Have a nice halloween, little cookie monsters!

Halloween is coming! Monsters and boogie men, skeletons and fairies.. witches and broomsticks, pumpkins and carvings..
Are you getting ready?????

Ready to get dirty? The perfect recipe for a muddy chocolate experience.

We all love chocolate. I refuse to believe otherwise.
Maybe some of us like dark bitter chocolate. Maybe others prefer a lighter milky sweetness. Maybe you are the white type of chocolate person. And maybe you like it nutty.
Regardless your particular preference I would like to assume you like chocolate.
And if you indeed like chocolate.. you got to like chocolate mud cakes.

I have been looking for ages for the perfect chocolate mud cake. Sweet and at the same time bitter, moist but not wet.
I knew exactly the right shade of chocolate color and the texture but somehow it was always quite not right!

But after about a year experimenting with TS Table Spoons.. I came across a Eureka moment.
I guess I had given up on the thought of actually perfecting the chocolate mud cake recipe of my grandmother.
Sometimes, with the passing of time, we tend to forget details of things. A mere generalization of feeling, aromas and colors is whats left behind and the rest of the story tends to be filled up by a very conscious consciousness.
That is the reason I decided to abandon the effort and merely accept faith and just mix the written analogies in order to achieve the mediocre certainty of a nice chocolate mud cake.
Yet, as i tripped over, fate had it, my flour bowl turned and a few of its precious powder content flew up in the air.
To make along story short, I ended up with about 2TS less flour… which brought me to the most delicious chocolate cake recipe!

What you need is 125gr. dark chocolate, 125 gr milk chocolate, 250 gr butter, 4 Leggs, 550 gr caster sugar, 325 gr self raising flour, 1 ts instant coffee, 188 ml water, 30 gr cocoa, 1 TS orange liquer, 1 ts vanilla extract, 125 ml buttermilk (or yogurt!)
You can start by mixing chocolate, butter, coffee, water over low heat mixing regularly.
In another bowl, mix flour, cocoa, sugar.
Then mix the flour mixture to the chocolate mixture. Add eggs, the vanilla and the yogurt.
Give it a good stir and bake for about 1 h. at 180o C or until the knife come out clean depending on your oven.

Potato make-over + 5 fun facts about potatoes..I bet you didnt know!

If I ask you what you ate yesterday, there is a 67% chance you will answer potatoes! It could be that you had a delicious baked potatoes with sausage or just chicken nuggets and fries, perhaps mashed potatoes and lambchops or was it salmon and boiled potatoes?

Potatoes are the second most consumed food in the Western world, tailing diary products.
They consist of about 80% water and only 20% solid mater. Their solid mater is mostly starch with a few proteins.
Not bad right? What is more, potatoes are quite rich in vitamins (niacin, riboflavin, thiamin, vitamin C) and minerals (calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, sulfur).
No wonder potatoes make a hearty, solid meal satisfying our taste buds while providing our organism with necessary fuel for the coming winter!

Boiled, baked, fried, mashed..potatos can be prepared in a variety of ways. Yet, as they are the most popular sidedish to accompany our daily meals, I was running out of options and that is when I decided it was time for a makeover! Low in calories yet high in style, my potato make over suggests a fried treat with as many calories as its boiled equivalent! Who said potatoes cant be sexy?

Did you know?

You could use potatoes in a lot of ways, besides eating them!
Potatoes contain a chemical called catecholase. Catecholase has the property of breaking down dyes. Next time you find yourself troubled by a stain on your clothes after dinner, cut half of a potatoe and use that to remove the stain.
And while you are at it, why not use the other half to polish your leather shoes?

Infographic Style Cookies for Movember’s Cancer Awareness Fundraising.

So, if you have been wondering about my previous post and why I chose to feature that in a culinary blog, I m ready to explain!

You see, in reality I have been working on designing cookies for Movember.

Movember is an initiative (http://nl.movember.com/ ) that helps raise awareness for cancer in men using a strong visual sign of “manhood”..that of a moustache. (Yes.. we are talking about moustaches here ladies!)

So, being a girl myself..and not really knowing anyone with a moustache I had a whole lot of research to do…

There are many, many types of moustaches out there. Some elegant and some barbaric, some very fine and others quite bushy.. I have been checking infographic representations of moustaches for a week now trying to decide upon a form that i would like to use for Movember.
Late last night, I concluded on these following shapes which I lasercut and used to create my moustache cookies!

The dough is made with organic ingredients and flavored with deep vanilla scent and the sugar glaze is fine and delicate with a coffee aroma.

If you would like to say hi, taste some cookies, get a nice moustache trim and support Movember,
feel free to drop by the Movember shop, located in Magna Plaza Shopping Center in Amsterdam.
I will be there every Sunday noon with fresh cookies and surprises for adults, children and..pets!

Have a nice week!

Have a nice week!

Top 10 fun facts about coffee!

I have been baking coffee flavored cupcakes all morning without realising that today, 29 of September is actually Coffee Day! This may come too late, but dont worry.. in Japan coffee day is yet to come

And what a better way to celebrate than by munching on some soft vanilla cupcakes tinted with a luscious, aromatic, buttercream frosting made with freshly ground coffee beans.

And since we are at it, my ultimate favorite top 10 with all the things, we need to know about coffee.

1. Coffee is…consumed at the rate of 1400 million cups per day!!!
Fact which makes me wonder if homo sapiens actually runs on coffee as a specie…

2. Coffee is the most popular drink after water.
Fact which verifies the hypothesis that perhaps humans do run on coffee!?!

3. Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world today!
With the first one being..oil.

4. Coffee was imported to Europe first by the Dutch!(YAY!) who actually (HMM?) eventually smuggled coffee seeds to Europe, defying the Arab Prohibition around 1690! Other sources claim it was Indians who smuggled it out towards the East but of course we can not be sure.

5. Coffee beans are seeds, found inside brightly red colored berries!
The berries are handpicked and the skin of them is removed usually by a machine. After this, a fermentation process takes place and allows the green coffee bean to be roasted to what we know as dark brown coffee bean!

6. Coffee develops its particular aroma at the exact 10th minute of roasting!

7. Coffee has more than 800 different aromatic compands, as scientist discovered.

8. While one can find many aromas in coffee beans, there are only two species of coffee beans: Arabica and Robusta. 70% of us consumes Arabica coffee which is mild and aromatic, while the other 30% opt for Robusta which may be more bitter but contains twice as much caffeine..

9. It takes 40 coffee beans for your daily espresso cup..

10. Since, one coffee tree yields less than half a kilo of coffee per year I would suggest we ease up on coffee.. Unless we make sure its fair trade?

and last but not least, if you are curious like me, the name “coffee” has a disputable “provenance”. Yet, even though we cant be sure, these are the most popular beliefs of the origin of the name of the most popular drink man ever created!

-Kaffa? A province in Ethiopia where it was first discovered.
-Kaaba? The holy building in Mecca.
-Kavus Kai? A Persian king who was able to defy gravity and levitate by drinking coffee.
-Kahwe? Meaning roasted in Turkish.
-Cahouah? A hunger curing drink in Arabic.
-Cohuet? Meaning strength or vigour in Arabic.

Mmm..I dont know about you..but I would like to have yet another coffee cupcake..or perhaps a nice cup of coffee? Inhaling its aroma, tasting its dark and full bodied flavor.. What a delight!
Enjoy your coffee everyone and see you soon!

Let’s talk about addictions..

Let’s be honest. Most of us have some sort of addiction.

Whether its shopping, smoking, drinking coffee, there is always a little dark secret.

My mister is addicted to coffee. We are not talking about one cup a day… we are talking about multiple cups.. a few on the breakfast table, a few during lunchbreak and occasionally a cup or two in the evening.
Yet, mister also enjoys chocolate. Usually with his evening coffee. Its a little ritual for him.
A cup of freshly brewed coffee with a chunk of sweet organic chocolate…

So, i decided to give him some help towards the coffee detoxe.. (which he still aint aware he is going to go through)
My idea is to substitute a few coffee cups a day with delicious vegeterian chocolate cupcakestopped with coffee “buttercream”..

A cup of coffee for the morning? Or maybe a cup of coffee cake?

Can you resist?

A day near the water.

Days of Autumn come and go. The sun seems to have lost its warmth and yet keeps on playing hide and seek with my soul, poking in and out of sight.

Yesterday was a sunny day. We put the bikes in the car and drove to the dunes.

Riding the bikes on the dunes somehow has a magically calming effect. The flora and fauna seem to have taken control of the landscape forcing it to entropy.
You might think, so what? Entropy is the rule of the universe. And you may be right.
Yet, this is a rare phenomenon in a country like the Netherlands where man has been fighting nature for centuries, trying to create dry land from the seabed. The sand of the dunes forced in place once serves to protect the recuperated land from the claims of the sea waters.
And it is on this piece of land, that birds find dwelling, swans bat their wings and plants find a way to grow and thrive.. An ecosystem evolves and dazzles with its complexity and its indifference to the man made expectation and claims.

In a way, it is ironic. In another way it is mystical. Nature finds a way.

So, we went biking. And biking. Stopping now and then to observe the landscape. By the mid afternoon, we reached the beach. There was barely any wind and everything seemed extremely peaceful. Not many people either. Just a few seagulls.
We had cookies and tea and stayed there until sundawn.

No cooking for today:)

Mint + Cocoa

Chocolate souffle baked in a mini cupcake pan and decorated with a mint flavored sugar topper!

Dark luscious running chocolate and a fresh crispy sugar to conclude a gorgeous meal, or perhaps to accompany a cup of afternoon mint tea?

And since I chose for mint cupcake wrappers, I went for mint colored, mint flavored sugary tops…

Have a nice week everyone!

Refined Mushroom Risotto with a glass of white wine.

Mister is gone again for work..
At first, I always get excited to be left alone.. I play records, swirl around the floor barefeet and dance on my favourite songs, I go through my diaries, I read a book..
But today, there is nothing on tv, my murakami book is long finished and the vinyls just lay there with a thin layer of dust..
The house is quite and still..Yet the clock ticks and ticks..
Around seven, our regular dinner time I find myself ready to act upon the stillness..
I haven’t prepared anything considering I would be dining alone but I have an urge to gloriously enjoy my night..
A bath, a glass of wine and a light risotto with herbs and grilled mushrooms, sprinkled with freshly grated parmesan cheese..

Maybe its time to order a new book.. Any suggestions for a good midweek reading?

Did you know?
France was the leader in the formal cultivation of mushrooms in Europe. Some accounts say that Louis XIV was the first mushroom grower. He registered different caves near Paris and set them aside for a unique form of agriculture: the mushroom cultivation!
Shortly after, intrigued by how easy and economical the cultivation of mushrooms was, English gardeners took the idea of mushroom cultivation and introduced it to the UK.