Chocolate Crinkles

 Crisp on the outside and still soft and fudgy in the inside, chocolate crinkles are one of the most delicious chocolate treats. They are also known as chocolate crisps or black-and-white cookies.
Successful chocolate crinkle is soft with strong chocolate taste and has a cracked surface as the ones in the pictures.

You can make crinkles in any time of the year but they are considered to be Christmas cookies. I, of course, had to make them now when there's 35 degrees Celsius in shade, but I couldn't resist them after I came across this beautiful recipe.

To make successful crinkles you should use dark chocolate with a high amount of cocoa. And for their characteristic appearance, I recomend you to first roll them into granulated sugar and then generously cover them with icing sugar. That way the icing sugar won't touch the dough and it won't melt while baking.

I slightly changed the original recipe and halved the amount of sugar because to me, chocolate was sweet enough. Not bad for my first crinkles!

Ingredients (makes 50 cookies)

• 2 eggs
• 60g butter
• 100g granulated sugar
• 200g dark chocolate
• 1tsp vanilla estract
• 200g flour
• 1tsp baking powder
• pinch of salt
• granulated and icing sugar for decoration

Procedure:

• melt the chocolate and set aside to cool down
• sieve flour, salt and baking powder together, set aside
• mix butter with sugar and vanilla
• and chocolate, stir
• add the eggs, one at a time, stir a little
• add the dry ingredients
• leave in fridge for at least 3 hours
• shape little balls (10 g each)
• roll the balls, first in the granulated sugar, and then cover with icing sugar
• put on a tray with parchment paper and bake for 10min top on 180 degrees Celsius

Vanilla flavoured french macarons with chocolate ganache filling

Holy shit, I made them!

Blackberry cobbler

Yesterday my mum came home carrying two large bowls of blackberries. The fruit was rich black and shiny, but on first touch (and bite!) it melt into sweet, sticky and bloodlike red delight. You should know she never does that, so I decided it was a sign and went in search of a perfect summer-blackberry dessert.

 I came across this beautiful recipe Meme's blackberry cobbler on Martha Stewart's recipes and decided to make it very next day. It is my first cobbler ever so I started searching a little more and found out that there is about hundred different ways to make a cobbler (you can put fruit into the liquid batter, roll tough dough onto fruit, sprinkle batter over fruit...and, of course, you can make it with any season fruit, which can be prepared in many variations....). I also found out about crumbles, crunches, and different variations of puddings and cobbler-like pies (yeah, I'm new into American kitchen :)).

 In any case, I've got a lot to explore now! As for this cobbler, it tasted great, although I think it should look a liitle bit more...hm...messy? Cobbler-like? But I'm happy with it, being my first cobbler :)

Blackberry cobbler recipe (from Virginia Willis cookbook Bon appetite, Y'all! via Martha Stewart recipes http://www.marthastewart.com/338419/memes-blackberry-cobbler)

Ingredients:

- 4 cups blackberries (preferably fresh)
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter
- 1 cup flour
- 1 cup sugar ( plus more for sprinkling)
- 2 tsp baking powder
- pinch of salt
- 1 cup of whole milk
- 1 tsp liquid vanilla extract
- vanilla ice cream for serving

 Procedure:

- preheat the oven on 190 °C (350 F).
- gently smash blackberries with potato masher to get the juices flowing. If they're not too sweet you may want to sprinkle them with a spoon of sugar.
-put butter into the oven and let it melt for a few minutes.
-mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a medium mixing bowl and whish. Add milk and vanilla extract. Whisk again.
-when butter is melt, pour it into a bowl with the other ingredients. Whisk and pour into your baking tray (the original recipe says 8 inch (20cm) square pan, but you can use any other appropriate dish).
-put blackberries in the centre and put in the oven.
-some recipes reccomend to bake from 45 minutes to 1 hour, for me 45 minutes was perfect.
-cobbler is done when the crust is golden-brown, or when a toothpick comes out clean .
Bon appetite! :)

First post ever / End of a beautiful vacation / Grandma's cookies

"I raised to my lips a spoonful of the cake . . . a shudder ran through my whole body and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place."
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
‘Remembrance of Things Past’

I thought a lot about my first post when I made this blog, which was about a month ago. I had started reading some food-bloggers ( Bake in  Paris, Tanja's cupcakes, 17 and baking, Sweet sensation and many more) and came back from trip to Paris thinking about Laduree's macarons, calissons and other delicious french candys I tried there.

I searched for a perfect macarons recipe online and came across some beautiful food-blogs I already mentioned. They were so inpirational that I decided to make my own blog about food and macarons seemed to be an obvious choice for my first post.
I went to a store, bought all the ingredients and started baking. The outcome was, well...catastrophic.
The batter I made was too sweet, there were NO legs, half of them broke and I put orange flavouring into orange ganache that I never used before and it made my ganache taste like orange bubble gum, so I had to fill the remaining shells with home made strawberry jam. I was tired, disappointed and, although I haven't gave up on doing macarons, I had nothing to write about on my blog. I decided to forget about the blog, went on a summer vacation and let the theme of my first post come to me, instead of searching for it.

And then, after three perfect weeks I spent with my friends I came home and had that sad feeling I always have when I come back home after a beautiful trip. I was sad beacuse my summer ended, but also excited about starting this blog and... suddenly, the idea appeared out of nothing! Is there a better candy to start writing about on blog than a simple, sweet grandma's cookie that reminds me of my childhood?
Instantly I started baking this old-fashioned cookies, first time on my own, and kinda felt like Proust when tasting his Madeleine cookies. Memories of childhood, this summer and starting this blog mixed with the delicious batter I made, making a perfect breakfast cookie to drink with strong turkish coffee or black tea with a bit of rum.

RECIPE: The recipe is for very simple, traditional crisp batter, but the problem is with the amounts of ingredients. To be more precise, there are no specific ingredients, It's more about feeling how much flour or sugar you need for the batter, but it shouldn't be a problem for someone who has at least a little experience with the crisp batter. I used about four big blades of flour and mixed it (with hands)with 1 and 1/2 softened margarine(cca 300g). Then I added 1 tsp of baking powder, 1 tsp of vanilla sugar and 4 small blades of white sugar. I finished it with 3 whole eggs. I shaped the batter into a ball and left it overnight in fridge. In the morning I shaped the cookies and baked it for 15 min (more or less) on 200 deg. Celsius. Dobar tek!