cimorene

*My wife is not really a dessert chef, it's just her hobby. She likes to watch French dessert chefs on YouTube.

For years one of our most frequently patronized restaurants was a Finnish chain of French provincial cuisine called Fransmanni and we got this cake every time we ate there. It's a miniature chocolate cake, approximately ramekin-sized, that would come upside down on the plate with a little scoop of vanilla icecream, and while the outside was cakey the inside was still liquid.

I was lying around yesterday, suffering through period cramps after taking my painkillers, and lamenting that I didn't buy any more peanut m&m's so I didn't have emergency chocolate, and saying for the millionth time that I wished I could have the miniature chocolate cake from Fransmanni, and it might not even be too hard to make, but I didn't even know what it was called... only then

waxjism said she thought it was called gateau fondant.

Actually it turns out that it might not be called that because apparently people use this term for miniature cakes that are not liquid in the center? But people still call it that enough to bring the information up with those search terms. The Wikipedia entry about it in English is called "Molten chocolate cake" and gives the same origin stories as the French recipe blog we used, and here's what she said about it:

[C]hocolate fondant (or should I say molten cake? lava cake?) is really something the French bake very often at home and that became a great classic of French restaurants, form small bistrots to more fancy restaurants. It’s super quick and easy, only 5 ingredients.

Molten Chocolate Fondant - Zest of France

I got out the ingredients in a spurt of enthusiasm, but then

waxjism jumped up and took over with her dessert chef skills! We only realized after the batter was done that it was a lot of batter and we don't have ramekins. Muffin tray was the only option, and there was some concern that it might not all fit in one mufffin tray, but it did: it made eleven muffin-size cakes out of a tray of twelve.

Then the muffin tray went in the fridge and we confronted the fact that we have only ever eaten one of these cakes at a time before (albeit slightly larger ones than the ones produced by the muffin tray), and that they are meant to be eaten straight out of the oven. They are so tiny that they bake in about ten minutes though, so

waxjism came up with sliding the filled muffin cups on little bits of cardboard into small ziploc bags and freezing them. So we ate two each yesterday and baked two more today.

I had to take pictures even though they look almost comically unprepossessing. We were not inclined to break out fresh berries or whipped cream to plate it with though, so it is what it is. Trust me, it's incredible! Even though they are a little less cooked than the ideal amount here: the solid shell is a bit thinner than it was yesterday (they weren't room temperature yet when we put them in the oven.)

I've got a lot of anxiety and that's why I'm currently on three weeks' medical leave, taking the SSRI again that I was eager to quit earlier this year, with two new prescriptions to boot. I have been gathering strength to make a blog post about it, and I was thinking of doing it this evening.

But in the meantime, has anyone ever heard of gooseberry cider? I'm intrigued.

We might be in the market for... recipes for homemade beverages, not necessarily alcoholic, because...

1. Applepocalypse. This year's apple harvest is insane and we have no hope of even gathering all the windfall apples. We don't have time.

2. Bottle collection: We tried an expensive imported French brand of sparkling lemonade that the supermarket here has. It's called La Mortuacienne and the cranberry lime flavor especially is irresistible. It's all natural, with old-fashioned hipster labels, and is even colored with beets and carrots. They come in lovely wine-bottle-sized glass bottles with a ceramic stopper attached with a wire latch, like canning jars, for an airtight seal. And they aren't recognized in our domestic bottle and can return scheme so they are destined just to be recycled if we don't reuse them! But we already have seven. And we don't need them as vases, as cute as that would be. We just donated most of the vases in the house, keeping two favorites, because we never use them.

Anybody who likes bottling or brewing homemade beverages? Any recs? Or wisdom?

We have a living gooseberry bush, but it's not thriving. Our blackcurrant bush is small and sad and has not ever produced berries, and our redcurrant bush is on the ropes. Blackberries and raspberries love our yard and are thriving, but we're apparently not destined to harvest any other sorts of berry. That's okay, I guess, since they're our favorites anyway. We have rhubarb and it thrives, but its season is past for this year. So in future we'll have other stuff to use up as well, but for now it's just apples and we'll have to buy any other ingredients.

This dish has evolved over the years but we are still in the habit of calling it "Greek chicken". When I initially found a recipe, it recommended a copycat for a commercial "Greek Seasoning" blend, and since a homemade spice blend and feta and olives are the solid basis of the recipe there's some excuse. Otoh, seasoning blends like this are never very authentic; real recipes tend to use an individual mixture of the regional characteristic spices instead. But as Wax pointed out, "Oven-Roasted Chicken and Vegetables with Feta, and Sometimes without the Chicken" is not a very handy moniker.

And this blend is very handy, because we use it often and it's got several things in it in smaller amounts that could be difficult to measure out individually.

( Greek-Inspired Seasoning Blend )

( Oven-Roasted Chicken and Vegetables with 'Greek Seasoning' )

You may remember that one of Wax's newer hobbies is baking desserts, mostly cakes. But at some point last summer we were discussing what recipes to try next, and I remembered these cookies, which you can only get at big or posh grocery stores around here usually:

Jules Destrooper almond thins.

Could we duplicate these, I wondered? I didn't actually know what these cookies are called; I'd never seen another version of them, from another brand other than this one, that is. They are very thin and crispy, buttery, golden brown, dotted with sliced almonds, a little less sweet than most American cookies, and other than almonds the dominant note is warming spices. So I examined a package, determined that the company hails from Belgium, and then did some web searches and eventually learned what the cookie type is called: pain d'amandes ("almond bread" in French).

Pain d'amandes is a traditional recipe from the region, and once you know what it's called, it's easy enough to find multiple recipes - very similar but not always identical - already translated into English.

And you know what? Not only could we duplicate the store-bought ones - the homemade cookies are significantly better!

I'm not sure why that surprises me. It's usually true with baked goods. I guess because they have a sort of poshness aura around them, because of the marketing and the price point? At any rate, yes, if you are familiar with this brand and like them, then rejoice! Because the homemade ones are even better, and they're not that hard!

Wax has made these four or five times since the summer, not because I couldn't make them, but because of her hobby she has become the managing director of all kitchen activities and prefers to be in charge of desserts herself with few exceptions. The recipe she chose out of the four or five we read through can be found here, with metric measures and quantities given in weight (a far superior method to measure ingredients for baking because it's much more precise). But a quick web search would no doubt find a version with Imperial measurements too.

This time I had the brainstorm that the sort of crispy almond cookies that are often eaten with tea and coffee often also come in an orange-flavored version, and that orange, almond, and warming spices seem to be a winning combination. We had some clementines that weren't very tasty to use up, so we just used those. (In future I would increase the orange a bit - maybe some more zest, maybe by using a more flavorful orange or some orange extract.)

Another brainstorm: pain d'amandes is very similar to Nordic gingerbread, which has a similarly-colored and -textured dough and also is dominated by the flavor profile of warming spices. Wax's family are loyal to a well-known recipe called Ronneby pepparkakor, where the main secret to success that makes them so much better than the average gingerbread cookie you buy in the store is that the spices are heated on the stovetop at the beginning of the recipe. So Wax also did that this time around with the pain d'amandes.

( Pain d'amandes (Belgian crispy almond wafers) recipe )

Wax follows chef Adam Ragusea on YouTube, and this extremely simple recipe is his creation. These are her notes: ( Read more... )

Also, I recently accidentally bought two extra jars of peanut butter, so I decided to make peanut butter cookies since there was so much. I haven't done that in ages. Rather than simply use the same old recipe, I googled for one that measures by weight, which is a far superior method of baking, and today we made it for the second time (still not out of the pb).

Wax combined a few recipes. I cut up a head of cauliflower into florets of about equal size, weighed them, and then cut up an equal weight of potatoes to about the same size. We tossed them with oil, salt and pepper, then roasted them in the oven about half an hour, until they got soft and started to brown. Then Wax sautéed a diced shallot and added the roasted vegetables, water, chicken bouillon cubes, and some smoked paprika, and boiled it all together (well, simmered) till soft, then coarsely pureed with the immersion blender. Magnificent!

Wax hasn't started making the cakes for Christmas eve dinner yet. These are not exactly part of her new cake-baking hobby, but the amount of French pastry chef youtube content we've both watched recently (that is, Korean and Japanese French-trained pastry chefs) have definitely affected our cookie execution.

Last weekend Wax made a batch of Ronneby Pepparkakor, her family's traditional recipe (but also quite popular and widely considered by many the best Swedish gingerbread recipe, easily googlable in Swedish), and it rested in the fridge all week because it's a dough that gets better with aging. ( recipe ) Then Friday evening we baked all of them (Wax does all the rolling and much of the cutting and I do a lot of the moving), filling up four tins, and I made a double batch of sugar cookies, which is about the same quantity of dough but not quite so many cookies because sugar cookies are not as thinly rolled out.

We did alter the recipe a little, actually. My mother's sugar cookie recipe, which I think she said she got from my Welsh-English paternal great-grandmother (the flapper), is called "No Fail Sugar Cookies" and is actually almost the same as the recipe I had decided to try out this year, Claire Saffitz's How to Make Sugar Cookies with Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person: ( recipe ) In contrast, 'No Fail Sugar Cookies' call for 1 cup of sugar-, 1 tsp of vanilla, 1/2 tsp of baking powder, and 3 cups of flour for that quantity of butter and egg. In the video Claire explains that she has minimized sugar to make the cookies less sweet because she intends to put lots of royal icing on them, but we made painted sugar cookies instead, so I used 1 cup of sugar (a tiny bit less). Wax rolled them out thicker than the paper-thin Swedish gingerbread, but they still baked in about 5-6 minutes total (turning after 3 minutes).

Painted sugar cookies are painted before baking with a mixture of egg yolk, water, and food coloring, applied with small craft/watercolor brush. We baked (and hence also painted) all of them Saturday. Today we iced the gingerbread, and we decided to use the new piping tips and bags Wax has gotten for her new baking hobby and try out royal icing, which is made with egg white, instead of the plain sugar-lemon juice glaze we usually use, and try out techniques demonstrated by various pastry chefs and suggested in the above Claire Saffitz video (dipping and flooding, specifically). And we had a good time! I have a feeling we're going to regret leaving no uniced gingerbread though, because the quantity of sugar on a flooded or dipped cookie with sugar sprinkles on top is significantly more than the quantity on a piped or uniced cookie, which is... what we usually do with gingerbread.

Coming during this week: lingonberry mousse cake with Russian caramel and mocha amaretto cake; marshmallow walnut fudge and chocolate pretzel sticks.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Wax got a bee in her bonnet about cake in her second summer vacation (her vacation days were broken into two approximately-two-week stretches, and the last one was just a couple of weeks ago in August).

We did already like cake; this isn't a really sudden thing, but it's been some years since I used to bake cakes really regularly. In my 20s, I was more into it than she was, but we've both liked baking (and cooking, to a lesser extent) from childhood. We both were raised by moms who REALLY liked cooking and baking, and sort of made a hobby of it.

My mom had a whole bookcase full of cookbooks, and she used to want cookbooks for international cuisines for her major presents; she'd go through them noting the ones she wanted to try and the modifications she'd make next time right on the pages of the books. She had less time for it after my dad's accident in 2003. Wax's mom was more the type to read cooking magazines and rip pages out of them; she had files of index cards and folded up magazine and newspaper pages going back decades, until she transferred them all to her tablet about ten years ago. My mom looked down on, and raised me to look down on, store-bought cookies and cakes; Wax's mom didn't do THAT, but she seemed to bake just about every weekend and to always have something baked whenever anyone came over. My mom went through four or five bread machines during my childhood; when I was a teenager we never bought store-bought bread. She often set the bread machine to finish a loaf when the first people were coming home from school or work, and she modified a revolving list of five or ten different recipes for machine use. When I was 14 we had a Norwegian exchange student, and she was out with her friends most afternoons, but they swung by our house daily to eat half a loaf of homemade bread on their way to ride horses or go to soccer practice. Wax's mom bought a little sheep farm and moved out there to raise four kids in the late 70s and she had a giant Bosch mixer, the professional sized ones, because she used to bake all the bread for the family of six, a week at a time. I made my first cake alone at age 5 - I wanted to, and my mom coached me through all the steps, but she let me add the things to the mixer. I was making cookies on my own regularly as a teen. Wax's mom made a gluten-intolerant friend in recent years after she retired and moved out here to Pargas, and she got really into gluten-free baking and having her friends over to try her efforts. Her gluten-free cakes were incredible.

Wax and I really like the various cooking and baking shows produced by epicurious on Youtube, which has several series we really love:

Price Points, where an expert in a particular ingredient is given a bunch of samples and gets to guess how much they cost;

Four Levels, where a beginner home chef, an intermediate home chef, and a professional chef all make their spin on one dish and then a food scientist reviews all their work and explains stuff;

and Pro Chef vs Home Cook, where a pro chef and a home cook are assigned the same dish and they both go shopping for all the ingredients for their way of making it, and then they swap ingredients. Then the food scientist coaches the home cook through how to make the pro chef's spin on the dish with their ingredients, and the pro chef does something super creative with the home cook's ingredients to make something new and fancy. They're all really nice and positive about all the chefs in all of these series, even when their efforts are hilarious or straight-up bizarre, which makes it pretty fun to watch.

But about a year ago, Wax accidentally discovered more ASMR-like videos by Japanese and Korean pastry chefs - presumably just by surfing to them, I guess. These are mesmerizing to watch and we completely love them. Wax's favorite of these is Joconde's baking, a beautifully-shot channel where she prepares everything without speaking, focusing on naturally-lit hands and cute pastel tools and implements, and the recipes are included as English captions. I also really love J'adore, which is quite similar (both are Korean, but if you surf related videos you'll quickly find Japanese and Chinese ones as well). This is what got us interested specifically in cake, anyway.

Wax first made the Apple Tosca Pie on her vacation, then the Triple Sec chocolate mousse pie with the crushed-cookie crust, then the boiled chocolate layer cake, tiramisu, and then this peanut butter lemon layer cake (we've only eaten 5/8ths of it in the last week because, while delicious, it's a bit dense and it feels like a bigger slice would replace dinner).

The cakes (and pies and tarts and things like that that pastry chefs would still make) that we want to try include:

perfecting the lemon-peanut butter combo, perhaps with peanut butter in the frosting

a matcha layer cake - this recipe looks like a good starting point, although not sure about the frosting

a matcha chiffon cake, maybe this one? In a bundt pan probably. If you make a matcha cake in a bundt pan, and it comes out all rounded and green, and then you garnish it with strawberries or raspberries, it'll look like a Swedish princess cake! I really want to do this because I love the look of the princess cake but I hate marzipan. I have a green princess cake pincushion.

Wax wants to actually learn how to make prinsesstårta - she likes marzipan. We need a good cooking thermometer first.

lemon pound cake (one without peanut butter as well)

Helen Rennie's Earl Grey Chiffon Cake (YouTube)

Maple Macadamia Cake

From that listicle of bundt cake recipes in my earlier post: cranberry-orange bundt cake, apple-cream cheese bundt cake, coconut pound cake (with lime glaze), olive oil cake, almond apricot coffee cake, citrus-raspberry coffee cake, and raspberry moscow mule pound cake

lemon poppyseed cake (the recipe in the listicle was a bad one, but maybe my lemon poppyseed muffin recipe will work)

pistachio cake - a recipe from scratch, unlike the one in the listicle

margarita cake - a recipe from scratch, unlike the one in the listicle. Maybe this?

A good pineapple coconut cake from scratch, unlike the one in the listicle

A good chocolate raspberry layer cake with raspberry filling

A good coffee layer cake (without chocolate), probably with hazelnut

German's chocolate cake. We've made that from scratch before... the frosting is a pain. I love it, but at home in the US we always bought the frosting.

A nice cinnamon swirl crumble-topped coffee cake. I haven't had that in ages.

A confetti cake. I haven't had one since I was a kid, and it just looks so fun.

Maybe an orange chocolate cake? I love orange chocolate chip muffins. I don't think chocolate chips is really the way to go with the cake though. Maybe with Grand Marnier. I don't mean a sacher cake or anything else that's coated in solid chocolate here, though. Slightly lower levels of decadence, please.

A layer cake with a good amaretto flavor - maybe this almond amaretto layer cake. There are recipes for chocolate amaretto cakes too.

Chocolate Amaretto Espresso Mousse Cake

A maple bundt cake like this one with walnuts maybe

lemon meringue pie

a way to combine pistachio, amaretto and coffee in one cake or pie - maybe a mousse cake?

Wax made this peanut butter layer cake, with the addition of a tablespoon of lemon zest and two tablespoons of lemon juice, and it's delicious!

It's got the lemon syrup and lemon cream cheese frosting from this recipe (just way less of the frosting), though, and while it is really good, it's not perfect: it should have more peanut butter flavor and less lemon. We may try a peanut butter frosting next.

The peanut butter cake recipe calls for garnish with peanut butter chips and drizzled peanut butter ganache made of peanut butter chips, but... we've never seen peanut butter chips for sale here in Finland. That doesn't seem to really be an ingredient worth hunting the world over for, but it may mean seeking an alternative recipe for peanut butter ganache. We don't really love traditional buttercream either though, so we might have to do some comparison shopping and not use the other frosting here either.

I'm pretty sure the lemon cake with lemon frosting would be really delicious without the peanut butter too.

Since we are apparently going to be making more cakes, we just ordered a traditional bundt pan (somehow we don't have one) and two aluminum 8" (20 cm) cake pans (we have four round cake pans but they're all 10"/26 cm, two silicone and two springform). I went right to the Poshest Kitchen Store in Finland, which is so fancy that the invoice they send in the package looks like a classy wedding invitation. However, even though they DID have pans in the sizes we wanted - including super expensive Bundt-brand gold bundt pans - they only had expensive springform pans, so we had to go seek out a slightly more quotidian kitchen store in order to get the one-piece aluminum pans Wax wanted.

A lot of the cakes you see online in recipe blogs have three or four layers, but I gotta say, I can't foresee any future where I ever feel moved to do that. Two layers, yeah, sure, but not three. (Hence why we didn't order three of the 8" pans.)

I found this article accidentally earlier, when I was looking for peanut butter layer cake recipes, called 30 Bundt Cakes You Need to Make This Spring, and while I don't actually want to make ALL of them, it did get me thinking that I don't have enough experience of bundt cakes and I'd like to try more coffee-cake, glazed, and unfrosted sort of cakes. Just in general, actually, my favorite cakes are chocolate chip date cake, banana bread, carrot cake, and blueberry lemon coffee cake (if you don't count pie and mousse anyway)... so maybe my inclination is more towards this style of cake anyway.

So I'm already a fan of their top-listed cake here, and then there's a margarita cake, which I'm anxious to try, an olive oil cake, a lemon poppyseed cake - my great-grandmother's lemon poppyseed muffins were a perennial favorite whenever someone in the family served them, a pineapple coconut ("piña colada") cake, an apricot almond cake, a coconut lime cake, and a pistachio cake (which I think might be the ideal opportunity to make a pistachio-coffee-amaretto cake, or maybe a pistachio amaretto cake with coffee mousse - I'm trying desperately to duplicate the flavor combination in our favorite pistachio-coffee-amaretto icecream shake).

Also people in the comments from yesterday have reminded me that I've been meaning to try out olive oil cake, honey cake, matcha cake, and Earl Grey cake! And then Isilya mentioned maple cake, which sounds unbearably delicious.

We've been meaning to get around to making tiramisu since we noticed ladyfingers at the supermarket, and last night we finally did it! That is, remembered in advance so we could check and make sure we had enough eggs and mascarpone. Wax looked at a bunch of different recipes. The authentic way to make the creamy layer is with raw egg and mascarpone, and because of this there's a widespread phenomenon of American recipes that use whipped cream instead so the result will include no raw eggs. Wax was warned that getting the texture to form stiff peaks in this layer would be tough because there's some egg yolks whipped in a hot water bath, mascarpone (independently whipped), and meringue, and then they're all folded together. (My research now tells me that the egg whites and whipped cream alike are later innovations and the original recipe was just sugar, yolk, and mascarpone, but we didn't read the Wikipedia article last night.)

Anyway, it's as delicious as I remember, and it definitely is better fresh and homemade (or I guess restaurant-made, as long as it wasn't made ages and ages in advance). And it's actually not really that elaborate, although using egg whites and trying to get the creamy filling to have a fluffy and airy texture makes the process a little longer. It's just whipping mascarpone and egg (or cream, if your raw eggs are a salmonella risk) and sugar and booze (you can use any strong liqueur and any sweet liqueur apparently - we used amaretto and cognac), then briefly dipping the cookies into strong coffee with booze in it and laying them in a dish, then spreading the cream out on top of them. It has to be refrigerated 6-8 hours to set up, and it set up beautifully, although the final texture is still puddingy and appropriate for eating from bowls in our case. You sift cocoa over the top before serving, and I kinda messed this part up with a sieve that wasn't fine enough, but it still tastes delicious.

Although the ladyfingers are arranged in a grid (if using a rectangular dish) and the dessert is assembled in layers, making it much more orderly, this is strongly reminiscent of two of my favorite desserts, Eton mess and trifle:

Dessert	Cake/Cookie	Creamy Part	Other
trifle	sponge cake cubes soaked in sherry	whipped cream	Fruit jam on sponge cake
Eton mess	crumbled dry meringue	whipped cream	macerated fresh strawberries in booze
tiramisu	ladyfingers soaked in booze and coffee	whipped mascarpone with egg or cream	cocoa powder on top

Trifle can be assembled in neat orderly layers too, but Eton mess is stirred up to evenly distribute the berries and meringue through the whipped cream, which also incidentally turns the whole thing pink. (As long as you use strawberries. If you use blueberries, you get purple.)

This is tagged 'recipes', but no recipes are actually included here because they're widely available and easy to find.

waxjism has really gotten into baking cakes recently, and she was totally on a roll on her vacation, so after the Apple Tosca Pie was finished, she made a chocolate mousse pie (to use up a package of not-very-good chocolate cookies), which was stunning, and then she made a super-moist mocha cake with some kind of ganache frosting that looks very very sad because of too much cream in the frosting. It still is VERY good, but not as good as chocolate mousse. (If you think chocolate cakes are too fluffy and light and not moist enough, or that when they are moist they're too soft/unset/undercooked, it's probably this last type of cake that you want. She said it's something to do with the chemistry of using boiling water that makes this cake extremely firm but moist, after a cake batter that's very thin and liquid. So definitely look up a recipe for a "boiled water chocolate cake" or a "hot water chocolate cake" if that sounds interesting.)

But enough about that cake. I want to talk about chocolate mousse.

It has to be said, first off, that a chocolate mousse cake is literally just chocolate mousse topped with whipped cream and dark chocolate shavings, with a layer of compacted chocolate cookie crumbs held together with melted butter. Chocolate cookie crumbs are not a BAD garnish for chocolate mousse, but they don't really add anything. They also aren't really crunchy enough to provide a strong texture contrast, if that's what you were after (I know people do do that, even though I don't personally feel like my experience of mousse would be illuminated by crunchiness). Chocolate mousse pie is not in any way worse than the same chocolate mousse in a bowl, it's just also not really better. And I guess arguably less convenient, since you have to cut it up instead of parceling it into servings as soon as you make it. So on the whole, it's remarkably impressive and also delicious in comparison with many other pies and cakes, but if you're comparing it to just making chocolate mousse, it's probably not worth it unless you have a box of chocolate cookies to use up.

But I DO want to put in a strong word for orange liqueur in chocolate mousse! The second to last time Wax made chocolate mousse, she used a bar of not-that-great raspberry-flavored dark chocolate from Lidl that wasn't tasty enough to eat as a chocolate bar, but it added a delicious hint of raspberry. However, the strength of the effect is much higher when using liquer instead. She splashed in some triple sec (because we don't have any Grand Marnier), but we're gonna try raspberry liquer next time. Coffee liqueur is another good idea, so we might try that too (although we recently used up a bottle of coffee liqueur and it isn't really a favorite). I suppose amaretto and Irish cream, which are my other favorite chocolate truffles flavorings, would also make great chocolate mousse.

Tosca cake is a classic Nordic dessert. Invented in Sweden in the early 20th century in a period when the opera Tosca was so famous that people were naming everything after it, Tosca cake is a buttery sponge cake topped with an almond caramel candied topping similar to nut brittle (but not as... brittle). It is widespread in prepackaged form, cafés and buffets, and a common homemade staple that can be easily purchased as a mix. (You can read about the classic Tosca cake here, if you want - I found an article and recipe in English with a video - but you can easily find recipes and pictures in English with a simple search.) Classic Tosca cake is also a great dessert which I also love, as are Tosca buns (cinnamon rolls topped with almond caramel), but you can read about them anywhere.

But this recipe for Apple Tosca Pie that we ripped out of the Sokos grocery coop's magazine Yhteishyvä last year is actually unique. A chef probably developed it for them, though it wasn't credited by name. We made it a couple of times last year, lost the recipe, and then recently when our apple trees started groaning beneath the weight of their apples we thought of it again and managed to find it online [Finnish]. Today we filled a little bucket with windfall apples and Wax made it this afternoon while I was running around doing dishes and laundry and changing bunny litter, and it's just as delicious as we remembered, maybe more so.

Therefore, for the benefit of others and also so we won't lose the recipe again, I have translated it and now offer in both metric and US measures:

( Apple Tosca Pie )

BIL & SIL and the niblings left this morning after being here all week with their elderly cat because they couldn't get a cat sitter. ( That went okay, but I really felt for the poor lil guy and am relieved on his behalf that he is returning to his own territory. There were no major conflicts of personality but Tristana had to be arrested a bunch. )

Now the spare mattresses are removed from the floor and the cotton rugs are back to allow bunnies to run around. The box of hay, the napping cushion, the stuff to chew on and the little house to hide in are all returned to their spots in the dining room and Rowan is cautiously jogging around sniffing everything, so nature is healing. ( The bunnies had much to endure, but nobody got bitten and I never yelled LEAVE THE BUNNIES ALONE FOR FUCK'S SAKE, so I'm counting it as a win. ) Tristana spent a day or so mostly hiding, but she got over it and became friendly with all the new guests, even the smallest child (who is I think 9?), even though there was always a large risk of being picked up by her. (Tristana doesn't hate being picked up in principle, she's just usually busy because she has to cram so much playtime in. She is docile about being grabbed unless she was really interested in what she was doing, and by the same principle, she will start to wiggle after a short time, but there's no hard feelings once she is released.)

We made tortilla pizzas for everybody Monday, which, if you don't know, are pizzas made on store-bought flour tortillas. ( How to make tortilla pizzas. ) This meal was delicious and it created a convivial atmosphere, with all the adults hanging around the stove/kitchen munching on toppings and chatting, because you have to cook one pizza at a time and each adult had to consume a total of 2-3 of them for a meal's worth. (The resultant pizzas were not considered nutritional enough for child consumption, so the children's ones were topped with shredded basil leaves and fresh mozzarella and like... chopped grapes??? by my SIL. The kids liked it, so whatever.) We shared a bottle of red wine, and among four adults who rarely drink wine, that was enough to render all of us slightly tipsy. We had a three-language conversation with lots of shouting. It was great.

Tuesday BIL made spaghetti primavera, but he has to make this with basically zero seasoning because of the children, so it was an astonishing taste experience. Very reminiscent of when my dad used to cook when my mom was in grad school (around the time I was silent pastel goth goddaughter's age actually). Also he decided not to bother us by asking where the parmesan was and instead grated up a pile of Oltermanni, a mild and creamy-tasting soft cheese similar to Edam. Obviously, unlike parmesan, it just melted into little melted blobs when put on a plate of hot pasta. Still fine, I mean, spaghetti and olive oil aren't bad flavors, so at worst it needed salt and pepper. But very funny in contrast to my expectations with the name of the dish. It reminds me of the time we were staying with MIL and she announced her intention to make fried rice, but it turned out she meant Rice That Has Been Fried. She served pre-steamed white rice that had been sauteed until soggy at a low temperature in olive oil, with no seasonings and no other ingredients. The spaghetti primavera was not nearly that bad, obviously, because it was still mostly vegetables, but still. LOL.

I sort-of-accidentally made a double batch of walnut shortbread yesterday (slightly more walnut, replaced ½ the vanilla extract with almond extract; in future I would leave the vanilla but increase the almond extract, maybe try with different nuts to test? A mixture of almond and walnut?) according to this recipe, having specifically looked for a recipe with measurements in grams so we could weigh the ingredients.

It uses egg yolks, so Wax decided to make meringues with the whites. She had a total of four whites, and they remained gritty (which means the sugar was added too fast) and refused to un-liquid (which means they were contaminated with a bit of yolk somewhere), so we decided the only way to save the ingredients was to make them into a cake. (We didn't know why they failed yesterday; I just looked for a video that explains meringue failure today.) Wax's favorite miniature cake (/cake in a mug) recipe uses equal quantities of sugar and flour, so she put the same weight of flour in as the sugar (we later realized the recipe is the same volume so this resulted in a cake much less sweet than her mug cake). Then she consulted our cake recipes to pick how much oil to put in and added some cocoa as well. Full of whimsy, we baked the cake in a spring-form bundt pan, and the result turned out... sort of halfway a brownie, but halfway a cake? The top got all wrinkly like a brownie, but with a dramatic fallen-in bit where the outer edges stuck to the pan. They were sort of crystallized. After breaking them off, we turned the cake over and it's sort of brownie height. A bit fluffier. And not as sweet, but it's got coffee in it too and it's a sort of mild coffee cake. Edible.

Anyway, we thought about the semi-ASMR videos we've been watching on youtube of professional Korean pastry chefs making desserts (the algorithm showed them to us presumably because of the America's Test Kitchen and Epicurious stuff), J'adore and Joconde's Baking. We've seen Joconde in particular explaining about the ideal temperature and texture of butter for cake using a laser infrared thermometer, and that reminded us we want one. In fact we don't have ANY thermometer but an oven thermometer, because Wax used to use a glass one for bread and it broke years ago. We tried to buy an electric one and like... I guess we never got it to work? Or it ran out of batteries like right away. Anyway! I checked the Ridiculously Posh Finnish Kitchen Store Whose Invoices Look Like Classy Wedding Invitations (Eiring, trilingual fi/sv/en) that we found one time by accident, and they have one of course, which enabled us to doublecheck the Finnish name for them. Theirs costs a hundred bucks, but they are typically used in construction and Wax found one by Bosch for fifty bucks from Motonet.

UNRELATED: we bought two raised bed boxes today so we will have somewhere to grow vegetables later! Last year everywhere in town sold out of them well before planting time for vegetables and herbs, so we made sure to go early this year.

This is the second time we've made this surprisingly easy spanakopita recipe. The first time, it occurred to me that it would work with frozen spinach too, and it does! But you have to wait for the spinach to thaw before making the filling, so it's actually not that convenient. And it's not like you could make it without planning anyway, because you won't have a pound of spinach, a pound of feta and a pound of ricotta lying around.

The only thing is that we had to make our own ricotta the day before both times, because it seems to be the one cheese you can't find lactose-free in Finland. We are planning to try it with cottage cheese next time, to avoid that.

Today we finally moved Wax's WFH setup to under the window (2 weeks after beginning this furniture-rearrangement!). In the process of doing this, this conversation happened:

waxjism: What are you doing?
cimorene: Just sweeping under the radiator before we move the desk, with this squeegee from the bathroom, since I didn't see a broom.
wax: It's gotta be up here. [NOW IN THE OTHER ROOM] Neither of us WOULD take it downstairs though!?
cim: But, honey, we both know that either of us would put anything anywhere when our brains are turned off.*
wax: No! [SHE RUNS DOWN THE STAIRS]
[A FEW MINUTES LATER] wax: But how many places can a broom GO?!
cim: [LITERALLY TURNING AROUND RIGHT WHERE I'M STANDING TO LOOK AT WAX]... Oh wait, this broom? It's leaning against your desk.
wax: [STARING] It must've been there for months.
cim: And we both looked right at it and didn't see it even though we were actively looking for a broom.
wax: And I looked at it every day.
cim: And you went downstairs to look for a broom and I went in the other room to get another tool that wasn't a broom to sweep with, and given that, don't you think either one of us would probably put anything anywhere?
wax: Yeah.

*Most memorably when I lost my favorite mug for a few days and later found it under the bed, the several times we've lost things and found them in the microwave, and the time I walked into the bathroom and found a bicycle pump and a small shelf I had never seen before on the toilet.

🌞 Another thing that happened was that we thought she might need some curtains in the window, to protect her eyes from the sun. The wooden valance with the curtain track has been leaning on the wall next to the window waiting to be put back up for several years, so I went and got the hardware, only for Wax to remember that we haven't been able to find the charger to our Ikea electric screwdriver for several years? It's one of the things that got lost in the move, along with one of my favorite sweaters. So just now I finally ordered a rechargable Ryobi One+ one so that it can share the same charger as our palm sander and minivac and (weirdly) lawnmower. That window faces west, though, so it's unlikely to become an issue in the meanwhile.

🍫 We felt like baking something today. We made the recipe I have previously referred to as "Chocolate Cake of DOOOOM" because it is extra chocolatey and which I once accidentally made with like 3x the proper amount of sugar. It's still a good cake, but I think making it layered makes it necessarily too sweet. It just can't handle two layers of frosting! (We ran out of cocoa powder and Wax haf to use a different recipe of chocolate glaze for the top layer, one that uses melted chocolate instead. That might be contributing, but I remember this problem from before too.) We thought that we had never tried the other chocolate cake recipe in our recipe database, but that's not true - in April 2020 we tried another one and decided it would be our default from now on! Best Chocolate Cake recipe from that post is what we should have made.

Snookums likes to sit on my bedside table like this when he wants something, and I call him a gargoyle when he does, but it's usually at night. I happened to get this great picture of him being a gargoyle this morning though. ♥ his adorable David Bowie eye

I couldn't resist these cute medium-sized local pumpkins the week before Halloween, so we decided to buy one and make a pie. This weekend we finally got around to doing that with a vegan pumpkin pie recipe - I looked at a few from-scratch recipes that all called for evaporated milk, which is a no-no for me. I only eat lactose-free dairy products, which are fortunately really common in Finland, but as far as I've been able to tell, evaporated milk is purely a sort of semi-rare imported food here and I've never seen a lactose-free version. Rather than hunt around for it, I decided to check out the vegan recipes, and the vegan formula is basically pumpkin puree plus coconut cream or coconut milk (and warming spices). It turned out delicious!

We used The Home Baked Vegan - The Best Vegan Pumpkin Pie on the Internet

Pumpkin pie filling usually gets its texture from evaporated milk, heavy cream, and pureed pumpkin (whether that's in a can or not), more or less - it makes a creamy custard texture by combining the tasty creamy stuff that is also thick and contains fat molecules with the pumpkin puree, which makes it denser and thicker than, say, just a pudding or custard. But because it doesn't include anything like eggs, the substitution of coconut cream (or the gloppy bits of coconut milk) doesn't create a really different texture or any other food chemistry-type problems to solve, if you see what I mean. When you have to find a vegan replacement for eggs, you have to maybe work a bit harder and not every recipe can use the same thing, because of properties eggs have. But with this, one sweet, gloppy, fatty delicious cream product is pretty much like another, just slightly more coconutty. TBH, I can't taste the coconut in the result because of the spices, but I doubt it would have a bad effect even if you could. So this recipe is not an inferior or more difficult vegan option; it's a fairly simple substitution (that happens fortuitously to be vegan and, in my case more importantly, lactose free).

Obviously, because we bought the pumpkin before Halloween, we had to make the pie before Thanksgiving. I mean, if we'd thought to freeze it or stick it in the basement or whatever maybe not, but we had it on the floor by the radiator, so we had no choice. And I've been thinking about pumpkin pie and about Thanksgiving as a result.

I haven't really been bothered about missing Thanksgiving as an expatriate; the last time I tried to make a pumpkin pie - with a can of filling my mom sent in the mail - was probably like fifteen years ago. I guess it has less cultural importance for me than for a lot of other Americans.

I grew up looking on Thanskgiving as a time for family reunions, and I associate it most strongly with going to the museums in Washington DC, because that was where we went for many of my formative years. I've also never been very food-motivated. The blueberry pie and the pumpkin bread were the only two foods I really looked forward to strongly (my mom COULD make them any time, but they were both a bit more work than she'd usually bother with except for a special occasion). Come to think of it, maybe I can find another recipe similar to pumpkin bread to try out (something that doesn't require a pumpkin, ideally). Blueberry pie is already, obviously, not seasonally-dependent.

Anyway, the point is, I can't visit my aunts and unclee and cousins and cousins-once-removed and great-aunt and -uncle for Thanksgiving no matter what I do, because there's not enough time off even if I were independently wealthy and transatlantic travel were simple and easy. And without that, there's not really anything left in Thanksgiving for me to care about (apart from political anger about the holiday and support for the idea of Native American Heritage Day instead). I would enjoy a family get together with my in-laws instead, which will simply wait until Christmas, pandemic restrictions willing, and at least some of them live much close to us here than I ever lived to extended family growing up. In fact, nobody lives farther than 5 hours' drive from us, which is already closer than the closest relatives lived to us (it was about 8 hours to my dad's sister in Tennessee - in that time we could be in Lapland, if we took a train).

Tosca cake is a well-known Nordic delight, a light moist sponge topped with coating of almond slices in caramel. Also a favorite of mine! We found this recipe for this absolutely INCREDIBLE and highly recommended dessert in the magazine Yhteishyvä, here - Omenatoscakakku (for the Finns).

This is a pastry pie crust under a thick layer of juicy apple filling, so reminiscent of a traditional two-crusted fruit pie, but the filling is thicker and holds its shape when sliced more like a cake in spite of being mostly fruit. The top is a layer of Tosca topping, chopped nuts in caramel, and it's a very impressive dessert! I figured I'd post this because I translated it in order to send it to my family this morning.

The magazine picture mostly just shows a very lovely Tosca topping, so here's Wax's snapshot where you can see the filling, which is pink because it includes the peels.

( Apple Tosca Pie )

These shakes are both the best icecream available to us and the best sweet cocktail I've ever had (I guess stretching the definition of cocktail a bit, although you could increase the alcohol ratio without making it less delicious).

Pistachio Espresso Amaretto Shakes

½ pint pistachio icecream

1 pint vanilla icecream

1 cup coffee or espresso

1 shot of amaretto (about 30-40 ml)

Blend until smooth in a blender. Serves 2.

It HAS gotten fairly hot outside a few times, into the 80s F, but our house is well designed and situated and it doesn't really get that hot, even without air conditioning. In fact, I suggested making icecream shakes almost as soon as I got home, so I was still warm from having walked a mile and a half in the sun; if I'd just laid down by the window for ten minutes instead I'd have cooled off too far to eat icecream without bundling up in a blanket first.

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Page Summary

My brilliant dessert chef wife* heroically recreates French restaurant molten chocolate cake for me
homemade beverages, not necessarily alcoholic
Our favorite roast it all in one pan recipe
Recipe: my new favorite cookies: pain d'amandes (Belgian crispy almond wafers)
New favorite pasta recipe is what I call "pea pasta"
The roasted cauliflower soup was great!
Christmas cookies 2022
About Our Cake Renaissance and Cake Pan Purchases
Peanut Butter Lemon Layer Cake #1
Cake Pan Purchases and Cake To Do List
The Non-Frozen Cream Blizzard Model of Dessert
Triple Sec Chocolate Mousse Pie and Mocha Ganache Hot Water Chocolate Cake
Apple Tosca Pie Recipe: Juicy apple filling under a layer of golden almond caramel
Tortilla Pizza (recipe), houseguests + cat houseguest for a week, bunny and Tristana socialization
kitchen experimentation & upgrades
Yum
also we sent a message to the tree trimming service! fingers crossed
really good vegan pumpkin pie!
Apple Tosca Pie recipe
First Pistachio Espresso Amaretto shakes of the year

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multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

Entries tagged with recipes

My brilliant dessert chef wife* heroically recreates French restaurant molten chocolate cake for me

homemade beverages, not necessarily alcoholic

Our favorite roast it all in one pan recipe

Recipe: my new favorite cookies: pain d'amandes (Belgian crispy almond wafers)

New favorite pasta recipe is what I call "pea pasta"

The roasted cauliflower soup was great!

Christmas cookies 2022

About Our Cake Renaissance and Cake Pan Purchases

Peanut Butter Lemon Layer Cake #1

Cake Pan Purchases and Cake To Do List

The Non-Frozen Cream Blizzard Model of Dessert

Triple Sec Chocolate Mousse Pie and Mocha Ganache Hot Water Chocolate Cake

Apple Tosca Pie Recipe: Juicy apple filling under a layer of golden almond caramel

Tortilla Pizza (recipe), houseguests + cat houseguest for a week, bunny and Tristana socialization

kitchen experimentation & upgrades

Yum

also we sent a message to the tree trimming service! fingers crossed

really good vegan pumpkin pie!

Apple Tosca Pie recipe

First Pistachio Espresso Amaretto shakes of the year

Pistachio Espresso Amaretto Shakes