A bit of Julehygge

The majority of December was spend being sick. In fact I think at least one person in our household has been sick every day of this month. Still I managed to sneak in a bit of Christmas hygge in those tiny windows of well being.

This year, I decided to try and bake spekulatius cookies and the first batch turned out really well. As always I made lussebullar for Lucia. Christmas and my urge to bake are somehow closely connected and this year I had a little helper by my side. (Wonder if she was trying to draw Santa on the table)

The Tale of an Acorn

Back when we could still wear short sleeved t-shirts outside, we spend some afternoons gathering acorns nearby.

I read that it's possible to make acorn flour and thought, why not? It's been a while since I indulged a completely unnecessary experiment.

When I say we spend a couple afternoons, it was because I made the rookie mistake of picking the green acorns instead of the brown. After we spend some hours de-shelling the acorns we gathered that day, we found out that we needed to use the brown ones and had to with a couple off weeks before we went back.

Acorns need to go through quite a long process before you can actually eat them. They contain a lot of tannin, and I am sure you could get a mean stomach ache, if you ate them unprocessed. First they need to boil, then you need to dry them (I did this in the oven), and to make flour you obviously need to mill the dried acorn pieces (or as I did: use a very good food processor). After all this work, we ended up with around 250 g of flour, which doesn't sound of much, but it was enough to make a couple of batches of acorn cookie during the fall. I used a normal short bread recipe and replaced half the normal flour with our the acorn flour.

I was wondering if the taste would be worth all the work, and even though it is not the best cookie I've ever had in my life, it was really unlike anything I ever tried - not at all bad, but very sweet. So I won't reject that I would go through the same laboursome process when next years fall when the ground once again will fill up with acorn en masse.

Seasons Green

One of the best things about this time of year is all the fresh seasonal greens. Right now we enjoy asparagus season and the fact that the German strawberries came a bit early this year.

Currently I let Fleur help me do the shopping and she is very good at it. This also means that sometimes we come home with more than planned. Once in a while she really picks up stuff where I think, "well, why not." Like when she showed extra interest in the rhubarb and I thought, "well, it would also be nice to make a rhubarb tart for saturday when Tina comes to visit." And so I did. Rhubarb tart with pistachio frangipane and vanilla ice as topping, and there were so much rhubarb that Fleur also got some compote from it as a kind of thank you for the good idea.

Sunday

Another sunny Sunday started at Jacobi with coffee and croissant and led us to Tempelhof, where Fleur had a nice long walk up and down the runway. I ended up baking spontaneous English Muffins as we were out of bread and no good bakery was open. First attempt, and not a bad one.

It's Rhubarb Season

What a lovely cake this was, definitely going into the save folder for future reference. If you want to try yourself this is the recipe.

The Tale of a Kransekage

Last year, when we were in Paris for New Year, I attempted my first kransekage. For those of you who don't know what kransekage is, it is a baked marzipan cake - sometimes filled with nougat, sometimes not- and it is very common to eat at big celebrations such as weddings and very traditional to have with the Champagne at the stroke of midnight on new years eve.

Last year, I just made straight pieces, but this year I felt like taking on the challenge of the kransekage-tower - something a bit more festive - since we were going to kliché new years dinner.

In the end, I was quite satisfied with it, even though I had slight problems with getting it to harden in our gas oven. But I managed and they all fitted on top of each other. So next year, I will just have to focus on making it look prettier.