thepassionatecook

Easy-peasy raspberry tarts with passion fruit curd

Preparing yummilicious food really IS child's play... you don't believe me? It's just about recognising where you stand in the list of skilled pastry chefs... no use working with a Pierre Herme recipe when really, your experience doesn't extend beyond smores and jell-o, believe me, I have learnt this the hard way. (I'll spare you the details, but I've seen everything from cakes exploding in the microwave to my cousin's plaits getting caught in the hand mixer...)

These tartlets are dressed to impress, but really easy to put together! A wonderful recipe for kids to get their hands dirty and feel like a proper pastry chef in the making! Bookmark it for them now for your Mother's Day treat. If you are not happy for them to use a food processor, you can put the biscuits in a plastic bag and crush them with a mallet... very soothing. If I had money to pay for a study, I'd like to see how this "therapy" performs compared to Ritalin ;-)

If you're willing to go the extra mile (like I did in this recipe), you can make some home-made passion fruit (or lemon) curd, but less experienced little chefs might just want to use the store-bought variety - the result will be equally scrumptious!

Of course, it's not just a recipe for the culinarily challenged, it is also an amazing choice when you don't have much time to slave in the kitchen or are preparing a multi-course dinner and the last thing you want to fret over is dessert... it's so quickly assembled, you definitely won't get your knickers in a twist!

Rhubarb & walnut muffins

Hello, my name is Johanna and I am a butter addict. Yep, that's right. Not even a recovering one, and not that I'd ever want to try to wean myself off it. Especially not since I've heard that my aversion to what was claimed to be the "healthy" alternative, margarine, is a sensible one since margarine is actually far worse than my beloved butter because it's full of nasty transfats that really play havoc with your cholesterol!

So I am not ashamed to say that I LOVE butter. If I had to choose just one thing that I needed to live on for the rest of my life, it would be freshly baked sourdough (preferrably my own) with sea salt butter - ok, that's two things, I guess, but for me, that's true heaven on earth. Another favourite way to have butter is beurre noisette - I love its nutty flavour and whenever we have a dinner party where the starter or main calls for some bread to go with, or if we're serving a cheese board after, I always make a point of browning said sea salt butter to serve alongside...  It's also funny how people then start to guess what it is an never quite get it... just like it happened to me when I had it for the first time. It's such a simple thing to do, yet absolutely divine!

Often when I bake and have a recipe that calls for melted butter, I tend to actually brown it first: it works a treat for financiers like these as well as the muffins I made on the weekend... a step so simple, yet it adds a flavour dimension that is absolutely amazing. This recipe is quite low on sugar, perfect for those who want a sweet treat, but not overly so...

So here you have it, by popular demand: the recipe for rhubarb & walnut muffins that so many of my facebook friends have requested, I hope you like them as much as my neighbours did ;-)

Chocolate and mixed nut bownie cookies

Merry Christmas, everyone!

If you're still up for some Christmas baking, here's a recipe you can easily make out of regular cupboard ingredients - which is exactly why I made them. I was stuck at home the other day when one of my offsprings decided to throw a runny nose and run a bit of a fever, and all the Christmas baking I had planned involved a trip to the shops! You can use any nuts you like, mine happened to be walnuts and toasted, unsalted peanuts. (Thermomix instructions are included in the recipe)

I instantly fell in love with them, they have everything that makes a great Christmas cookie, a bit of chocolate, a bit of nuts and a great look! They're soft at the start and after a few days turn slightly chewy, which I think is my preferred way of eating them. With a glass of mulled wine in front of the fireplace, nothing is better to see out a fun-filled Christmas day!

Creamy birthday cheesecake with mixed berries

When you will finally reach my age, you suddenly realise that there's worse than celebrating getting a year older every year. Thing is, if you're wicked enough, you'll probably be (like me) celebrating your 27th for the, errm, 11th time running, anyway.

No, it's far worse to be celebrating your CHILDREN's birthdays year in, year out. The reasons are manyfold. There is, of course, the fact that you're being reminded about just how old you REALLY are (this year, for example, people surrounding me started to doubt my age, you could literally see them count in their heads... "but if her daughter is turning 17 and she is 27, then... no, that's impossible!"), then there's the thing about celebrating (in my case) four times a year, so that feels like you're growing 4 years older every year. Not good! Sooo not good!

Plus there comes a point when you just won't put up with the fact that THEY are the ones getting all the presents when it's YOU, and ONLY you, who did all the hard work on the day being celebrated. No, seriously, how hard can it be to BE BORN, as opposed to BEING IN active LABOUR for 36 hours, not having slept in 52 and not having had a shower in bloody too long for anyone's liking???

So I say, bring on the indulgence. With everything you do to make their birthday special, make it YOUR special day, too. Make YOUR favourite breakfast. Choose YOUR favourite cake. Luckily for me, her tastes in cake coincide with mine most of the time (well, it's simple, really, there are no mushrooms in cake, no fish, no soggy bacon, no peppers, no beef, no...  I could go on 'til the cows come home), so nobody found out about my outrageous and egoistical plan of spoiling myself rotten on HER birthday...

You will love this cheesecake, it's seriously the creamiest and therefore most indulging I've ever eaten, yet the ingredients are fairly healthy - ricotta, philly and only a little bit of single cream... ok, it's not a spelt cracker with barley grass, but it's a cake after all. The seasonal berries (full to the brim with antioxidants) were the literal icing on the cake and so much better at it... and the candles, you ask? Well, they're kind of hard to fit on a sea of berries, so we had a birthday banana instead ;-) 

Lady Maria's Schokogugelhupf

I solemnly vow not to watch the Eurovision again. I do. Unless Jonathan Ross presents the show. Or Austria qualifies - both very unlikely events indeed.

Moving on, let's speak about nicer things. Things that lighten up everybody's face, that fill the house with warmth and make the birds appear to be singing overtime.

Like when Lady Maria is visiting. She's not really of royal descent, my Mum, she just happened to marry a normal sort of guy (Lord Rudi) who went on to come into the possession of some land up in Scotland and is therefore, by default, a "Laird" - which, translated to English, means "Lord". So it follows that she is a "Lady". Not they they have been invited to have tea with HRH, nor do they own a lavish mansion in Belgravia or Mayfair (or anywhere else, for that matter) that I could benefit from...

Whenever she graces us with her presence, my sons demand that she bake with them - and really, there's only one cake they will make, which has become my sons' absolute favourite and is about the only thing we ever bake when we bake together. By popular demand. It takes the traditional shape of a Gugelhupf, a plain Bundt, basically. I bring this to playdates and coffee mornings often and everybody is always amazed at how tasty, moist and finger-lickingly good it is. The last time I made it, there were five of us around the table, including two boys who polished off the *entire* cake in a matter of maybe half an hour - and probably only took so long out of politeness.

You know how Austria is known for its patisserie, but most of it, especially the more elaborate creations, is seldom, if ever, made at home. Every (good) Austrian housewife's repertoire (at least in my Mum's generation) would also include the famous Sachertorte, the  Apfelstrudel (apple strudel) with home-made fillo-pastry, a variety of tray bakes typically with fruits of the season, Black Forest cake, Malakoff Torte (a tarte with almonds, buttercream and sponge fingers), a nut or poppyseed ring, a plaited yeast bread for Easter and a variety of biscuits (incl. Lebkuchen, our version of ginger bread). Nowadays, not many people bother to make their own, so I know very few women (or men) of my age who can master their own strudel. But the Gugelhupf is something everybody can make, it's easy, quick and therefore the most recognised form of cake in the country. Delicious as all its different variations may be, it is therefore also the one form of cake that you're unlikely to find in one of the many cafés in Vienna - as everybody knows how to make their own, people tend to go for more elaborate patisserie when they go out.

What sets this one apart from your usual chocolate Gugelhupf, which can often turn out to be quite firm in texture and, without artificial additives, incredibly dry, is that it uses real chocolate (rather than cocoa powder) and almost as much ground almonds as flour - giving it that extra moisture. Incredibly easy to make (with a little adult help, this is quite literally child's play), this is one of the best recipes to have up your sleeve and sure to become a favourite in your household, too!

Chocolate hot-cross buns

A happy Easter to all of you... and what a disaster it has been weatherwise! After coming back from a long-awaited holiday in the Alsace, glorious sunshine and finally being able to leave the house without having to wrap the kids up in interminable layers of clothing, we were badly hit by five days of continuous cold and wetness. In my pre-parenthood days, I would almost have welcomed such unfortunate circumstances, spending my days reading book after book after book, enjoying leisurely meals with friends, watching movies or even reading a newspaper back to front with your (five) morning coffees.

Not so now. While the eldest is pretty much self-sufficient in her little den in the attic, spending hours worshipping the Jonas Brothers or trawling around facebook or twitter or whereever else it might be hip to surf these days, the two little toads need pretty much constant entertaining - they do enjoy a play in the garden despite a drizzle but there comes a point when there isn't any dry clothing left to be put on them and you are stuck in the house. Since we  don't like to put them in front of the TV, I try and keep them busy with arts and crafts... egg dyeing, blowing out eggs and decorating them for the Easter brunch we're having tomorrow, making bunny ears - and baking.

When I announced yesterday that we were going to bake hot-cross buns, I was met with an "oh no, they're disgusting!" emanating from my 5-year-old... he clearly had had a taste of them at school and hadn't been too impressed - none of my children like dried fruit all that much, so we decided to make them all chocolatey. Easter baking is always a great opportunity to use up any chocolate santas, reindeers etc, whereas the first Christmas cookies of the season always have some Easter bunnies in them ;-) I wouldn't say they're the best cakes I've ever made, but if you want to stick to the theme of Easter and dread the traditional ones, these hot-cross buns are something you want to try. And they kept us occupied for an entire afternoon, with lots of dancing and prancing in the kitchen while we were waiting for the dough to rise three times before they could finally shape them... a fun-filled afternoon!

WTSIM copycat: Mixed berry tart courtesy of Lucullian Delight

This round of WTSIM Andrew is hosting is a bit of lazy one... not only because we don't even have to come up with a recipe ourselves, but merely re-create one recipe out of a previous edition, also because I am incredibly late, which is not entirely my fault, seeing that Andrew emailed everybody and their dog about what my challenge would be, but forgot to include ME in the email ;-) and by the time I realised, I was already swamped with other things, like deadlines for articles for National Geographic and assignments to be handed in at uni - not to speak of the dreadful weather outside which really didn't have me storming out to get summery berries!

So, my challenge was berries. Great theme for winter, thanks Andrew! ;-) But the tart I chose could have easily been done with frozen berries as well, so should please both hemispheres. I had a really tough time choosing... for the longest time, I thought I'd explore one of the savoury recipes from Foodblogga or Exceeding the speed limit - I have never paired pork with berries, even though one of my favourite poultry dishes is quail stuffed with raspberries. But in the end, I couldn't resist Ilva's glorious photography... and since I know I can always trust her recipes (with a delay in posting such as mine, I could not afford the recipe not to turn out), it was settled: I would be making a mixed berry tart with a rosemary crust.

Now, I am usually quite lazy when it comes to making tarts, I know the dough is quickly put together, but it's more the fact that I am too impatient to spend an hour pressing the dough into the fluted tin and hope that everything will be nice and even, I am a perfectionist that way, I can't deal with bumpy bottoms and need a nice crust:filling ratio. But the idea of putting rosemary into the dough seemed like such a great addition, so I conceded. While I was making it, I thought I should have added more of the herb, but as it turned out, the 1 tsp does give it a nice and subtle hint of rosemary without being too much in your face.

Although I didn't follow the recipe by the book, I didn't end up writing the recipe down, so please, refer to Ilva's original recipe - her pictures are much better than mine and it's always good to get things straight from the source, so please head over to Lucullian Delights and try this delicious tart for yourself!

Carrot, courgette & hazelnut muffins with lime cream cheese frosting

I have long shrugged off the proposition of having (albeit organic) vegetables delivered to my house, thinking it would be too limiting. Not in the sense that the contents don't change enough over the weeks and I'd get bored with them, rather that I am far too impulsive when it comes to food... I spend my day thinking about the stuff pretty much non-stop (and I am sure that even as I am sticking my head into my books to study Iridology or Traditional Chinese Medicine or whatever else a given day might bring, there's a recipe sneakily developing in some dark corner in the back of my brain) - when I set my mind on having jerusalem artichoke risotto one day, I won't be settling for a Thai green vegetable curry just because I've got leftovers!

Some time at the beginning of my naturopathy course last autumn, I started ordering from my tried and trusted supplier again. It's probably because the nutrition lecture on food labelling really brought it home to me how easy it is for big food companies to mess with your head and not actually tell you what goes into their products, let alone how they're produced and how that f*** up the nutritional content. Did you know that the vitamin content stated on your average orange juice carton is "before" not "after" pasteurisation? And did you know also that up to 90% of, say, vitamin C, is lost in the process, no matter how (supposedly) *gently* they do it? And that any vitamin added AFTER is likely to be in a "cheap" form, meaning that its bioavailability is low and you're body struggles to absorb it, if it gains anything at all from it?

So I did change my ways and very selfishly buy almost exclusively organic now. The first change was the regular delivery of boxes from my favourite supplier. After a little incident last year (which I won't go into, because I am almost certain it wasn't their fault, they just employed a marketing agency which employs less than ethical methods of generating revenue) our relationship had gone a bit stale, so I did investigate and compared them with other suppliers in my area and sure enough, they came out top again. What I like the most about them (apart from the fact that the delivery guy is a handsome and chirpy chap) is that you can state your likes and dislikes for produce and they'll tailor-make each week's box for you. For example, I don't like beetroot, so that's NEVER going in. EVER. Also, if I have too many clementines or kiwis left over from the previous box, I can request that these fruits are not included and replaced by something else in any given week.

I usually have a deluxe vegetable box, which carries the (seemingly) more "unusual" vegetables (e.g. artichokes, aubergines) and an essential plus fruit box which get delivered on a Thursday, and to be honest, I have to order some extra stuff on top, which I either order through them (juicing oranges, extra herbs, onions, garlic, but also great organic salmon...) or though Ocado, the only supermarket delivery service where I can trust that the quality is what I paid for and I get ripe fruit and vegetables that don't go mouldy halfway through the day they're delivered.
With all that food, of course I do have things left over by the time my next box comes, just because what I learnt in nutrition doesn't mean that I have gone off food. I am still as passionate and temperamental when it comes to all things edible and I still need to satisfy my cravings for things that aren't necessarily in the fridge that day. But I don't fret over it any more because there are so many things I can do with what's left. So Thurday usually sees the unpacking of the boxes, cleaning the produce (I soak everything that we eat skin-on in water with a dash of cider vinegar for 30 mins to get rid of any - potential - creepy crawlies and most germs) and taking out any unconsumed vegetables and fruit from the last delivery which I will then convert into favourite easy lunches that can be made ahead for the next week: soups (great recipe of last night's lentil, courgette, broccoli and salmon one-pot to follow), quiches, frittatas, dips for starters or an afternoon snack the next day (again, recipe for a mouth-watering smokey aubergine dip coming soon), the list goes on.

What I hadn't thought of until yesterday is that you could actually use vegetables to make sweet things, too! Carrot cake I have grown up with (albeit a version very different from the British tradition, and with chocolate drizzle, instead of the dreaded icing you get here), but to use courgette in muffins? La Tartine Gourmande had some recently and although I had shrugged similar ideas off before with a "yeah, like, whatever" (that I've perfected over the years by observing my teenage daughter), the idea stuck in my head so much so that I had to try some for myself yesterday.
So these muffins combine three left-overs (or actually four, if I count the eggs) from my organic delivery scheme: courgette (aka zucchini), carrots and Medjool dates, as well as hazelnuts and ginger left-over from Christmas baking. And I am learning that you can make the most delicious dishes from scraping together some random things emerging from your organic box: I am a big fan of the brown stuff, but honestly, after tasting these muffins, I will never need a triple chocolate muffin ever again! Moist, gently spiced and topped with (another concept I have never understood, but now love after trying it) cream cheese topping gently infused with lime... pure bliss!

Plum & cinnamon streusel cake

It's been a long time since I last made a traditional Austrian cake. If you want to know what's been keeping me all those years, I'll be very honest with you. I used to hate baking, primarily because I never was much of a sweet tooth, so I had never felt the urge to bake until quite recently. It's only since we moved to London that I discovered that end of the culinary spectrum - possibly because good pastries are hard to come by in this country. Sure, supermarkets and cafés offer muffins, cookies and deep-fried stuff galore, but proper home-made cakes are not all that easy to find. And although I love a good opera cake (bought, not home-made) as much as the next person, you can't beat a cake that really makes you feel at home. Like coming in after a long autumn walk in the woods, fingers and toes slowly thawing by the fireside, a pot of tea at arm's length... surely this calls for something like your Mum used to make much more than poncey patisserie. Right?
The other obstacle to baking Austrian things more frequently is that in a country that (deservedly) enjoys world fame for its patisserie and (inexplicably) coffee culture, most cakes are just impossible to recreate at home. Our way of baking is very far removed from the American (and I guess British) approach where you throw all ingredients into one bowl, mix them up with a fork, pour into a tin and hope for the best. No, that would be far too simple! To make a proper Austrian torte (think Dobos  Torte), you'll be killing your back standing in the kitchen for hours non-stop just to prepare fourteen pivotal ingredients to a cake, not to mention the fact that you'll run out of mixing bowls and whisks half-way through it!

On the other hand, we obviously have simpler fare as well, but I never even attempted to make any of that, because back home, they're so well known all around that a) they don't impress anybody and b) everybody has their own favourite version of a particular cake and instead of reaping compliments, the best you'll possibly get is a half-hearted "this is nice, but you know, my auntie soandso makes the best EVER (insert name of the cake that you just pain-stakingly made) and we've been trying to coax the recipe out of her for ages, but she took it to her gave". How can you possibly compete with that!

So it was only this week that I undertook my first attempt to make one of the most popular cakes known to the Austrian: the Zwetschkenfleck. It's a tray bake with plums, topped with cinnamon & almond streusel and the name sort of suggests already that this isn't considered haute cuisine... "Fleck" literally translates as "blotch" or "stain", although in Austrian dialect, it is commonly used to designate a scrap of cloth. A Zwetschkenfleck is an afterthought, something you make on the side when you've got too much fruit at home at harvest time and you can use all sorts of fruit, of course, the plums just being the most common.

I did not have a recipe for it, nor did I remember exactly how my Mum makes it. I think the traditional would be a sponge or shortcrust base, a generous spread of jam, topped with the fruit and then the streusel. I wanted to make the deluxe version of it, which is probably what you would find in most patisseries and coffee houses (including Paul's in Paris and London), with a base of pâte briochée, a layer of crème pâtissière, a layer of plums and a topping of cinnamon-laden streusel with almond slivers, half of which I naughtily gobbled up while I was assembling the cake. What can I say, since I brought the cake to a coffee morning where I could be sure not to encounter any Austrians or Germans, I felt quite confident with my first attempt at baking Zwetschkenfleck. And although it wasn't all that difficult to make, it was a sure hit with the ladies... whether they're easy to please or just glad someone could be bothered to actually bake something, I don't know. What I DO know is that I feel like I've done a big step towards my own reconciliation with Austrian baking ;-)

Easy chocolate cake with no need for scales!

Self-catering holiday accommodation - we've all been there...  you find yourself on a rainy day wanting to keep the kids happy and decide to bake a cake. But no matter how well-equipped your vacation home is, there are usually a few essential items missing. Cake tins, for example. Easily remedied by baking in a casserole or heat-resistant coffee cups. No mixer? At a push you might get away with a spatula/wooden spoon. But what about scales? Our cabin on the farm near Salzburg which we've now rented two years in a row (with no intentions of breaking with this new-found tradition any time soon!) is exceptionally well equipped and the farmers are always happy to help out, but I had no scales and couldn't well leave the kids alone in the cabin (but frankly, I had no intentions of getting my sorry behind soaking wet in the weather that was raging outside, anyway!) I remembered a recipe torn out of a newspaper which has been hanging on my mother-in-law's pinboard for years and years: this uses a cup of sour cream (typically 250g in Austria, but it works just as well with 200g - the consistency might vary, but why stress when you're on vacation?) and measures all the other ingredients in that same cup - perfect!

So a phone call and one SMS later and I found myself in the kitchen with the boys, letting the older one measure everything out with the emptied sour cream container and he made the whole cake entirely by himself - he even braved the rain to pick up some apples in the garden to put on top. The little one got to lick the spoon... and had to endure his Mum taking pictures of his face covered in chocolate for hours... bless!

This cake is easily put together and depending on what you have at hand, you can use melted or grated chocolate or, as per original recipe, cocoa powder. The end result will differ in that the melted chocolate (picture) will give you a wonderfully moist and gooey consistency, whereas using cocoa will make the cake lighter and fluffier. With grated chocolate, the cake will have more of a speckled look. I have tried them all and they were all delicious in their own way. And as I appreciate that you might not be able to buy a 250g tub of sour cream, you can either use a regular US cup measure or resort to scales - as I have converted the recipe to metric for you as well. No excuse then... just wait for a rainy day and get creative in the kitchen!