Vanilla Almond Pancakes

As far as pancakes are concerned, I used to have a strategy: whenever I was craving for them, I would send my little sister to ask our Dad to bake some - and he would never refuse. Had I asked directly, the answer would have been no, most of the time. (My sister was really thin as a kid, so I guess my parents were just over happy that she would spontaneously want to eat something...)

For about three years now, I've tried a new dairy-and-egg-free pancake recipe every now and then, and failed miserably every single time. They'd be sticky, impossible to fry; they'd taste like soy or some other unpleasant ingredient; their consistency would be like rubber; well, you get the picture.

Until Santa brought me a new vegan cookbook, the Vegan Love Story. A very recommendable book indeed! It features a pancake recipe that immediately caught my attention: no dairy-free-milks nor egg-substitutes needed, just basically water and flour. Simple and ingenious! I substituted part of the flour by almond flour, and the result was the best-ever vegan pancakes that even my son adored.

To make enough pancakes for 1 hungry or 2 moderately hungry breakfast eaters:

• 50g almond meal


• 125g flour


• 2 tsp sugar


• 8g vanilla sugar


• a pinch of salt


• 3/4 tsp baking powder


• 150ml water


• 1 Tbsp sunflower oil, plus some more for the frying

Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl. Add water and oil and beat energetically until you have a smooth batter. Let the batter stand for about 10 minutes - just enough time to make some coffee ;)

Fry your pancakes over a medium heat until both sides are golden brown. Make sure that they are well cooked from the inside as well - if not, reduce the heat.

Serve with your favourite accompaniment - I opened a jar of home-made wild raspberry jam for the occasion!

P.S. Who would invent a method to make even the first pancake turn out perfect?! Mine didn't, as you can see from the pic... it never does...

Day 16: Zedernbrot, or a Happy Marriage Between Lemon and Almond

The first time I tasted these very lemony, very almond-y Christmas cookies was at a friend's place. They were made by her mother-in-law, and the recipe was top-secret. I managed to convince my friend to convince her mother-in-law to give me the recipe, and the plan worked!

But here's the thing - I lost the paper on which the recipe was written.

The other recipes I've found give a good result as well - like this one I posted last year. This year, I used 100g roasted ground almonds and 100g plain ground almonds (last year only roasted almonds because that was the only organic variety I could find). I also reduced the amount of lemon juice, because last year the dough was a bit too liquid.

And I decorated my Zedernbrot cookies with some finely chopped candied lemon peel!

 

Day 14: Orange Cookies with Almond and Rosemary

Ever heard of the Flavour Thesaurus? If not, do take a look at it! It's a great source of inspiration, suggesting which flavours pair well one with another. And it's an entertaining read, too!

So I had already decided to adjust my Rum Raisin Cookie recipe and to use homemade candied orange peel instead of raisins, and I was exploring the different options of other ingredients to go with. Rosemary seemed a good candidate, due to its fresh taste and the small surprise effect it would create.

And it sure was a good choice! This recipe will yield about 25 incredibly tasty cookies!

What you need:

• 100g homemade candied orange peel, cut in small cubes


• 50ml Cointreau (the alcohol will disappear during the cooking, but if you want, replace with orange juice)


• 1 Tbsp orange syrup (from the candied peel)


• 3 twigs of fresh rosemary


• 100g butter, softened


• 50g sugar


• 1 egg


• a few drops of vanilla extract


• 50g ground almonds


• 200g all-purpose flour


• 1/2 tsp baking powder


• (a pinch of salt, if you're using unsalted butter)


• plus some confectioner's sugar

Preheat the oven to 175C. Combine the candied orange peel, Cointreau, orange syrup, and two of the rosemary twigs in a small saucepan. Bring to the boil, remove from the heat, and cover until the rest of the dough is done.

Beat the softened butter and the sugar in a baking bowl until white and fluffy. Add the egg and the vanilla extract, stir well, then add the almonds and the flour in which you've mixed the baking powder (and the salt, if using). Add the orange peel mixture (remember to remove the rosemary twigs!) and stir until well combined. The batter should be soft but not too liquid - add more flour if needed.

Use a teaspoon to place small heaps of batter on a baking tray covered with a parchment paper. Leave some space between the cookies as they spread a bit in the oven. Now you need the third twig: hide one rosemary leaf in each cookie! Bake them until golden brown, or about 15 minutes.

Sprinkle with confectioner's sugar and serve immediately - or hide well ;)

 

Day 8: Little Josephines

Last weekend I baked two Chocolate Mousse Cakes, so I had a lot of egg yolks that I had to use as soon as possible. Luckily I didn't have to wait long to get an inspiration.

In the morning I was reading one of my favourite baking books Underbart är gott, and happened to see an interesting recipe that only required four ingredients: egg yolks, butter, marzipan, and almond flakes. That sounded so crazy I just had to try these little cakes called Josephines. I was almost sure this could only result in a disaster - I mean, what kind of a batter would you get using only those ingredients?!

But weirdly enough, the batter was smooth and the Josephines themselves.. well.. I feel like repeating myself, but they are like almonds gone to heaven!

I don't think they will keep well, though; they are very moist - maybe in the fridge they'd keep up to a week or so, but I think I'll make a second batch just before Christmas and serve these first ones asap ;)

For 10 small-cupcake-sized Josephines you need:

• 300g marzipan


• 170g butter


• 90g egg yolks


• about 10g almond flakes


• plus some extra butter for the forms

This is how you make them:

Grate the marzipan into a baking bowl. Add softened butter and stir until well combined. Then add egg yolks and stir again until smooth. Prepare the cupcake forms: I suggest you use silicon ones - I tried in both silicon and aluminum ones, but although I had buttered the aluminum forms really well, the Josephines wouldn't come out of them well. Place some almond flakes into each form, then fill with batter and bake in a preheated oven (150-170C) about 15 minutes or until well set.

Let the Josephines cool before taking them out of the forms.

Serve immediately!

P.S. I have no idea where the Swedish name Josefiner comes from: a quick Google search in English and French didn't result in any similar recipes... so I'll call them Josephines until I find out what they really are called in English :)

 

Day 7: Greek Almond Stars

This is a recipe I’ve wanted to try for a long time, and I’m glad I finally did! These almond stars, flavoured with brandy and vanilla, are among the prettiest cookies I’ve ever baked! They are very tasty and easy to make.

The original recipe is from Rena Salaman’s The Greek Cook. I had to change the measures a bit - especially the amounts of sugar and flour. Here’s my version:

For the dough you need

• 225g butter


• 125g sugar


• 8g vanilla sugar


• 2 egg yolks


• 3 Tbsp brandy


• 1/2 tsp baking soda


• 160g ground almonds


• 350g all-purposed flour


• a pinch of salt (only if using unsalted butter)


• plus about 100g confectioner’s sugar for dusting.

Set the oven to 175C. Combine softened butter, vanilla sugar, and sugar in a baking bowl. Stir with a wooden spoon or spatula until creamy and white, then add the egg yolks and stir until well combined. Add the brandy in which you have dissolved the baking soda. Lastly, add almonds and flour and work the dough with your hands until you can form it into a ball.

Roll the dough about 1cm thick (the original recipe suggested 2,5cm but for me it was just too much and my cookie cutter is only a bit less than 2cm deep…). Use a cookie cutter to cut small stars. Bake the cookies until they almost start to get some colour - be careful, they burn very easily!

Once out of the oven, sprinkle some confectioner’s sugar on top. Take a big plate and sprinkle its surface with confectioner’s sugar, too. Let the cookies cool a few minutes, then transfer them on the plate and dust them with more confectioner’s sugar so that they are totally white.

Serve your stars with a cup of strong coffee!

Zedernbrot - Almond Cookies with Lemon Icing

These cookies with a very misleading name might just have reached my top 3 of best Christmas cookies ever! The name is deceiving, since Zeder is actually German for cedar, yet (luckily!) the cookies have no cedar in them. Instead, Zeder refers to Italian, where cedro stands for citron (citrus medica) - and yes, there’s a lot of lemon in Zedernbrot!

Zedernbrot cookies are very easy to do, they are not too sweet, and they combine two of my favourite flavours - almond and lemon. Besides, the consistency is very pleasant - like chewy marshmallow. (If you do it right, that is. I forgot to check on my second batch and it stayed too long in the oven - and they got too dry..)

For about 30 small rectangular cookies you need:

• 1 egg white


• 125g powder sugar


• a pinch of salt


• 200g ground almonds


• zest of 1 lemon


• 3 tsp lemon juice


• a bit of flour for rolling the dough out

For the icing:

• 100g powder sugar


• lemon juice

Beat the egg white with a pinch of salt until soft peaks form. Add sugar and continue beating until glossy and firm. Add lemon zest, lemon juice, and almonds, and stir with a wooden spoon until all ingredients are well combined.  Place the dough in the fridge for one hour or so.

Roll the dough out about 1cm thick. Originally, these cookies are cut out with a moon-shaped cookie cutter, but I couldn’t find mine, so for my first batch I used a rectangular cutter. The dough is sticky and quite tricky to cut, so for the second batch I rolled the dough out into a square and used a sharp knife to cut out small rectangles.

Dry your Zedernbrot in a preheated oven (150 C) for about 20 minutes, or until their surface isn’t sticky to touch anymore. While the cookies are in the oven, you can prepare the icing: add as much lemon juice in the powder sugar as you need in order to get a mixture that is easy to stir with a spoon. Let the cookies cool a bit, then spread some icing on top of each, using a small spoon. I wanted mine extra lemony, so I squeezed a couple of lemon juice drops on each cookie before spreading the icing. Let the cookies dry, then store them.

P.S. So, two more days to go! If I don’t change my mind in the last minute, there’s going to be still something fruity and something chocolatey on the list ;)

Coconut Balls with Almonds and White Chocolate

My advice is - do NOT try out this recipe. I did, and there’s no turning back. These crunchy almond coconut cookies dipped in white chocolate and rolled in coconut flakes are highly addictive.

The recipe is from a small booked called Weinachtsplätzchen, and had to be somewhat modified - I had to add a bit of water in the dough, and the amount of white chocolate (100g) just wasn’t enough. That’s why half of my cookies are covered with dark chocolate (which didn’t work as well as white chocolate, though). You can also leave the coating out - the cookies taste great even without it.

For some 35 cookies you need:

• 300g all-purpose flour


• 100g ground almonds


• 100g desiccated coconut


• a pinch of salt


• 100g sugar


• 250g butter or vegan margarine


• about 50ml water

For the coating:

• 200g (vegan) white chocolate


• 100g desiccated coconut

In a baking bowl, combine together flour, almonds, coconut, salt, and sugar. Add butter or margarine in small cubes and work with your fingertips until fine and crumbly. Add enough water so that you can form the dough into a ball.

Divide the dough into about 35 pieces. Roll each piece into a small ball. Bake in a preheated oven (180 C) about 15-20 minutes, or until cooked but not brown yet. (Lower the temperature if needed.)

Once the cookies are baked and cooled a bit, melt the white chocolate - add some (vegan) cream if needed. I’m too lazy to use a bain-marie, so I melted mine in a pan - it worked, too, but I needed to add a bit of milk. Drop a couple of cookies at a time into the chocolate, take out with a spoon and roll in the desiccated coconut. Let dry on a plate and transfer into an air-tight container.

I’m going to bake a second portion of these cookies and coat them only just before Christmas. My guess is, even well-hidden, they won’t keep as well as other Plätzchen types.

Spitzbuben

“Quite good, but not as good as the ones my mother-in-law bakes”, was the honest judgment of a friend of mine when she tasted my Spitzbuben (= rascals), these little sandwich cookies that are amongst the most popular Christmas cookies in Germany. And she was right. The recipe I found in Feinste Weinachtsbäckerei results in very decent Spitzbuben - but not the best I've eaten.

While I’m waiting for my friend to convince her mother-in-law to reveal her secret recipe, I’ll share this one with you. Spitzbuben are not difficult to make, but you need to count with at least 2 hours to get 40 cookies. I was lucky today to have some baking company, so it went faster - and was a lot more fun!

For 40 or so you need

• 125 g butter or margarine


• 100g sugar


• 8g vanilla sugar


• 1 pinch of salt


• 1 Tbsp rum


• 1 egg


• 60g ground almonds


• 250g all-purpose flour


• plus some jam (raspberry, apricot..) and powder sugar to decorate

Beat butter, vanilla sugar, and sugar together until pale yellow and fluffy, then add the egg and rum and mix well. In a bowl, combine almonds, flour, and salt together, and pour the mixture on the butter mixture. Use your hands to combine all ingredients well together. Form the dough into a ball and place in the fridge for an hour or so (or even overnight).

Roll the dough out about 0,5 cm thin. Cut out stars (or circles) with a cookie cutter. In half of the cookies, make a hole in the middle (I used an apple corer). Bake your cookies in a preheated oven (180 C) for about 10 minutes, or until cooked but not brown yet. Set aside to cool and bake the rest of the cookies.

Spread about ½ espresso spoon of jam on top of each hole-less cookie and place a cut-out cookie on top. Place on a plate. When all your sandwich cookies are done, sprinkle some (vanilla-flavoured) powder sugar on top.

Biscotti di Nonna

These are the best cookies ever. And I’m not exaggerating. Even the dough is addictive! I got the recipe from a cousin of mine about four years ago, and have been baking them ever since. (Originally the recipe is from the Gourmet Magazine.) I bake them all year round. But during the Christmas time they are very practical: even one single portion yields about 50 (more if you make them Plätzchen-sized - very small, that is) - just pack a dozen or two in a nice tin box and you have a perfect gift.

As the name suggest, these cookies are baked twice (biscoctus - baked twice): first you make long loaves, bake them, cut them into slices, and bake once more.

Biscotti are said to keep for centuries (!) so I guess it’s safe to assume they’ll make it until the 24th - if you manage to hide them well, that is.

For about 50 biscotti you’ll need

• 200g almonds, toasted and roughly chopped


• 1 cup sugar (or 215g)


• 2 ¾ cups flour (or 375g, using spelt flour type 630)


• 1,5 tsp baking powder


• 1 pinch of salt


• 8g vanilla sugar


• 3 eggs


• 115g melted butter or margarine


• 50ml Cointreau or other liquor of your liking

Place all dry ingredients in a baking bowl. Then add butter, liquor, and the eggs, and with a wooden spoon, work the dough until the ingredients are well combined. Place the bowl in the fridge (or on a cold balcony, if you have one) and let stand 30 minutes. In the meantime, preheat your oven to 200C. Then form two long loaves, using WET hands, and bake until golden brown, about 20-25 minutes. Let cool and cut into slices, a bit less than 1 cm thick. Place the slices on an oven pan and bake again until your biscotti are evenly cooked, about 10-15 minutes. Be careful, this time they burn easily!

Biscotti taste wonderful with coffee at any time of the day, or with a strong wine like Port or Marsala. Store in an airtight container.

Sweet Italian Fruit Bread

When I was on my first Inter-rail in Christmas holidays back in 1996, I travelled light, only with a 30 liter backpack or so. (Ok, most of my stuff didn’t fit in, but luckily my bf had a slightly bigger bag that could fit in the rest! How convenient.. ) So, it was quite impossible to do any kind of shopping, there just wasn’t any room left for any new treasures - except for a huge Panettone, which I hung to my backpack. It must’ve looked quite funny, the Panettone being almost the size of my bag..!

So you get the picture - I kind of like Panettone. The disadvantage is that you only get it around Christmas time - which, luckily! extends nowadays from early October until the end of January, at least. And the other downside is that it’s very difficult to bake at home. The owners of a local Italian restaurant told me they’d never even want to try such an impossible thing themselves. All the recipes I’ve seen are so complex and time-consuming I’ve decided to give them a try in some quite distant future.

Last time I was in Italy I happened to buy a book called Croissant e biscotti, written by an Italian baking celebrity Luca Montersino. I found an interesting recipe for a sourdough-based chocolate and nut bread that, unfortunately, didn’t work at all (by all means, do try it - the picture looks great!) - but that gave me an idea: why not try the same method, only replacing chocolate and nuts with sultanas, candied lemon and oranges, almonds, lemon zest, and vanilla? After a partial disaster, the second loaf turned out perfect! It would be pretentious to call the result Panettone, so I call it Sweet Italian Fruit Bread instead - until I coin a better name for it. (Suggestions are welcome!)

So here’s how you proceed to get a loaf of it:

Beat together 3 eggs and 130g sugar until fluffy, then add 250g sourdough starter and wheat flour each, 6g salt, 5g fresh yeast, zest of 1/2 lemon, 2 tsp vanilla sugar, 100g candied orange, candied lemon, sultanas, and chopped almonds each, and combine well together. Then add 125g melted butter, stir well, and let ferment for some 8-10 hours in a warm place (25-30 degrees). Transfer into a proofing basket, let ferment another hour or two. Bake in 225 degrees for 10 minutes or so, lower the temperature to 190 degrees, and bake until well done, about 45 minutes. Let it cool on a rack and decorate with some confectioners’ sugar.

This bread is great for Italian-style sweet breakfast - any time of the year! Hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do...