Hello honeyz! It’s Sunday night at the lazy mansion and I want to tell you about last week’s treat for the knitting club (yes, I am 80 years old and need to start wearing a diaper). I had two friends over for a knitting session and made some toffee from a Swedish recipe book called “Julgodis” (~Christmas candy, a book by Johanna Westman about whom I know absolutely nothing, but seeing as you have a computer too you can do me the honour of googling her yourself, lazykins). It contains a lot of very accessible recipes for hard caramel, soft toffee and all sorts of chocolates. Very tempting stuff. Here’s a combination of two recipes of hers, or rather one roughly translated lemon toffee recipe with a bit of ginger. It’s dead easy. Hell, I think you can have it done by the time a new X-Factor contestant is voted off the island. And then you get to sit there and gloat while enjoying the lemony-gingery butterness of the softest toffee you’ve ever had.

Swedish Ginger & Lemon Toffee (25-30 toffee bits)

• 50 grams butter
• 1 decilitre cream
• 1,5 decilitre sugar
• 1/2 decilitre light syrup (as opposed to dark)
• 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla sugar
• Grated zest of 1 organic lemon
• 1 tbsp grated ginger

Melt the butter in a large saucepan with a thick bottom, mix in the cream, sugar, syrup and vanilla sugar. Boil the mixture without a lid until it has reached 122-125 degrees Celcius or time it for 15-20 mins and you should be alright.  To make sure that the mixture is done, drop a teaspoon of it in a glass of cold water and if you can shape it firmly between your fingers, it’s ready. If not, boil it for another 5 mins. Now add the lemon zest and the ginger, stir it well and pour it into a greased and lined tray or square cake mould. Then leave it in the fridge until it has set (took mine about 15 mins). Remove from the tray and cut  the toffee sheet into individual bits (I recommend using a pair of scissors) and wrap them in baking paper. They can keep in an airtight container in the fridge for 5-7 days.

Whenever I’m travelling, this blog works as my cookbook. So imagine my surprise when I wanted to suggest a nice chocolate recipe for my niece’s baptism in Stockholm and I couldn’t find one single all-chocolate recipe here! And it’s not like I haven’t been yapping on about the endless pleasures of the cocoa persuasion, but somehow I’ve managed to avoid actually putting that into action. So sorry! Luckily I’ve found just the right recipe to make amends with on a very pretty sister blog called Cannelle et Vanille: French Chocolate Macaroons.

I have attempted to make macaroons before with mediocre results, as this mugshot shows. But when I found this recipe I instantly knew I had the key to perfection. There was just something about the details concerning the egg white and the fact that there are so many different delicious looking macaroons on that blog that made me trust the writer 100%. And it really paid off. I made the macaroons following the recipe as religiously as possible. The only change I made was in the ganache where I used dark chocolate (Lindt  70%) instead of milk chocolate and replaced the passion fruit with raspberries.

Raspberry Ganache (makes just the right amount for the macaroons)

• 100 grams dark chocolate (70%)
• 50 grams frozen raspberries
• 20 grams cream
• 15 grams butter
• A splash of rhum
• A blob or two of glucose
• A pinch of salt

Start by chopping the chocolate into nice little bits and set them aside in a bowl that can stand some heat and place a sieve on top. Then heat the cream and the whole raspberries in a saucepan while you mash the berries into the cream. When the berries have dissolved as much as possible and the mixture is slowly starting to boil, take the saucepan from the heat and pour the cream through the sieve and over the chocolate. You only want to get rid of the raspberry seeds, so make sure that when you have, you immediately start stirring the melting chocolate into the pink cream. When all of the chocolate has melted, add a splash of rhum and a pinch of salt to deepen the flavour and sweeten it with some glucose (or syrup). And that’s it. Now pour the mixture into a piping bag and leave it in the fridge for five minutes before squeezing it out onto your baked and cooled macaroons. I promise you, these are the best treats ever and you won’t believe you’ve actually made them yourself!

The texture, the overall look and the flavour were spot on – now I just have to learn how to make all of the macaroons the same size. Let me know if you have some good tricks up your sleeve.

Hello everybody, this is Silas Bo talking. I’ve been invited to do a post on whatever came to mind as long as it was food-related. Well, first thing that came a-knocking was soup. Since poor Heidi has been under the mutilating care of a dentist everything is now liquified in one way or another. And where should one go from there but into the wonderful world of soups? (mind your footwear, mmmkay?). One favourite is the French Vichyssoise, which is fancy talk for leak and potato soup. But be aware of the recipe you have to stick pretty darn close to the numbers or you won’t get that almost cheese-like flavour that comes from the leaks and the rather large amount of butter. We tried this soup in the delightful surroundings of Krapperup Slot in the southern part of Sweden and need we say that it has been on the repertoire ever since. The recipe is from the bottomless archives of BBC-food. Get it right here.

Every single time I see the word “Pizza”, including on this blog, I hear the word as it sounds when coming from my favourite sketch character Brian Butterfield (aka Peter Serafinowicz). But there are so many other inspirational food concepts in this sketch that I have to share it with you:

You know how fresh bananas are really nice? And then in no time, they turn on you and show their true colours. That happened to me, yes, thank you, scuse me while I grab a Kleenex. Anyway, what better way to get rid of that traitor fruit than to mash it up and throw it in a deliciously buttery cake?

Banana Cake (makes one cake or 12 muffins) Recipe from the legendary Nesa cookbook

Cake

• 1 ripe banana, mashed
• 3 eggs
• 145 grams sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 125 grams regular flour
• 100 grams melted butter

Icing

• 75 grams dark chocolate (60-70% cocoa)
• 20 grams butter
• 2 tbsp cocoa nibs
• A pinch of salt

Turn the oven on to 170 degrees Celcius. Grease a muffins tray or cake mould with butter and set it aside. In a mixing bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar until the mixture has turned fluffy. Add the vanilla sugar, flour and baking powder and mix it until there are no little flour lumps left and you have an even texture. Finally stir in the melted butter. Pour the mixture into the cake mould and leave it in the oven for 30-55 mins (the original recipe said 55, but my oven made it in 30). Make sure you check it with a cooking pin after about 30 mins and if nothing sticks, it’s done. While the cake is cooling off, melt the chocolate, butter and salt in a saucepan and spread it onto the still warm cake. Sprinkle with cocoa nibs or chopped hazelnuts and serve lukewarm – the melted butter in the cake makes it so much juicier while it’s still warm. But careful, one piece tends to lead to the next, and the next, and before you know it, you awake at 3 am with chocolate drool on your shirt and reruns of Friends showing on telly (when was that show ever funny? I just can’t remember).

While I usually swear by everything homemade I’m not opposed to jumping a few fences here and there. That’s why I sometimes buy a ready-made pizza dough so I can get to the interesting part quickly. Below is the recipe for the almost refreshing and definitely flavourful pizza I had tonight, including a dressing that was adapted from the Danish kitchen revolutionary Claus Meyer’s incomparable salad book “Claus Meyers Salatværksted“.

Lazy Plum Pizza

Pizza and topping

• 1 store bought pizza dough
• 1 tbsp olive oil & a pinch of salt
• 4-5 tbsp grated parmesan cheese
• 2 Jerusalem artichokes (a bit like knobby potatoes with a nutty flavour) in thin slices – or just use potatoes
• 2 plums, sliced
• Lemon oil or olive oil + lemon juice
• Fresh cress

Dressing

• 50 grams rygeost (~ smoked milk cheese, a Danish invention - a bit like soft, smoked cream cheese – you might be able to get the same effect from using a cream cheese with smoked salt)
• 1/2 decilitre full cream milk
• 1/2 tbsp heavy rapeseed oil
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp light syrup
• Salt & pepper

Turn the oven on to 220 degrees Celcius. Roll out the dough, pick holes in it with a fork, brush it with oil and sprinkle some salt and grated parmesan cheese over it. Put it in the oven for about 10 mins. Meanwhile, gather the ingredients for the dressing in a bowl and blend them together, season with s&p and set aside. Prepare the Jerusalem artichokes and when the ten minutes are up – spread them on the pizza dough and sprinkle some more parmesan over it. Leave it to bake for another 5-10 mins and start preparing the plums. When the pizza is nice and golden, remove it from the oven and drizzle it with some lemon oil, distribute the plums over it and then pour the smoked cheese dressing all over it and top with freshly cut cress, s&p. If you prefer a more soggy/juicy pizza, you can spread some pesto on the base before baking it for the first time. Serve with roasted almonds and apple slices in a discrete white wine vinegar dressing.

Being a quick & dirty recipe for everyday use, I’ll let it speak for itself. Here’s how you make it:

Greek Potato Salad (~main course for 2, side dish for 4 people)

• 15-20 small, preferably new potatoes
• 1 large bay-leaf
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 red/yellow peppers
• 1 big handful of rocket salad
• 125 grams of good feta cheese (try the goat milk kind)
• 100 grams of banged and pitted kalamata olives
• 1/3 cucmber and/or a whole ripe avocado, diced or sliced
• 1/2 finely sliced red onion
• Olive oil
• Balsamic vinegar
• Salt & pepper for seasoning

1. Clean the potatoes and leave the skin on. Put them in a small saucepan and add water until it covers the potatoes. Add the salt and the bay-leaf and turn on the heat. When the water is boiling, leave it on for five minutes. Then take the saucepan off of the heat and leave the potatoes to finish cooking in the water for another 15 mins. I learnt this method of potato cooking from the infamous Price brothers, who have a fantastic high- cholesterol cooking show on Danish television. It’s one of two things you actually have to cook in this salad recipe so you have plenty of time to make that  little extra effort. The potatoes turn out much more flavourful and firm that way.
2. While the potatoes are resting in the hot water, start preparing the peppers. They need to be cooked and peeled, so the taste is enhanced and sweetened. Some people like to boil them first or cook them on a gas flame (Jamie Oliver if I remember correctly) and then leave them in a plastic bag, but I prefer to fry them because that way you both get the fried flavour and can cook several at a time. Heat some cooking oil (not olive here – it doesn’t turn hot enough) in a frying pan, using a fork or a pin, pick holes into the surface all over the two peppers to make sure they won’t burst in your face when heated. Then fry them both in the pan on medium-high heat, turning them regularly and pressing them down onto the surface if necessary where they are uneven. When they both have that transparent colour and they have turned soft, take them off the heat an put them in a plastic bag. Seal it tighly and leave it for 15-20  mins and then start peeling the thin outer skin off. It might not come off completely, but as long as the flesh is soft and most of the skin is gone, they’re fine. Remove the seeds and the centre of the peppers and cut them into thin slices.
3. Take a large dish and arrange the de-watered but still hot potatoes with the pepper slices, the rocket leaves, the feta cheese (though the feta cheese here looks like the disgraceful imitation of feta cheese called “salattern” (~salad dice), I usually try to avoid that by crumbling the cheese instead of cutting it), the banged and pitted olives, the cucumber/avocado and the red onion. Pour a bit of olive oil and some balsamic vinegar over it, season it with salt and pepper and mix it with your hands.
4. Serve with a cold beer and some oven fresh bread.

Anyone who has ever read a recipe in a women’s magazine would probably recognize the expression “great for when you have unexpected guests dropping by” but I’m not going to perpetuate that illusion. I’m pretty sure the mobile revolution has killed off that kind of spontaneity a long time ago. Anyway, this little delicious number is an adapted version of one such recipe and it usually comes in handy in the morning when I feel like bringing a cake to work or when I’m struck by a sudden craving. In other words: It’s damn easy and fast.

Raspberry-Chocolate-Coconut Muffins (makes 12)

• 1 egg
• 1 decilitre fine cane sugar
• 1/2 decilitre milk
• 1/2 decilitre rapeseed oil (for baking)
• 1 decilitre dessicated coconut, ligthly roasted and cooled down
• 1 decilitre flower
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 50 grams chopped dark chocolate
• 1 decilitre (frozen) raspberries

Turn the oven on to 225 degrees Celcius. Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet in another bowl and then mix them together. Finally – add the raspberries to the mixture. It’s supposed to be quite runny, but don’t worry, that will change in the oven. Distribute the mixture in a muffin tray and put it on a cooking plate in the middle of the oven for about 10 mins. Check them with a cooking pin just to be sure before you take them out. Allow them to cool for a bit and then try to release them from the tray so the chocolate bits don’t stick to the bottom. Now get comfy in your couch (or at work) and bite into that coconutty delight with tangy bursts of raspberry and sweet chocolate rewards.