Carrot cake or my happy autumn

The good thing about autumn is orange. This is why one of the straightforward ways to celebrate autumn (yes, it's followed by the winter but it's not a reason not to celebrate) is a carrot cake! Easy, tasty and odorous.

2 cups of flour + baking powder
~1 cup of sugar (depends on how sweet you want your cake to be. I put slightly less and everyone's happy)
4 eggs
100 g of walnuts (I broke them in pieces and fried a bit with some cinnamon)
1 cup of sunflower oil
350 g of ground carrots
cinnamon, ginger, a bit of salt, 
a spoon of cointreau or orange peel
(whatever you think fits with carrots)
250 g of mascarpone 
(well, any other cream cheese can do, too)
50 g of sugar powder 
(or even more, if you don't like your icing sour)
peel and juice of a lime

Start to heat the oven at 180 C. Mix the flour, baking powder, salt and spices. Mix eggs with sugar (better, with a mixer), add the oil to the mixture. Add the flour blend little by little, add carrots and nuts, mix again. Bake for 40 minutes (till the dry toothpick) at 180 C. Wait till it cools down. Mix mascarpone with sugar powder and peel and lime juice, distribute it over the cake and enjoy!

Pear Dainties "Farewell feast" or "This looks suspicious"

This receipt my mom has found on the web (in English but the web-site was so epilepsy-unfriendly that I decided to repeat it here. If you want to see the original, please go ahead). I gave them such a good-byeish name because of the occasion for which I baked them (I was quitting my research group). Baking them is fast and easy (you don't even need a mixer) and they look good. And I think that list of products looks pretty, too.

170 g self-raising flour
30 g cocoa powder
200 g sugar powder
150 g butter or margarine, melted
5 egg whites
1 teaspoon pear liqueur
12 canned minipears


I cook in the common dorm kitchen, so my measure is a random clean cup, so I took a bit less then a cup of flour + baking powder. Canned minipears are as rear as white siberian tigers, so I took usual canned pears and cut them in quarters (and a picture of a tiger is here because they are badass). Egg whites should be cold and the melted butter cooled. If you don't have a pear liqueur, mix pear syrup with some vodka and feel happy (well, this is a general recommendation).

So, turn on the oven at 180 C, sift the flour, baking powder, cocoa powder, sugar powder, a bit of salt, spices (I always add cinnamon and muscat, unless otherwise stated), mix well with butter and then add egg whites, one by one, mix very well after each. Add the liqueur, mix again and distribute the dough among 12 baking cups. Put a minipear in each cup. Bake at 180 C for 10 minutes and then at 160 C for 15-20 minutes (till golden-brown or dry tooth-pick).

Before serving, apply some apricot jam on top of a dainty and treat it with a bit of sugar powder and chocolate chips (for technical reasons, I skipped this step). The result looks as if the Big Brother watches you through these pear eyes (as my friend Masha says, if you suffer paranoid schizophrenia it doesn't mean nobody's following you)

Sable cookies for Masha

This is a receipt from a book "Essentials of Baking" or something like that, I have found it in one blog and now copy it to this blog (as usual I make my corrections to anything I cook, it just happens).

I had some kind of negative experience with these cookies - I have put too much sugar there. Now, I've chosen a different strategy (see below). Anyhow, these cookies are indecently easy to make and there are 1000 and 1 variation of what you can do to them. This is why I dedicate them to my best friend Masha :)

So, you will need 250g of soft margarine (or butter), half-cup of sugar (I took sugar powder this time to obtain a fine consistence), vanilla, 2 big egg yellows (I took 3 small ones) and 2 cups of sifted flour. The procedure is close to trivial: mix margarine with sugar, a bit of salt and vanilla, add one by one yellows and the flour. Form 4 cylinder-shaped pieces, ~4 cm in diameter and ~20 cm in length, wrap them in the cellophane film and put in the freezer for at least 3-4 hours (up to couple of months). When the time to bake comes warm up the oven to 180C and unwrap the dough (if you see ice crystals on it let it for 10 min at the room temperature), slice it with a sharp knife in 4 mm slices, put them on a layer of a backing paper (which is supposed to cover a baking tray), keep the distance between slices ~2.5 cm and bake it for 12-14 minutes (till it gets a beautiful golden color) then take it out, let it cool on a tray for some minutes and then... well, you know what to do if you read this at all!

Now, the interesting part about these cookies. The version above is a classic vanilla sable. You don't have to confine your desires to this taste, you can add whatever you feel like to the dough. This time, I've made three versions: lemon peel and lemon juice, almond and candied orange peel (pictured) and cacao and cashew. I think, I have put a bit more flour than the previous one, so the cookies are more sable (it means sandy). The ones on the picture have a very strict taste - not too sweet but odorous. They go nicely with coffee with spices.

Rich and odorous.. cake!

Cakes are right, cakes are always good and they make people feel better. This is a huge cake, it's a perfect one for the end of summer or beginning of autumn, and it feels like a Big Hug of a friend.

For this cake, you need a blender. I made it without one, and it was a bit of a torture. On the other hand, there is always a place for a deed in everyday life. So, the cake is full of fruits and nuts and it's very nutritious. I made it just with plums but the original receipt recommends to take 3-4 kinds of fruits (pears, apricots, plums, peaches, better - no apples), 2-3 of each. Cut fruits in big pieces. Warm up the oven to 180C.

Mix 200 g of margarine (or butter, if you prefer) with 1.5 cups of sugar and vanilla, cinnamon and muscat till you have a homogeneous mass. One by one, add 3 eggs. Don't add the next egg before the previous one is not united with the whole mass in the proud flight of the uniform happiness. Prepare 350 g of sifted flour with baking powder and a teaspoonful of salt and 250 ml of buttermilk (or 1 cup of milk with a tablespoonful of lemon juice). Add some flour to the dough and mix then add some buttermilk and mix, and so on till you finish all the flour and buttermilk. The dough should be homogeneous and quite liquid.

Put half of the dough in the form (make sure you've placed there the backing paper or applied some butter on it) and distribute all the fruits there. Put the rest of the dough on top and finish the composition with nuts. I used the mixture of walnuts, pecan, hazelnuts and cashew. Any of them would do. Put the cake in the oven at least for 50 min. After that, check if it's ready with a toothpick or a dry knife. When it comes out of the cake dry it means the cake is ready. It took me about 1.5 hours to bake it, so after 40 minutes I've covered the cake with foil in order not to let the nuts burn (also, it would be a good idea to remove the "peal" from hazelnuts).

Oatmeal porridge for real mammoths

The other day I had a weird dream. My grandmother told me that I had to teach Geography in my school for the 5-th grades. I learned this half of an hour prior to leaving home in order to be on time. Like a crazy I was thinking over the structure of a lesson - for some reason my initial idea was to start with not very straight-forward example of how Geography works (but something that would fascinate kids) - to discuss mammoths - where and how they are discovered, how they look, how they related to other species, etc. I have found some pictures as supplementary material and have realized that I was being late. I have arrived to the classroom (the one that looked quite like my Physics classroom) - there were no kids, just some teachers of mine and former classmates (oh, God, people of whose existence I have forgotten). Before I could pull myself together they forced me to start, I was trying to introduce myself but they were interrupting me all the time and were very unfriendly. After 2 minutes they have asked me to stop and take my place. I felt confused, humiliated and totally unprepared. Someone was showing a trial Math class with a pupil solving something at the blackboard. I have seen disappointment in my high-school Math teacher (towards me, as it always had been), so I felt like apologizing: "Sorry, I didn't know it was a trial session, I've just knew I have a lesson 1 hour ago". She looked surprised and  told that it would be fair to give me another chance. I couldn't recall the logical connection between mammoths and Geography, so I've started with asking the auditorium what they though Geography was. They were writing their answers on the chart and getting points for that - three points were equal to 1 excellent mark, three minus points for misbehavior and interruption - to 1 "fail" mark. Then I woke up and felt hungry like hell.

So, this half-failed mammoth intended but not realized lesson took so much energy that something large-scale had to be done. Imagine, cold autumn morning, urge to get/produce/share knowledge thrills inside and stomach is about to propose an ultimatum. Fast, infinitely warm, nutritious and healthy way to deal with it - a good old oatmeal porridge. Most of people use milk for this porridge and then hate it. Try both of ways and choose by yourself, but my way is "milk - no way!" Milk is for drinking it with cookies.

If you are very hungry take a cup and fill 3/4 of it with oatmeal (a full cup would do for 2 moderately hungry people), add 1 teaspoon of salt, sugar and some cinnamon. Turn on the heating plate (strong or medium power, depending on how much time you have and how fast you're ready to stir). Put the mixture to the pot, add some dried cranberries (matter of taste - apples, bananas, peaches, any dried fruits or pieces of chocolate will do) and half-cup of water. Stir in order not to let the whole thing to stick to the bottom. When you see steam rising add another half-cup of warm water (some people use milk at this stage), reduce the heat to the medium and continue stirring. When the porridge starts to form exploding bubbles it's ready. Best, if you can add a spoonful of butter, mix, close the pot and let it rest for some minutes (help yourself with coffee meanwhile). Personally I never have neither time nor patience or butter, so I eat the whole thing as soon as it's not burningly hot.

For aesthetic reasons I will not show you a picture of any porridge :)