brownies :o)

I still chuckle when I think of the following brownie recipe. Mary found it in some paper when she was in London. It had something to do with Mental Health Awareness Week and it said something like 'make brownies for your depressed friend' or something, way to make someone fat and even more depressed! I can't remember exactly, but whatever it was, it was hilariously inappropriate. Nevertheless, it is an awesome recipe! I just made it the other day but it didn't turn out as I remember, perhaps Canadian cocoa isn't as chocolaty as the Polish one, but just give it a taste and add the necessary cocoa so that it has that deep bitter chocolate flavour! The best part of this is that it makes 1 dirty pot and no time at all.

Mental Awareness Brownies

1.  115 g plain flour
2. 5 tbsp cocoa powder (add a couple more for sure!)
3. 280 g caster sugar (a little less doesn't hurt)
4. 2 eggs, beaten (if you want to wash that extra bowl)
5. 115 g melted butter (I just leave it in a metal measuring cup and melt in directly on the stove or cooker as mom says :o))
6. 1 tsp vanilla essence or package of vanilla sugar

Preheat oven to 170C. Grease a 8x8-12 inch cake tin or whatever you can find.
Mix flour, cocoa and sugar together.
Add the eggs and give it a quick stir.
Add in the melted butter and vanilla and mix it until smooth.
Pour into the pan and bake for 25-30 minutes, 25 if you want them nice and gooey. Scrummy with ice cream!



For the next recipe, it's Nigella all the way, this is when you want to impress. I once made these brownies for Fredrik when he came over to Toronto from Sweden for the weekend once (I'm blushing), and he's still around :o)... It's perhaps not the simplest nor cheapest recipe, but it's worth the hassle!

Nigella's Flourless Chocolate Brownies

1. 225 g dark chocolate
2. 225 g butter
3. 2 tsp vanilla extract or a bag of vanilla sugar
4. 200 g caster sugar
5. 3 eggs, beaten
6. 150 g ground almonds
7. 100 g chopped walnuts (optional) 

• Preheat oven to 170C/fan.
• Grease a 24cm square tin.
• Melt the chocolate and butter over low heat.
• Once melted, take off the heat and mix in the vanilla and sugar and leave to cool.
• Whisk the eggs into the chocolate mixture making sure that it is cool enough so that the eggs don't scramble.
• Add the ground almonds and chopped walnuts.
• Pour the mixture into the baking tin and bake for 25-30 minutes.

If you're feeling especially chocolately inclined, you can opt for a sauce:

1.  75 g dark chocolate
2. 125 ml double cream
3. 2 tbsp instant coffee dissolved in 2 tbsp water
4. 1 tbsp golden syrup

Dump everything into a pan and melt over gentle heat. Pour into a small pitcher and serve with ice cream and brownies.

cheesecakes and the like

Before I get to some more savoury stuff, thought I should really post the link for the cheesecake I made in Kurozweki with white cheese and raspberries. Perhaps it's not as creamy as your typical North American heart attack cake but it was definitely good enough for seconds. I used the recipe from BBC Good Food and didn't change anything. http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3842/baked-raspberry-cheesecake. It's just as good with frozen raspberries or blueberries or whatever is growing in the garden.

For the next recipe, it's perhaps not my favourite but it's still perfectly palatable and makes for a great platter to bring to a party, or with some ice cream or a cup of coffee.

Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies

1. 125 g butter
2. 125 g dark chocolate
3. 200 g soft brown sugar
4. 3 medium eggs, lightly beaten
5. 50 g plain flour
6. 50 g cocoa powder
7. 1/4 tsp baking powder (a little more can't hurt)
8. 150 g cream cheese (get light)
9. 50 g caster sugar

Preheat oven to 160C/fan. Grease 18cm square baking pan.
Place butter and chocolate in a small pan and melt gently. Once the chocolate has melted, remove from the heat and let cool for a few minutes then briskly whisk in the eggs.
Add the flour, cocoa and baking powder to the chocolate mixture and mix until smooth.
Pour into the greased tin.
In a bowl, beat the cheese with the sugar and randomly spoon it over the brownie batter. Use a knife to swirl the cream cheese into the chocolate creating a marble effect.
Bake for 35-40 mins or until the edges look crispy.
Leave to cool, cut into squares and enjoy!

post-op day #1 & some sticky treats

¡Hola! Hmmm, lying my favourite couch all doped up after yesterday's hernia operation, both sides at once is a little viscious, but I am really enjoying my time off :o) Can't say I have too much appetite with all those pills schwimming around my stomach, and the thought of food makes me a little nauseous, so I don't feel too enthusiastic ooo-ing and aaah-ing about culinary delights at the moment but I can't pass by this opportunity to post more fattening recipes... hehehe!

For the first restipe, I thought I absolutely must post a recipe for millionaire's shortbread, it's perfect for parties! The first time I ever had this was in boarding school, probably the only edible things they had there. I know I have eyeballed it a couple times at Boots since then, but once I have read the ingredients and calorie count, I definitely rather go buy a bag of carrots!


Preaheat ovent to 180C/fan.
Grease a 18cm square pan, make sure it's at least 4cm deep. Put together in a bowl: (or save your time and shove it all in the Vorwerk for a couple secs)

1. 225 g plain flour
2. 75 g caster sugar sugar
3. 150 g cold unsalted butter, diced

Mix the 3 ingredients together and rub in the butter until it forms breadcrumbs, and then work it further until it forms a dough.  Press the dough evenly into the greased pan and prick it all over with a fork. Bake it for 25 mins or until golden. Leave it to cool in the tin.

In a small saucepan, (hahaha, I've started pronouncing 'sauce' like Mr T, he calls ketchup 'soss'! Hehe, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, Paul was just the same as a kid!), combine:

1. 100 g unsalted butter
2. 100g g dark soft brown/muscovado sugar

Once melted, add:

1. 2 tbsp golden syrup
2. 397 g can sweetened condensed milk

Keep stirring until the mixture comes to boil, then cook for 5 minutes mixing all the time. Remove from the heat and stir in a few drops of vanilla essence or vanilla sugar. Spread over the shortbread base. Put in the fridge to cool completely.

Melt 200 g dark chocolate over low heat. You may add 1 tbsp vegetable oil to this or I preferred to add a little cream.
Spread it over the cooled toffee and put back in the fridge until set. You might want to score out the pieces in the chocolate before it is completely set in order to facilitate cutting it later.

back from the dead with bison day and fondue chinoise

As a kid, I often wondered why on earth did Quebequers name Shepherd's Pie, 'Pâté Chinois'. What does China have to do with minced meat topped with corn and potatoes? Whatever the reason, it did no preclude me from having Ketchup with it for my birthday whenever I could. (Lucky me, I didn't "have my birthday in a tent every year"... guess who that quote is from?).
Anyways, so after a very kind sibling gifted us a fondue set for Christmas, 'Fondue Chionoise' was on the menu tonight. Not having eaten this since the Berneval days, I had no idea how to make the broth so I looked it up. I found: Fondue Chinoise au Caribou. How absurd. I'm sure caribou is number one delicacy in China; welcome to Quebecois logic (trust me, there's not much of it around here, starting with the language, health care system.... enough said.)!
So anyways, point two of this blog is that it has been a truly 'bison day' today and I was thinking that Fondue Chinoise au Bison (nooo, tak, ale co to ma byc????), would not be such a bad idea at all on the menu. After Fredrik went beserk over our pets (those silly awful moths that live in the flour - thanks to our sourdough attempts we had tons of organic flour in the kitchen and I guess a moth farm too) and searched every website on how to exterminate them, we ended up buying tea-tree oil at some funky flower power shop where the lady in front of us was buying nothing else than bison meat. I love the way I feel so chuffed when people eat bison, as if I was a bison meat authority....
So yeah, along the way, for some reason we thought we would make fondue tonight, and as we were hunting for the meat, we came across bison meat for fondue. And blah blah blah blah blah I started talking a hole though Fredrik's head on how bison fondue would be the bestest idea in Kurozweki. Anyways, so we bought some sensibly priced beef and made our way home.
We cleaned the flat from top to bottom, washed the whole kitchen with tea-tree oil and Domestos, really making sure to deaded those bugs and started cooking dinner. I always laugh when I hear about tea-tree oil, remembering the massive variety of Malaleuca products we had in the States, they were the best to make magic potion!
So in the end, we sat down to dinner on the couch and watched our precious weekly episode of 'Chopped'. It's a program where four chefs have 20 or 30 minutes to make up a course using 4 'mystery ingredients'. Usually it's nasty stuff like squid, urchins, violet mustard or candy cane. The chefs have to cook an appetiser, entrée and desert within the time limit and as one person is eliminated every round, with the last person winning 10 grand. So anyways, tonight, one of the mystery ingredients was bison, again, officially a bison day!

So, ergo, before I forget, I thought I would share the recipe I used for the fondue tonight. The broth was a little spicy to eat like soup but the meat turned out bestestest and flavourful.

1. Start boiling around a liter of water. Add a couple beef stock cubes to it.
2. Chop up an onion and gently fry it in some vegetable oil.
3. While the onion is sizzling, pound on a few cloves of garlic, chop them up quickly and dump them in with the onions.
4. If you have a few carrots or celery or celery root lying around, peel it/some, cut it into chunks and add it to the onions and stir it all around.
5. Throw in some chili flakes, salt, pepper and some bay leaves.
6. Pour in 1/2 cup red or white wine (I think white is better if it's spicy) and boil it for a couple minutes.
7. Once the alcohol has evaporated, pour in the broth and let it simmer for half an hour or till whenever dinner is ready.
8. I added some spring onion later on, it adds a nice crisp fresh flavour that compliments the white wine.

The beef turned out nice and juicy with a good spicy kick. But then the bestest part were the dipping sauces. I had been planning to make a horseradish sauce but realised that there wasn't any in the fridge, shame on me, I must have had 5 jars of it in the flat in the Krak... so I made the Dijon mustard sauce from this website: http://www.gofondue.com/fondue_dipping_sauces.htm There are tons of good dipping sauce recipes on that page.

Also really tasty was a Curry-Mayo dip: 

• 1/2 c mayo
• 1 1/2 tbsp ketchup
• 2 tsp curry powder
• 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• garlic and onion powder to taste
• salt and pepper

So, it was definitely a success. We had millionaire shortbread for desert.... will post that restipe tomorrow if I have the time :o).