Christmas time has begun. Yeah, I don’t talk about winter because I hate winter. There are three seasons of the year for me: Spring, Summer, Christmas. So, when I saw the first snowflakes fall from the sky and melt on the dirty streets this week, I assumed Christmas might have begun. You got any presents for your people already? Well, I do, because I love giving stuff to ohers – even more than getting it myself.
And what fits Christmas time more than a chai latte? I have no idea (I do not like spiced wine that much, so this is the drink I become addicted to during the cold months). It was a kind of vision of mine that a chai latte needed to be made and that it would be a succes.
Love the spices in this wonderful fluffy mass. I also added some small pieces of apple under the cheese layer, which added some freshness to the spices. It is definitely worth a try. (Not only because it is my very own creation.)
Chai Latte Cheesecakes
(makes about 12 cheesecakes in a muffin pan)
60 g (1/4 cup) butter
90 g (3/8 cup) sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp flour
2 eggs
250 g (9 oz) curd
100 g (3 oz) sour cream
100 ml (3/8 cup) heavy cream
50 g (2 packets) instant chai latte powder
1 small apple, cut into thin slices
12 round cookies (for the bottom of the molds)
Line a muffin pan with paper molds. Place a cookie at the bottom of each mold. Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F).
For the cheese layer, mix butter, sugar, vanilla extract, flour and eggs in a bowl. Add curd and sour cream and cream until incorporated.
Beat the heavy cream in a seperate bowl, then fold it gently in the rest of the mass. Last but not least, put in the chai latte powder.
Put apple slices into the molds, so the cookie is covered by a thin layer of apple. Fill the molds up to 3/4 with the cheese mass.
Bake for about 35 minutes.
Et voilà!
So glad I can present to you a recipe that used to make my face lighten up when I was a child. My Mum used to make it every now and then and I was always amazed by how a sticky brown mass looking like nothing turned into a sweet bar of chocolate that looked like meat. Today I do not eat meat any more, but I feel like I am thrown back into my childhood when seeing (and eating) it.
I was very excited, when an Italian friend of mine told me they use to make this treat in Italy. I asked for the recipe, because my Mum never taught me how to prepare a chocolate salame. So here we go.
It is quite easy to prepare and the result looks realistic with no afford. You just have to let the fridge do the work. I used half of the original recipe and got out two sausages with the length of about 25 cm (10´´). As I assume this is quite much, still, I will let you know the instructions for this amount of it.
Chocolate Salame:
100 g butter
125 g shortbread cookies
100 g sugar
50 g dark cocoa powder
1 egg
1 pinch cinnamon
Crumble the cookies by smashing them with a rolling pin in a freezer bag.
Melt the butter in a medium-sized pan over low heat. Stir in sugar, cocoa powder and egg. Then put in all the cookies and mix well with a spoon.
Lay out a piece of aluminium foil and pour half of the chocolate mass in a line on it. Roll in the foil and shape it with your hands until it looks like – well – a salame. If you want to, you can put sprinkles or chopped nuts on the surface, so it does not stick to the foil. Otherwise dust it with some powdered sugar. Wrap the salame up in aluminium foil and let it chill in the fridge for at least two hours.
Then cut it into slices like a sausage ;)
My trip to Bulgaria was very interesting, also from a culinary point of view. Go with me on a trip to the coast of the Black Sea and I will tell you what I ate.
This lollipop brought me back to my childhood, I think you might know this (if you are a 90’s kid you definitely will).
Found a truck with a sign promoting Thuringian sausages right before my grandmother’s house.
My brother’s favourite donuts were to be found in Varna’s park by the sea. He ate 20 (!!!) for breakfast topped with chocolate sauce and I ate five with fig sauce. It is a rare event that I eat deep-fried food, but this one was totally worth it.
The pictures below were taken on a food market in the city.
Here we have my dinner at the mall. Yummy sushi with avocado. And the pic below shows my brother eating some really good pizza. Grand mall Varna has a really nice food court, my dears.
These are bread cups filled with a kind of sour cream. My mother’s cousin has created them. I really liked the poppyseeds in the dough in combnation with the savoury cream.
Here we have a topping bar for frozen yoghurt at a mall in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. I had a banana milkshake, though, because I did not really feel like eating something ice cold. No regrets.
I soooo love fresh, soft and fluffy Easter bread, no matter what time of the year it is. By the way, you cane make Easter bread by yourself with the help of this recipe.
There was a lot of fruit at my grandma’s garden, fresh and ripened in the sun. Look at this giant tomato the neighbours gave to me!
This. This is IT. That’s what I went there for. Figs. I LOVE figs. There is no better fruit than freshly picked violet figs. I enjoyed each and every bite.
And here we go with one more special thing – grandmother’s homemade banitsa, a phyllo dough “cake” filled with cheese.
I was honored to bake for our guests this summer. I used my mini cheesecake recipe and made one large cake in a round pan. It turned out so beautiful I could not resist to show you.
And these ones were my favourites: Grandma’s pancakes with chocolate cream for breakfast – my brother had them for 6 weeks almost every day.
And my favourite savoury meal: roasted peppers with tomato sauce. Ripe vegetables make this meal finger-lickin’ good.
