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.
It is time for me to make a confession. I was not confident enough to say it until now but it is a real problem for the blog at the moment and therefore I have to share. So here we go:
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!
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.
