Though I haven’t been doing much cooking while in London, I’ve managed to make these nuts three times and I think that calls for a celebration. Here’s a makeshift recipe so you can join in on the festivities:

Caramelised (Christmas) Nuts

• 200 grams mixed nuts (here I’ve used hazelnuts and almonds)
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon (don’t let the cinnamon scrolls below fool you – they’re just eye candy)
• A tiny bit of salt
• 1/2 star anise, ground or finely chopped (this one is the real deal – don’t resort to pre-ground stuff please)
• 1-1,5 dl. icing sugar (to be honest I’ve never measured it).

First of all: I really recommend that you use icing sugar and not granulated or caster sugar. Using icing sugar is what gives that shiny and thin crackling sugar shell, that sends out a wonderful music when you pour them into a jar. Very much like the sound of ocean water trickling through shells on a tropical beach.

Second: These nuts can be made with all sorts of spice combinations. I imagine sea salt and rosemary or maybe cocoa and orange peel could work but please let me know if you find a magic combo I shouldn’t live without.

Third: This recipe also works well for praline. Just follow the steps and chop into fine pieces that you can add to ice cream, mousses, nougat, marzipan etc.

Anyway, down to business:

Prepare a sheet of baking paper or silicone sheet on a cold baking tray. Crush the 1/2 star anise on a chopping board/in a mortar and mix with cinnamon and salt and set the spice mixture aside. Start toasting the hazelnuts first, just until they’re light brown and the skin peels off. I like to pour them onto some paper and rub the more stubborn specimens against each other until the skin comes off – but don’t do it in a tea towel unless you want brown stains on it. Then toast the almonds lightly (sometimes you can hear them cracking and that’s perfectly alright).

Throw the hazelnuts and the spice mix in with the almonds and shuffle them around a bit. Dust with some icing sugar and mix again. Then wait for the sugar to melt and distribute itself evenly on the nuts. You can repeat this several times until the sugar coating has the right thickness to your liking but make sure you stir and mix regularly – never on too high heat and always watching over it like a baby in its crib. It will look something like this shot below. Not my best photo I know, but I thought it might be helpful for you to see the condition of the nuts, pre-deliciousness:

If you find that some of the nuts stay white with unmelted sugar, you can always add a few drops (no more) of water to the single nuts to make the caramel cover more evenly. When all of the sugar has melted the nuts are ready. Pour them onto the baking paper/silicone sheet and try to separate them with a fork. Keep a glass of hot water handy in case you need to dip the fork to make it less sticky. Be careful not to touch the nuts with your bare hands until you’re sure they’re not too hot. When they’re lukewarm just pull the nuts apart before they turn into huge clusters – unless you’re using them for praline in which case it doesn’t matter. Leave to cool completely before pouring them into a jar. Crunch!

(Pretty cake sign in the background courtesy of Simone)

It’s like ra-i-ain on your wedding day

It’s a free ri-hi-de when you’ve already paid

It’s arri-i-ving at the cake competition

When they announce the win-nerrr.

That’s what happened and I feel only Alanis would understand.

I and my current partners-in-crime here in London had our hearts set on bringing a cake for some benefit at Wilton’s Music Hall. The general Sunday laziness and temperatures soaring above 20 made us an hour late with our entry to the competition: An orange and almond cake.

We pulled out the shiny object only to find that they had decided (probably for health reasons) not to judge by taste but rather by the amount of play-dough/hobby paint skills displayed in the final product which made our cake completely superfluous. Below are some of the other entries. Note our cake on the top left, just above one of the winners. My favourite is the open cavity with candied cherries on top. That one was hilarious.

So in the end we did the only decent thing: Handed in the cake and went straight up and bought half of it back while maintaining that we were just anonymous fans of “that cake with the shining stuff on top”.

Orange and Almond Cake (slightly tweaked recipe by Camilla Plum)

• 2 organic oranges
• 225 grams almonds, peeled and chopped
• 1/2 vanilla pod, only the seeds (keep the pod for another purpose)
• 225 grams sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 6 eggs

• 75 grams good dark chocolate (here: Green & Black’s organic cooking chocolate, 72%)
• 25 grams flaked almonds, lightly toasted

Put the whole oranges in a large saucepan, cover them with water, and boil them until the peel has turned slightly pale and it has all but cracked. It will take from 60-90 minutes depending on the stubbornness of the oranges. Meanwhile, peel the almonds, chop them coarsely, allowing a few larger bits if you like some resistance in your cake. Then slice the halved vanilla pod open, remove the seeds and mix them with a tablespoon of the sugar to separate them properly. Mix the almonds, sugar, vanilla, and baking powder in a bowl and set aside.

Turn the oven on to 160 degrees Celcius. Remove the cooked oranges from the saucepan. Now they should be soft enough to be pulled apart easily by hand. Make sure to remove any pips and then purée them into an even, kind of creamy paste, mix it with the dry ingredients and finally add the eggs one by one.

Use a regular sized round cake mould. If you choose the metal spring type, grease it with butter and dust it with regular flower before adding the cake batter, but if you have a silicone one you won’t need that. Bake on a tray just below the middle for about an hour or until the cake is soft but firm and nothing sticks to the fork. Be sure to check on it now and then as it does tend to scorch easily.

As soon as the cake has been removed from the oven, chop the chocolate coarsely and spread it out evenly on the still hot surface of the cake. You can choose to release the cake from the mould before adding the chocolate. That’s what I did here. Then, spread the melting chocolate and sprinkle the almond flakes on top. Done! Now skip off and be late for some do.

BONUS CELEBRITY AT WILTON’S: Barbara Windsor of Eastenders (who was being a really good sport):

Okay, so the latest trick to get me back into the posting game is to allow me a maximum of 15 mins. to do it. So here goes some serious speed-posting:

Do you ever get those after-lunch sugar cravings? Well, this is the cure. I made a relaxed reinterpretation of the recipe from 101 Cookbooks, by converting it to decilitres, adding a few touches of my own but basically keeping the proportions of sugar/syrup and muesli filling intact. Here goes:

Lemon, Almond and Apricot Muesli Bars (makes about 15-20 depending on size)

Adapted from 101 Cookbooks (there’s a video as well as a written recipe for your new addiction)

• 1 1/2 deciliter (dl) dessicated coconut
• 1 1/2 dl roughly chopped almonds
• 1 dl sunflower seeds

• 2 dl roughly rolled oats (“grovvalsede”)
• Zest of 1/2 lemon
• 6 dried apricots cut into little cubes

• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1 dl dark syrup
• 1/2 dl cane sugar
• 1-2 tsp vanilla sugar
• Pinch of salt

Turn the oven on to 180 degrees Celcius. Line a baking tray with paper and add the coconut, almonds and sunflower seeds. Allow them to toast in the oven for about 5 mins or until the coconut has turned light brown (keep a watchful eye on those rascals). When they’re done, add them to a bowl with the lemon zest (the heat of the nuts bring out the lemon flavour), the rolled oats and the apricots.

In a saucepan, add lemon juice, syrup, sugar, vanilla sugar and salt. Bring to a boil and leave it there for about 4 mins., when the syrup should have thickened slightly. Pour the syrup over the remaining ingredients and be sure to mix it in evenly. Then pour the sticky mixture into a buttered baking tin (I use this metal frame that can be adjusted in size) and press it firmly together. Leave to cool for about 30 mins and cut into your preferred size. Enjoy! I am chomping one at this very moment! Mmmmmcrunchy-vanilla-lemon-almond-chewy-mmm.

(UPDATE: Made these again the other day and found that the bars look a lot more professional and appetising when using a mould of silicone squares (mine is a Moulflex with 9 rectangular holes in one mould). That way every single bar keeps its syrupy shine all over the surface instead of the rather bleak looking sides where the knife has been. Just a recommendation, but of course, the flavour remains the same either way.)

I really feel like pulling out some dusty old map and pointing out the many places we visited in our four weeks of Australia time, but I’ll just settle with a recipe to get us started. In our last week of gallivanting, we ended up in Perth on the west coast, where we met up with mum’s friend from back in the day – Margaret. And to those of you who don’t already know it, my mum’s Australian and lived there into her twenties when she moved to Europe and eventually settled in Denmark with my Danish dad.

Anyway, my mum was also in Perth and the four of us (T included) rented a car, a blue thing full of testosterone  although the license plate only said “1DIK”. Seriously. Naturally we milked that one for days. But the car took us everywhere, around Perth, further south through Busselton (Margaret’s native town), the Margaret River wine region and to the south-tip where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Pacific. And somewhere in-between, we found a Saturday market in a sleepy town hall, where the locals had brought stuff like those classic knitted bits no one know what to do with (like a hat for boiled eggs or a napkin ring) as well as a few food-related things.

Enter the prunes in red wine syrup.

There was this one stall with a pretty simple setup and a guy in a laid-back chair, who had the best mouthfuls! Not an awful lot, but just the right things. The two I remember best were the runny-centered chocolate “muffins” (very much like the French moelleux) with a single soft prune in the middle and then the whole jars of prunes in Shiraz (Australian Syrrah) syrup. And we couldn’t stop marvelling at the velvety deep flavoured syrup and the prunes, ahh the prunes. Can’t stop saying “the prunes” and I’m not even that pruny myself. Thankfully, he revealed a lot of his cooking secrets to us, which mainly consisted of Shiraz, sugar, prunes and 12 hours of patience.

So now I’m back in Denmark, where the snow is lining the branches like thick toothpaste and we’re all struggling to keep warm in our silly designer wellingtons. Just the right time to pull out a feel-good recipe or rather – an experiment in that direction. Here it goes:

Prunes in Red Wine Syrup (serves at least 8 people)

• 1 bottle Periquita (happened to be the only red wine at hand, left over from my friend’s bachelorette party, but any not too sweet wine will do I suppose)
• 180 grams raw cane sugar
• 180 regular sugar
• 320 grams prunes
• 1-2 limes

For serving:

• Peeled, toasted and chopped almonds
• Greek yoghurt (2% fat)
• Cream for whipping
• Vanilla sugar

Add the wine and sugars to a heavy-bottomed pot and leave to simmer without a lid for about 30 mins (but keep an eye on it now and then). Then add the prunes and let it all simmer for another 20-30 mins, still without a lid, but don’t let it bubble up. If it does anyway, it probably means the syrup has turned too sticky (and it will thicken even further when cooled down). But don’t fret – you can always dilute it with a bit of water. Then take it off the heat and add the juice of at least one lime and add a bit more if the sweetness is still a bit too much. I prefer doing it this way rather than just cutting down on the sugar as the lime adds a nice spice to it. Then leave the prunes for a couple of minutes while you scald a large jar. Finally pour the prunes into the jar and leave to set in the fridge. I like to serve them chilled with peeled, toasted and chopped almonds and a dollop of 3 parts whipped cream to 1 part greek yoghurt with a bit of vanilla sugar. It’s just the right combination of crunchy nuts, slightly sour and fluffy cream and intense prunes.

I’d love to give the chocolate treatment to the prunes at some point too. Let me know if you do and what becomes of it.

NOTE: With this recipe, the prunes stay slightly chewy (the way they are soft and chewy when fresh from the bag), but if you like them softer you could go in the Australian guy’s direction and opt for 12 hours of very slow cooking… I still think his 12 hours are meant for ginormous portions, so maybe try with two hours and see how you go from there.

I’ve decided to stop whining about boring mueslis and make my own. It’s as simple as that and so is this recipe. Naturally this isn’t the only way of making muesli, but it’s one way and that’s a start. Take it from there and experiment with your own favourite spices, nuts, seeds and dried fruit and never ever again will you have to wake up to a bowl of wood shavings. That’s no way to start your day. This is much better:

Muesli (makes approx. 500 grams)

• 1 dl almonds
• 6 cardamom capsules (shell removed and centre powdered)
• 2 tsp powdered ginger
• 1 tsp powdered cinnamon
• 1/2 decilitre sunflower seeds
• 4 + 2 dl rolled oats
• 1 dl cane sugar
• 15 dried apricots
• 2 tbsp dried cranberries
• 2 tbsp flaxseed

Put a frying pan on medium heat and roast the almonds. If I hadn’t been that lazy today, I would have peeled them  first for a nicer look and more noticeable flavour. Then remove them from the heat and chop them into large pieces. Turn the heat lower and add the spices. Allow them to warm up for a bit until the scents start to open up. Then add the 4 dl of rolled oats and the cane sugar and roast everything slowly while continually scraping the surface of the pan gently. Soon the sugar will start melting so you need to make sure everything is mixed and that it doesn’t stick or burn. Just before it is done, add the dried fruit, the almonds, the two kinds of seeds and the remaining rolled oats. When the mixture has finally turned brown and slightly crispy, pour it onto a lined baking tray and leave it to cool. And that’s it. Now you can actually have a flavourful breakfast where you control the amount of favourite bits, not to mention the sugar content.

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 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 (with a few cracks and dents;-). 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 and the flavour were spot on and the look very nice  if you like the rustic and not French-nazi-patisserie chef-style. But I would like to learn how to make all of the macaroons the same size and without cracks in the surface.

NOTE: I just attended a patisserie class last night (May 5th) at La Glace in Copenhagen. There we learnt, that the cracks can be avoided by, among other things, making sure the almond-cocoa-sugar mixture is completely even and mixed, before adding the meringue.

Okay, so I’ve had this amazing New Year’s post planned for quite some time now where I finally give you the recipe for the traditional Danish New Year’s kage “Kransekage” (above left and partly on the right too) that I’ve shown you only in the shape of a picture for the last two years. But then January happened and I’ve done nothing about it so far. That’s why I’m giving you, my supposed readers, the chance to interact and change the course of history. I will post the pictures of my New Year’s cake below and the recipe will follow, but ONLY ON DEMAND!!! How about that for a tempting offer? Anyway, looking forward to seeing if you’re still out there and as curious as ever. Ready? Here we go (I won’t be waiting by the computer, no I won’t. But maybe I’ll finally sort out my desktop while I’m here, you know? Delete my unnecessities and all of those “Linx_ 2_ kool_ stuff.doc” things crowding my workplace. While I’m at it, maybe it’s time to exchange the picture of Matt Damon on a bear skin for something more 2010, say that pale guy from “Twilight”, no wait, that Malibu Ken dude from “New Moon” getting out of the water. Yes! That’s what I’ll do. But don’t mind me. Just post a comment if you want me to fill in the blanks between these pictures.)

UPDATE: It seems there’s a genuine demand for the kransekage-recipe in New York (thanks for a great evening with your really nice friends and your dad’s turtles Sarah!), so here it goes:

Kransekage (12 people)

Recipe adapted from this original

Cake

• 500 grams of marzipan
• 200 grams of icing sugar
• 1 egg white
• 25 grams of chopped almonds (optional – I like the bit of bite it adds)
• 1 tbsp freshly ground espresso beans OR 1-2 tsp lemon zest

Icing

• 250 grams of icing sugar
• 1 pasteurized egg white

Mix all of the ingredients for the cake well - with your hands, yes, get them in there and down and dirty. If you just found a rock where you thought your soft marzipan was, try grating it first. That usually does the trick. The espressoed version makes for a grainy texture and rustic look as you might be able to tell from these pictures – as well as gives a good kick to an otherwise very sweet experience. The lemon zest version on the other hand is much more perfumed and delicate. Anyhoolahoop, after you’ve kneaded the marzipan, sugar, egg white, almonds and espresso/lemon zest put it in a plastic bag and leave it in the fridge for 3-4 hours.

Turn on the oven to 225 degrees Celcius. Take out the mixture from the fridge, sift a bit of flour onto a clean table and roll it into long, 1,5 cm thick “sticks”. Then cut them into separate sticks with alternating lenghts, 8 cm, 12, 16, 20, 24 etc. Depending on how small you want the top layer of the cake to be, you can also start at 6 cm. And now comes the fun part – it’s play dough time. Connect each stick with its own end to create circles. You might need to smooth out the joint with a tiny bit of water. When all of the circles are done, put two fingers on the inside and a couple on the outside of each ring and gently press them down and up so it gets a flat bottom and a narrow top. That way when you layer the rings, the transition between them will be nice and gradual as it should be – but hey, I don’t expect all of you to be that anal. And finally – always stack the rings to match the size before you place them on two baking trays with plenty, and I mean PLENTY of space in between. Bake them for 8-10 mins and leave them to cool completely before you make the icing.

The above measures make a lot of icing, so if you’re not into a laced-over cake, you can also make half and there’ll be enough to go around. Put the icing in a piping bag or a plastic bag with a tiny hole. Then decorate the rings as you like and make sure to finish off with a circle of icing as glue between the layers. Then stack the layers before the icing sets and leave them to dry completely. And – you’re done (literally).

This is NOT a 10 minute treat. Not by a longshot. But oh my G does it hit the spot after 2-3 hours of messing about in the kitchen. While it may not be a beginner’s recipe, it’s not as hard as one might think. The only problem is the chocolate, but come on, when has chocolate ever really been a problem?

Chocolate drippings everywhere just give you an extra excuse to taste the stuff as you go along.

• 3 (pasteurized) egg whites
• 20 grams sugar
• 1/2 vanilla pod
• 15 raspberries, mashed (you can choose to remove the seeds by pressing them through a sieve first)
  —————–
• 50 grams water
• 225 grams sugar

• 150 grams marzipan
• 20 grams chopped almonds

• 200 grams very dark chocolate, e.g. Lindt 85% cocoa which has a very nice acidity

• Place the tip of the piping bag on the middle of a marzipan circle.
• Hold it upright and squeeze out an even blob that goes almost to the edge of the base
• Stick the tip into the blob and squeeze some more, always lifting it slightly upwards as you go. This should result in layered “waves” of meringue that turn smaller as you reach the wanted height. Mine were about 7 cm tall. See above photo for details.
• When all of the bases have been topped with meringue, leave them to set for 30 mins.