I like fruits when they are still partially green, unripe. I want them to be really hard and not so juicy. My mother, who is in love with all the juicy and messy fruits, always told me that I was a bit “weird” in that sense.. Well, maybe I am.
You probably know, from my previous fig related recipes, that I am not the biggest fan of figs. And yet, they are so great to use as ingredients that this late summer/beginning of autumn I used them quite a lot in many recipes, from salads to cakes.
Did you know that if you mix tahini and molasses, you get a fluid and deadly sweet & gorgeous dessert? You can just dip your bread in it and bamm! You would probably get less sweet if you actually inject sugar in your veins… And my mother used to just spoon this whole thing, without making the sweet taste even a bit milder with the help of bread.. I’m hoping she stopped doing that (since she is 72 years old with a weight problem…). Ok but that was not the thing I was going to talk about!
A friend of mine sent me a text message two weeks ago: Hi dear, one of my students (she gives private Turkish courses) discovered your blog and baked “simit”. She said that she loved the blog and that the recipes were so easy to understand. I told her that I would tell you immediately, to make you happy. And yes, I WAS happy!
This autumn is definitely the one that I got to learn so many new uses of pumpkin. I somehow cannot remember much, but I guess the only thing I knew about it before was the traditional Turkish pumpkin dessert, that’s all (by the way, it is one of my favourite desserts in the whole world!).
If I ever manage to open my own bakery, I will bake something with cinnamon every day, especially in autumn and in winter. Cinnamon gives the cosiest ever smell… When I baked this semi-sweet bread, the kitchen (and ultimately the whole apartment) smelled so nicely of cinnamon that I could stay inside forever.
If there is one thing I don’t actually like in French cuisine, it is the famous French macaroons. Even if text edit insists on correcting the word as macaroons, I want to write it in French: macarons!
It was about 2 weeks before I came to Helsinki in 2010. I realised that I had absolutely no idea on how Finnish cuisine was. I made so much research about many aspects of my new home, but forgot the food part! I guess I thought that food ought not be a hard topic, that I could find something to eat after all. Of course I had in my mind the regular stereotypes, like, “oh, they eat reindeer there..”. But then, I checked wikipedia.
For a while now, I was planning to learn how to make the softest and chewiest chocolate chip cookies. I was searching for the recipes and it looked quite easy but there was one quite big problem: where the hell would I buy chocolate chips?! I checked the baking section of many stores but there were just some crushed chocolates but no chips… Just when I decided to make crushed chocolate cookies, I remembered the life saver little store: behnford’s.. And yes, of course I could find chips there.. And so, I could finally bake the easiest but at the same time yummiest cookies!
I am not a professional cook, nor have I been cooking for a really long time. I just have the rather newly acquired passion, it gets bigger and bigger as I cook more and as people love what I cook more. This motivates me big time! But, I am still learning the secrets of cooking and especially baking. So what do I do when I want to try experiment something really new for me?
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