as finely as possible, make indentations in the fish and place the slices in the indentations. Place a few more slices under the fish, and nibble on the remaining slices, they're really yummy;)

Add some olive oil, oregano and ras-el-hanout on the fish and minneola slices.

2. Roast the fish and minneola at 200 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes.

3. Cook the fresh pasta, stir-fry the spinach, put everything nicely on plates, and enjoy:)

P.S. Putting everything nicely on plates is Kristof's job here, since he's better at it than I am ;)

Squid Ink Pasta with Seafood in White Wine Sauce

So I wanted to:

- make ink squid pasta with actual squid,

- add some big prawns (gambas),

- try to make a white wine sauce.

Here's the result:

You can't see much of the white wine sauce (I only added it to the pasta then piled the rest on top, since the pot and pans I used were not big enough to stir everything through), but it worked very well!

I used this this recipe for it, and I flavoured it with shallots, sundried tomatoes, oregano and lemon olive oil (also a few drops of Asian fish sauce and mango vinegar).

I also added some leek, green peas and yellow bell pepper. It was really nice:)