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

Lavendel biscuits

Lavendel biscuits

Couple of months ago, when I had my birthday, my neighbours gave me some self dried and wrapped lavendel as a present. Since the it has been sitting in our kitchen corner and trying to tell me I should use it for something. Well, I decided finally to "roll my sleeves up" and do something with that lavendel. I found a nice and easy sounding recipe in Internet on site Ichkoche. After small changes I was ready to try it and it worked out great. Even Hubby who normally doesn't care for lavendel though that the biscuits were good. So guess what I'll give for my neighbour as a christmas present :D

A beautifully packed present I got from my neighbour

Lavendel biscuits

250 g wheat flour

130 g butter

1 egg

 130 g sugar

2 tbs (about 2 g) dried lavendel

pinch of salt

for the top

egg wash

dried lavendel

decorating sugar 

1. Rub the cold, cubed butter togeter with the flour

and throw in the salt.

2. Place the sugar and the lavendel in the mixer and let run

for couple of minutes until the flowers and sugar

are some what fine.

3. Foam the lavendel sugar with the egg

4. Add the egg foam to the flour mixture

and mix into a dough

5. Let the dough rest in the fridge for about one hour.

6. Roll out the dough and cut out the desired biscuits

7. Brush with the egg wash and sprinke with lavendel

and decorating sugar

8. Bake for about 5 minutes in 200 Celsius.

Biscuits in the oven

Enjoy!

A late afternoon stroll with the Cutie

Christmas magic in Zürich

Zürich is a lovely christmas destination. I have been there twice inside couple of days. First with Hubby and Cutie and two days later with Cutie, my sister and her friend. My sister was visiting us for one week. During that time she also drove to München for a few days and visited the Christkindlmarkt there. She actually thinks that the christmas makets in Zürich were more enjoyable. I wouldn't know because I have never been to München in christmas time.

We have a tradition that every year shortly before christmas we visit Zürich to enjoy the nice atmosphere. Before we used to go to the moves and have dinner afterwards. All the moves playing in the cinemas close to us were dubbed so the only change to watch any with an original audio was (and probably still is) is to go to Zürich. Last year we even stayed over night. Now, with the Cutie, the movies are obviously out of the question and so are fancy dinners as well. Well, it doesn't matter because we just enjoy the walk around the town, the lovely christmas lights and great foor at the christmas market on the Sechseläutenplatz: Wienachtsdorf. We were there already last year and this year it was even better. There are loads of food in offer like Flammlachs, curries, fancy burgers, peruvian food etc. This is the place to go for a foodie. Here are some pictures to inspire you to visit Zürich.

On the Bahnhofbrücke

Hirschenplatz

Hotel Storchen in the front and the tower of St. Peter behind it.

Grossmünster

Ice rink on the Sechseläutenplatz

Bellevue and the christmas market on the Sechseläutenplatz

Christmas lights on the Bahnhofstrasse

Paradeplatz

An animation film being projected to the wall of the UBS building.

Christmas market in the main train station

Christmas market on the main train station

Paradeplatz in the day light

Bahnhofstrasse

Bürkliterrasse

Quaibrücke

Christmas market on the Sechseläutenplatz

In front of the ice rink

A merry-go-round on the Sechseläutenplatz

Christmas market on the Sechseläutenplatz

Peruvian food in the christmas market

The menu

Lomo saltado

Indian food in the christmas market

One of the many christmas trees in Zürich

Lake Zürich

River Limmat and Grossmünster

Busy with Cutie

Such small hands

We have had some interesting times at home so the blog has been pretty much neglected. First I was put on a sick leave because our Cutie wanted to arrive too early. For about five weeks I wasn't allowed to do anything and that almost drove me mad! Well she did decided to take a head start and arrived four weeks too early. Despite the problems I had had she did take us by surprise. My mom had been visiting us for a couple of days and two hours after I had taken her to the station, so that she could head back to Finland, I was in a hospital and being told that the baby is on its way....only hours earlier I had been wondering how should I make it through the last four weeks :D Everything went well. She was so tiny but beautiful and healthy.

As you can imagine, this has all been very exciting but at the same time tireing, fantastic, surprising, cool, new and pretty much everying possible for us. She is our first baby and after being eleven years together, just two of us and the cats, we are suddenly three. That is something!...

She was a skimpy one, as you can see, but now already double the birth size.

Somebody had taken over the pram.

This way they can both fit in :D

Slowly we have gotten to know each other and the days have started to have some routine. I have been baking and cooking all kinds of things but the photos are missing. I guess we are being to busy on taking photos of her from all the different angles :D

All I can say is:  thank god for the Ergobaby and the baby sling! Without them I would not be able to do anything. Some time ago we celebrated my 30th birthday. We decided to organise a party. It was both a birthday party for me but also welcoming party for Cutie. I did most of the things myself. We had cassis-chocolatemousse cake, reindeer tartles, tomatomousse tartlets, cloudberry cookies, orange-cocos chocolates, Baileys chocolates....etc. just to mention some of the things. So it was a lot to organise/bake/do but most of the time Cutie was taking it easy in her baby sing while mommy was getting her hands dirty. I did so much nice things but all the food photos are missing, unfortunately.

But I do have couple of photos of the chocolate cake I did for my sisters and of the Sunday Zopf I did when my parents-in-law where here. So here you go:

Pimped Sunday Zopf

With oats, flax seeds and poppy seeds.

I think it looks nice with the black seeds.

This is how you do it with a baby: the small one in the baby sling while mommy is making some chocolates.

A chcolate cake for my sweet grazy sisters who came from Finland to visit us

The flowers are from my our garden.

I made the base with a Sacher recipe which I got from Peter. It has almond flour in it and that makes the cake very moist.