Busy family life

My, my!!! Quite some time has passed since I last wrote here...have been busy working and making kids. Ha ha haa...well, we do have two kids now. Our son was born this autumn. Mainly due to me being a full time working Mama, I have been ignoring this blog for ages. Now I still have a bit over one month of maternity leave left, so I thought I could try to update this blog a bit. 

It's not that I wouldn't be doing things. I'm cooking pretty much everyday and I'm also baking every now and then, specially since my maternity leave started, but I have less time for taking photos and writing things up. Often I have had this blog in my mind and I have even put some recipes to the side with a plan to publish them one day but somehow I never come to it.

I was going through my photo archives and trying to find some photos for the recipes and found some from my daughters birthday. So here are couple of pictures from last summer.

What happened? When did my small Mausi get so big?

Birthday cake for my little two year old. An apricot mousse cake with some sugar fondant decoration. The summer day was so hot that I didn't want to coat the whole cake but keep it fresh instead.

Cookies for the birthday

Animal cookies

200 g butter

2 dl sugar

2 eggs

Zest of one orange + dash of orange juice

4,5 dl all-purpose flour

1,5 dl whole-grain flour

1 tbsp vanilla sugar

1/2 tsp sodium

1/2 tsp baking powder

Cream butter and sugar.

Add eggs while mixing quickly.

Mix the dry ingredients and orange zest together.

Add them to the butter mixture.

Add the orange juice.

Take care not to knead the dough.

Place the dough into a fridge for at least 1 hour.

When the dough had hardened you can roll it and cut our different shape animals with cutters. Bake at 200 C for about 7 min.

 

 

Small tartlettes with creme patissiere and lemon curd

Decorated with flowers from our garden

The original recipe for the hedgehog cookies I found somewhere in Internet but unfortunately I don't remember anymore where. All I know is that I did some changes to the recipe to suit better for my purpose. Here is my version:

Hedgehog cookies

75 g butter

35 g confectioners' sugar

1 tsp vanilla sugar

85 g all-purpose flour

85 g ground nuts (I used almonds) 

Chocolate for decoration

Sprinkles for decoration

Cream butter and sugars.

Mix the ground nuts and flour together.

Combine everything and mix quick. 
Form the hedgehogs and bake at 170 C for about 10 min.

Hedgehogs in the oven

Ready to be finished...

I think they turned out pretty nice