This Sunday

Happy Birthday!

Post aus meiner Küche: What I got

Post aus meiner Küche

I love the new project "Post aus meiner Küche" and was so excited about it and not really sure what to make. Finally, I decided to make five different types of pralinés: dark chocolate walnut marzipan, milk chocolate hazelnut nougat, milk chocolate & cream truffels, dark chocolate cranberry cherry crunchies and (my favourite) milk chocolate pralinés with white chocolate & speculoos filling.

Speculoos cheesecake

I ate this delicious cheesecake in Antwerp which had a dough made of speculoos, so I tried to do one on my own that turned out to be really great. I used Pauls recipe for New York cheesecake as a basis and reduced it for a small baking tin with a diameter of 20 cm.

170 g speculoos
60 g butter (at room temperature)
95 g sugar
190 g quark
460 g cream cheese
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla sugar

1. Put the speculoos into a freezer bag or unused trash bag und crush them with a rolling pin into tiny pieces. Knead the speculoos with the butter until you have a smooth dough and roll it into the well-buttered baking tin.

2. Preheat the oven at 170 degrees and bake the dough for about 10 minutes. Let it cool down.

3. Cream sugar, vanilla sugar and eggs together. Then add the quark and the cream cheese.

4. Fill the cream into the baking tin and bake the cheese cake for about 40 minutes at 170 degrees.

5. Let it cool down and put in some hours in the fridge. It tastes best when cooled. 

Where is spring?

It seems so much like winter these days, though it is already Easter, there was even snow in some parts of the country. Unfortunately not where I live, because I am a big fan of snow and winter, but even I have to admit that it is time for spring now. And after a beautiful spring, summer and autumn my anticipation for winter will be even bigger. But today I will spend in bed reading and drinking hot chocolate. I bought this really delicious cocoa powder by Café Tasse in Belgium: Chocolate Caramel. Mmmhh!

Easter cookies

I have to admit that I am not such a fan of Easter. Christmas is MY season, which I am looking forward to the whole year long. But this year I'm in the mood for some bunny cookies.

For about 30 cookies: 

For the dough:                                 For the icing: 

2 eggs                                             200g icing sugar 

250g butter (at room temperature)   1 egg white 

150g sugar                                      1 tsp. fresh lemon juice 

1 tbsp. fresh lemon juice                   food colouring 

400g flour 

1/4 tsp. baking powder 

1.Separate the eggs. Cream the butter with the two egg yolks and the sugar. Add the fresh lemon juice.
2. Sift the flour and the baking powder onto the cream and knead them to a ball.
3. Keep the dough for about 30 minutes in the fridge.
4. Preheat the oven at 180 degrees.
5. Roll the dough (ca. 1cm thick) and cut out bunnies or whatever you like.
6. Bake for about 10-15 minutes.
7. After cooling down, prepare the icing with the ingredients mentioned above and decorate as you like.

Strawberry speculoos trifle

The time for strawberries is starting and I can never get enough of them. So today a (really fast) recipe with strawberries together with my other current obsession: speculoos!

For 4 glasses:
50g speculoos
120g mascarpone
150g quark
50g icing sugar
2 tsp. fresh lemon juice
250g strawberries

1. Crumble the speculoos.

2. Mix the mascarpone with the quark, the icing sugar and the fresh lemon juice.

3. Cut strawberries into small pieces.

4. Layer speculoos crumble, cream and strawberries. End with a layer of cream and decorate with some speculoos crumble and a strawberry.

Mhhmmm...!!!