Hello dear reader,

I know it’s been a while again but it has been a busy October this year. Most important of all, a dream of mine has come true: I started studying medicine in Berlin. I realized that going to school and going university are two completely different things and I do my best to enjoy as much as possible.

So my new life is really exciting and fabulous thus far, but let us with over to food.

More than a month ago, back in September, I was at my grandma’s again. I spent about 10 days in Bulgaria, where the beginning of autumn is still warm and full of life. The following pictures show you this year’s impressions of the journey.

My grandma has violet chilies growing at her balcony. They are tiny, but really hot! Beware, beware, beware…

Since nobody has cooked for me in a long time, I was very happy to get a fabulous vegetable lasagna à la Gran, with eggplant, zucchini and Bulgarian cheeeeeese.

This year, I had the wonderful opportunity to help my grandparents can some harvest for the cold season. We had plenty of tomatoes and peppers, parsley and plums.

We roasted the peppers in a special gadget for roasting peppers (my grandma owns this kind of stuff) and shredded the tomatoes through a mill.

It is wonderful to have cans with veggies that have actually ripened in the sun, so when you open them to make casserole or whatever, everything tastes like summer.

We also had plenty of plums, as it was the season back then and converted them into some yummy marmalade. (Guess what I did? Licked the spoon and the large pot, of course.)

If you have followed the blog for a longer time, you might have realized that I adore figs. Luckily, my grandparents’ fig tree had already plenty of them ready to make their way to my stomach. Honestly, I ate a huge amount of them during my stay.

I really love looking at these pictures again, because they remind me of the warm late summer days at the coast of the Black Sea and most of all, I love the light at the time. It makes all the colors look so bright and natural.
Hope you like it just as much as I do.

I don’t have an oven. Since I have moved to Berlin, where I am about to start studying, my kitchen contains no oven, nor the possibility to place one inside the new flat.

Until I move out, it will not be possible for me to bake sweets in my new home, so baked goods might be shown here less often (you might have already noticed). Nevertheless, I have prepared some things for you that should keep the blog going until my kitchen supplies have changed and I hope you like the result shown in the pictures as much as I do.

You know I love figs. Hells, I REALLY love them. When visiting my grandma in Bulgaria this year, I kind of occupied her oven to experiment. This is a result, isn’t it? Cinnamon cheesecake with a crunchy cookie crust, topped with sweet, soft and juicy figs and in between a caramel note due to the decorative parts.

So this is how things are going right now and I really hope to be able to show you more of this as soon as possible. But for now, we remain with this beauty here. And this is the recipe:

Fig Topped Cinnamon Cheesecake:

crust:

250 g (8 oz.) Hobbit cookies
125 g (1 stick) butter, melted

cheese layer:

600 g (20 oz.) cream cheese
200 g (7 oz.) sour cream
200 g (1 cup – 1 tbsp.) sugar
3 eggs
3 tsp ground cinnamon
1 pckt. vanilla pudding powder (or 2 tbsp. flour)

fig topping:

400 g fresh figs
50 g (1/4 cup) sugar

Preheat oven to 175°C (350°F).

Crunch the cookies in a freezer bag. Mix the crumbles with the melted butter and spread in a round cake pan with 26 cm (10´´) diameter. Press down the cookie and butter mixture with a spoon.

In a large bowl, combine the ingredients for the cheese layer and beat with a mixer until the mass is smooth. Pour the mass over the cookie crust and bake for about 45 minutes (until the center stops jiggling).
Don’t turn off the oven yet.
Let the cheesecake cool and prepare the figs in the meantime.

Place the figs in a large pan. Spread the sugar on top and bake in the preheated oven for about 20 minutes, until there is a jelly-like liquid at the bottom of your pan.

Place the figs on top of the cake and pour the jelly all over them.

You can decorate the cake with caramel ornaments, if you wish. (Heat about 75 g/ 1/3 cup of white sugar in a saucepan until it melts and spread the caramel on a sheet of parchment paper to harden.)

Tastes best with… nah, it tastes good enough the way it is. Enjoy!

So I loked for a way to cool down a bit in a healthy way an this is what my dehydrated brain produced: Juice pops. Actually, thi is the easiest thing ever, if you own a mold for ice popsicles.

And the best thing is: you need no more than 4 ingredients. I just love the way the grapefruit juice adds freshness to the whole popsicle and eating the berries out of the ice is fun, too.
So if you need a deliciuos cool down, throw that few things together and get outside again.

Iced Juice Pops

(makes 8 popsicles of about 90ml/ 1/3 cup)

100 ml grapefruit juice
500 ml peach juice
1 cup mixed berries, frozen

Combine the juices in a bowl or measuring cup. Divide the berries equally between the molds. Pour the juice over the berries until the molds are full. Freeze for at least 4 hours.

Cool down!

Yuuuuum! I finally made a real cake this weekend and had a blast while doing so (and while eating it).
This new combination of lychee, hibiscus and a little vanilla transformed my fluffy and light cake into a juicy tropical flavor bomb.

The basic is a fluffy sponge cake, soaked with the juice from the canned lychee.

Aaaand on top of it, you form a dome of beaten heavy cream and curd with a spoon. It feels great to just dig in and have a spoonful of this cake. (It should not contain that much fat because of the skinny curd and the sponge cake. – Just sayin’.) I put a little orange food coloring into the cream to make the optical effect more intense and decorated the whole thing with coconut flakes, one hibiscus flower, white chocolate and rose petals. But this is not really nessecary.

Luchee Hibiscus Dome

sponge cake layer:

85 g (2/3 cup) flour
2 eggs
110 g (1/2 cup) sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract

cream layer:

250 ml (1 cup) heavy cream, beaten
1 pckt. instant yoghurt/curd powder vanilla
500 g (18 oz.) curd (0,2 % fat)
1 can lychee, drained
juice from 1 can lychee
4 hibiscus blossoms in sugar syrup
powdered sugar, to taste

Preheat the oven to 175°C (350°C).

Beat the eggs and sugar in a bowl with a mixer until the mixture is all light and fluffy, for about 90 to 120 seconds.
Stir in vanilla.

Mix baking powde and flour and sift the dry ingredients over the egg mass.
Stir again on medium speed until the flour is incorporated – do not overbeat.

Pour the dough into a slightly greased round pan with 26 cm (10´´) diameter. Bake for 12 – 15 minutes until a toothpicker comes out clean. Let the cake layer cool on the counter.

To prepare the cream, beat the heavy cream until stiff. Then add the vanilla powder (I used ‘Paradise cream’) and stir. The cream will become thicker, but that is exactly what you need to get a steady dome.

Purée the drained lychee fruit and stir it in the cream, add the curd. Chop the hibiscus blossoms and stir them in. You can add some orange food colouring to for an optical effect.

Stab a couple of wholes into the sponge layer by using a fork. Soak it with most of the lychee juice from the can. Now place the cream on top of the cake. You get a kind of dome by putting one heaped tbsp in the center after the other. Decorate and let set in the fridge for about 2-3 hours

I used an original Italian tiramisu recipe as a basic, but substituted the espresso and amaretto for plums with sauce (I don’t like alcohol and coffee in dessert).

I am sure you can do this as well with blueberies or peaches with the same delicious result. So.. when you have stopped dieting because of your new year’s resolutions – try this, you will not regret it.

Plum Tiramisu:

3 eggs
75 g (1/3 cup) sugar
250 g (8 oz.) ladyfingers
500 g (18 oz.) mascarpone

2 ripe plums
300 ml (1 1/6 cup) orange juice
1/2 tsp cinnamon

cocoa powder, for dusting

Cut the plums into thin clices and then the slices into smaller pieces – this will make the tiramisu easier to eat. Put the cut fruit together with orange juice and cinnamon in a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Cook for about 5 minutes, then remove from the heat.

Seperate the eggs and beat the eggwhites with half of the sugar in a bowl until stiff. In a second bowl, stir the egg yolks with the rest of the sugar and mascarpone. Now carefully integrate the beaten egg whites in the creamy mass, trying to keep as much air inside as possible.

Put a layer of ladyfingers at the bottom of a rectangular pan. Pour half of the orange sauce and half of the plums on it. Cover with half of the cream. place a new layer of ladyfingers on top and repeat.

Let the dessert cool for at least two hours, but not for more than a day, since it contains raw eggs.