Month: December 2013

Coconut macadamia cookies – Don’t need flash to make a little splash

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As much as some folks like to cite shiny bling things as important, I’m convinced that very basic things done well can get the job done.

I have only made these coconut macadamia cookies once before – many years ago when I first moved to Norway. I don’t recall anything about it but decided, wanting to get rid of both coconut and macadamia nuts, that this would be a good way. Not the most popular girl at the dance, I did have a few people come up to me after trying out several cookies from the giant smörgåsbord I provided the other day, commenting that these unassuming and seemingly very plain cookies were by far the best ones they ate. Job done.

not flash but solid: coconut macadamia cookies

not flash but solid: coconut macadamia cookies

Coconut Macadamia Cookies
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
2 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 cup flaked coconut
3 1/2 ounces or so of macadamia nuts, coarsely chopped

Preheat oven to 375F. Mix butter, sugars and egg. Stir in flour and baking soda, dough will be very stiff. Stir in coconut and nuts. Drop dough by heaping tablespoons onto an ungreased cookie sheet (I rolled into balls, then flattened). Bake until light brown, 8 – 10 minutes (centers will be soft). Cool slightly, remove from cookie sheet and cool completely.

Chocolate truffles: Perfect simplicity

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As I set up the vast spread of baked stuff on Monday, I was quite shocked to see that all the chocolate truffles I brought were gone in about 15 minutes. I am sure I have brought them before, and no one ever seemed interested in them. As I discussed with someone last night, though, sometimes when confronted with too much choice, the most basic things stand out most. Or the most chocolatey things. Sometimes, like in retail and merchandising, placement is key. I don’t know how to explain the rapid disappearance of the chocolate truffles. But I can explain how ridiculously bloody easy they are to make.

CHOCOLATE TRUFFLES
18 ounces chocolate chips (511 grams of chocolate of your choice; I used milk chocolate)
14 ounces sweetened condensed milk (generally one standard-sized can)
1 teaspoon vanilla
Stuff to roll truffles in (I used plain, unsweetened cocoa powder, but you could use powdered sugar or sprinkles or whatever you prefer)

On the stovetop in a saucepan (or in a double boiler), with burner on low, melt chocolate with the sweetened condensed milk. (I do this in a glass bowl over boiling water so that I can just transfer the bowl to the fridge for the chilling part.)

Remove from heat, stir in vanilla. Chill 2 hours, shape into small balls and roll in topping. Place on a platter or in small paper cups (like cupcake cups) for candy. Chill again until just before ready to serve.

See? Really, really simple.

The bonus box: Maple pecan cookies and five-inch floppy disks

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Nothing makes a girl feel old like explaining to a youthful colleague what it was like to use floppy disks in “the old days”. It makes one feel even older than explaining the ubiquity of dial-up and AOL to people. It almost does not seem real to me either since my floppy-disk-using time was at the tail end of floppy use. That said, I still remember it well, right down to the last box of these disks that I owned. The brand was “Bonus” or something, so my brother sometimes asked jokingly, “What’s in the Bonus box?” We found it funny, but I can’t begin to understand why now.  (It’s possible he wanted to imitate the scene from the 80s film Real Men, which is so impossibly silly and stupid that I love it – and my god, look at John Ritter, who was SO young then (RIP), “Happy pie!”)

Now just seeing the words “five-inch floppy” together makes Viagra and other erectile dysfunction pharma commercials spring (yes, SPRING!) to mind. HA!

Then again, in most of the world, tv commercials for pharmaceutical, prescription drugs are not permitted. Only in America (probably) can you have drug ads in every commercial break prompting you to “ask your doctor” to prescribe all manner of toxic chemicals (and we have seen how much trouble the industry gets into as a result; for example, Johnson & Johnson recently got into hot water thanks to false marketing/making misleading claims and for paying doctors and nursing homes to recommend a specific drug that they knew had other adverse effects).

And in America – North America in general (including the Great White North, Canada, in this assessment of course), one great thing is maple syrup/flavor. In my recent baking escapades, I made not only the infamous brown sugar-maple cupcakes and frosting with candied maple bacon, but also tried a whole new recipe – maple pecan cookies. I did not hear any opinions on these one way or the other (and with 24 different options to choose from, I suppose everyone tried a lot of different things), but I assume these were okay – at least they looked the part.

maple pecan cookies

maple pecan cookies

MAPLE PECAN COOKIES

1 cup butter, room temperature
¼ cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons real maple syrup
2 cups flour
1 ½ cups finely chopped pecans (or whatever amount you desire – I used less)

Maple icing
1 ½ cups powdered sugar
2 to 3 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons cream or milk (to achieve right consistency
pecan halves, to top the cookies

Preheat oven to 350F/175C.

Cream butter and add powdered and maple syrup. Add flour and pecans and mix well. Shape into 1-inch balls and place on ungreased/parchment-lined cookie sheets. Flatten cookie slightly and use your thumb to make an indentation in the top (for the frosting and pecan. Bake in preheated oven 13 to 15 minutes or until lightly browned on the bottom. Cool completely on racks.

Mix icing ingredients together until you have achieved desired, spreadable consistency and flavor. Spread on cooled cookies and top each cookie with a pecan half.

maple pecan cookies

maple pecan cookies

“Sixteen calendars with nothing in the frame…” – I need a calendar!

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“Sixteen calendars with nothing in the frame
You said you’d pencil me in, but you don’t know my name.”
–Robyn Hitchcock “Sixteen Years”

In the old days, my former (boy)friend used to give me a new calendar every year as a Christmas gift. It started off when he made calendars for me – really the best, most personal gift I had or will ever receive(d). Later he sent other calendars, and then we stopped communicating.

I realized that he was the only one looking out for my calendar needs. Last year I lived (somehow) without a paper calendar for the first time in more than a decade. It was tough.

Now I am on the hunt for just the right calendar. At this point, though, any calendar would do. One helpful thing would be a calendar that includes the bloody week numbers on it. Sweden loves to refer to doing activities during week X, and I never know what week number it is.

 

“Nothing clings to you like laughter…” – Full list of 2013 holiday baking

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I started off today in the office exchanging messages on Facebook with a colleague who was on a bus – it was unintentionally stalker-like to see her progress as her public transport made its way to different parts of the city, and I could track her, thinking, “Oh, she must have stopped responding because she is walking up the path to the office now…”. In any case, our conversation started the day off on the right foot because it sparked laughter. And, as Robyn Hitchcock sings, “Nothing clings to you like laughter…“. Too true.

I also noted that the 24 kinds of baked goods that I brought to the office yesterday – the logistical nightmare that that was – has been reduced and fits nicely on two long tables instead of three. Progress!

Christmas 2013 spread - three full tables

Christmas 2013 spread – three full tables

The final list of stuff baked and brought along with links to recipes (where they exist – some I was making for the first time so will post in new posts in the coming days)…

COCONUT-MACADAMIA COOKIES

CHRISTMAS M&M COOKIES (I know this links to a white chocolate macadamia cookie recipe, but I have been using it for M&M cookies for a while – prefer it to the one I used to use. Just eliminate the macadamia and white chocolate and put M&Ms in instead!)

VANILLA ORANGE ALMOND BISCOTTI   

CRANBERRY PISTACHIO BISCOTTI

TART CHERRY & PINE NUT BISCOTTI      

GINGERBREAD

THUMBPRINTS (WALNUTS & CHERRY)  

RUSSIAN TEA CAKES (ALMOND)

SHORTBREAD                            

CHOCOLATE MINT COOKIES

SNICKERDOODLES                    

RASPBERRY OAT BARS

PEANUT BUTTER CUPS                  

CHOCOLATE TRUFFLES

OREO TRUFFLES           

MAPLE PECAN COOKIES

PUMPKIN PIE                             

RAFFAELLO CANDY CUPCAKES (ALMOND, COCONUT)

BROWN SUGAR CUPCAKES W/ MAPLE FROSTING AND CANDIED BACON

GUINNESS CUPCAKES W/ BAILEYS FROSTING

OREO CHOCOLATE COOKIES-AND-CREAM CUPCAKES

EGGNOG COOKIES                    

PUMPKIN DOUGHNUTS

HONEY ALMOND SHORTBREAD

O, eggnog nastiness – you are eggnot – or eggsnot: Eggnog cookies

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Eggnog cookies ready to eat

Eggnog cookies ready to eat

Despite my protestations about eggnog being completely vile, I made some. Then I used it to make eggnog cookies with eggnog glaze. It also gave me the opportunity to use fresh nutmeg and my grandmother’s nutmeg grater. I have had the grater for years, always admired it – but then reached for the jar of already ground nutmeg every time. Why did I do this for so many years??

Naked eggnog cookies begging to be glazed

Naked eggnog cookies begging to be glazed

For every task, a tool - nutmeg grater

For every task, a tool – nutmeg grater

Even though I can still report that I am disgusted by eggnog, I can say I have a new appreciation for nutmeg and old-fashioned, lovely nutmeg graters. As a firm believer in the “for every task, there is an appropriate tool”, the nutmeg grater is handy and functional.

Eggnog cookies eager to be eaten

Eggnog cookies eager to be eaten

Pumpkin doughnuts – time-sucking little bastards

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“Who needs to think when your feet just go?” – Tom Tom Club, “Genius of Love”

It is hard to overstate the tedium of my life – I don’t mind most of it but I have had my fill of some aspects. I laugh in the face of the people who sometimes tell me they admire what I have done with my life or that they think it is so exotic or exciting that I have moved to different countries and so on. It really only sounds exciting on paper – everyday life is a whole heck of a lot like yours. Or yours. Or yours.

To think that the mindless repetition of filling and refilling these six little cavities in my doughnut pan is less tedious than some of life’s less savory bits. Long ago, I planned to make these baked pumpkin doughnuts (recipe) – but i did not get around to it until now. I have to say – these are time-consuming little bastards. I only have two doughnut pans, each of which only holds six – but I had batter for… 36, so I had to keep doing this over and over again. Empty, clean, grease, refill, bake and — repeat! Yeah, I chose to do this, and maybe on a day when I was not trying to do 25 other things, it would be fine. But not today. Bastards! But they are done in any case. It remains to be seen (or tasted) how they have really turned out. They look okay and did not fall apart when I removed them from the pans – for my purposes (at this stage) that is all that matters.

Pumpkin doughnut bastards ready for the oven

Pumpkin doughnut bastards ready for the oven

And I guess going the extra mile to make a few more things is worthwhile – it’s the last bloody bake of the year!

Pumpkin doughnuts ready to eat

Pumpkin doughnuts ready to eat

I have been listening to music that is all a bit different for me – like Grace Jones. I remember the first time I saw Grace Jones on tv. I was a little kid, and I was not sure if she was a man or a woman. Not that I have anything remarkable to say about her, except that the Wikipedia page about her states that she is responsible for Dolph Lundgren’s acting career… so we have her to blame! Then again, what would the world be without Ivan Drago? Haha.

More recently I remember seeing her in a bit part in a weird fictional bio of Falco (Falco – Verdammt, wir leben noch!). I was confined on an airplane with a limited choice of entertainment, so thanks Lufthansa. I now know that story. I would otherwise never have heard of it. I certainly would have found no other way to see it.

Baking progress and other randomness

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My overly ambitious baking plan for the weekend seemed best suited as a long list of the recipes, printed out for ease of access – and it’s 21 pages long. I made some progress today but have barely made a dent in the list.

At the same time, I am trying to burn a bunch of CDs and get them ready to mail out as year-end music mixes. I sent out my normal Halloween mixes but had used an unfamiliar CD burner… so most of them only work on PCs. I always make MP3 mixes so they don’t work on older “standard” CD players in any case, but generally modern CD players, assuming people did not jump to iPods and the like, do play them (and of course if one skipped the MP3-compatible CD players, they can upload the MP3s to their computers and put songs they like on their MP3 player. Or they could use their DVD/Blu-Ray player or something). But yeah, I collected enough songs between September and now that I made a year-end mix to accompany the Halloween one (which I am adding to the year-end mix just so that everyone gets the chance to actually hear it if they want to). I HAVE TO – after all, when I saw this year’s Swedish holiday stamps, I was so madly in love and felt like everyone needed to see them, so I bought a truckload of them and must mail things.

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It’s my duty – mail things out that are not bills. It generally, I think, brightens someone’s day a little bit. Non-junk mail (sort of, anyway) and physical proof that someone genuinely thought of them and took the time to post something to them.

Suddenly addicted to Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3’s Goodnight Oslo album. I have been loving Hitchcock since I was a kid. On that night – goodnight Oslo and all the other places who might be reading this.

Ambitious weekend baking list

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For the final big bake of 2013, I have compiled a baking wishlist – and if I were to follow through and do everything on this list, I would end up making:

  • Six types of cupcakes
  • Three types of candy
  • 24 kinds of cookies/doughnuts/bar cookies

Yeah pretty sure I won’t get that far… but being alive is an exercise in pushing the limits. I will push the limits on how much I can achieve on the baking list by Sunday night. Monday, people in my office will push the limits of their belts and waistlines. 🙂

Do what makes you happy – RIP Arik Einstein & RIP investigative skills

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A clear, sun-filled, beautiful day at home in the woods. Being here turns my mood around 180 degrees.

Some places I have lived have always filled me with some sense of satisfaction. Many people will claim that happiness has nothing to do with “place” – but I have always felt otherwise. It is a big contributing factor. I was never happy living in the US for some reason, and while I had bounced around to different places looking for the right place (a place to feel at home, grounded), I landed in Iceland. To this day, although I don’t live there anymore, just being in Iceland and seeing the panorama across Faxaflói Bay or being back in the “subdivision” of Reykjavik in which I used to live (Seltjarnarnes), makes me feel at home (or rather, homesick). I don’t imagine ever moving back – but being there and the place/surroundings – affected how I felt.

Now that I split my time between my home in the Swedish woods and Gothenburg, and have been doing so for a year, I have no bad feelings toward Gothenburg – but I know that being at home is where I want and need to be. I don’t want to move to or be in the city even though a year ago that sounded like a good idea. Truth be told, I needed a change, but a move to the city was not the change I needed. Sometimes, though, you have to try something to see that it is not right for you.

Thinking back to the time in Seltjarnarnes, which I wrote briefly about the other day, reminiscing about baking there – it is hard to believe that I was only living in that apartment for two years. It was such a defining time, but such a short span of time.

For whatever reason, I watched quite a bit of television when I lived in Seltjarnarnes (2001-03) – my friend had given me a tv, and I often turned it on just for noise (this was before there were really great internet connections). For some reason MTV was the Israeli version, so I saw a lot of TV commercials in Hebrew – and every commercial break was this same one advertising (I suppose) a kind of “greatest hits of…” album for some unidentified Israeli musician. Since I cannot understand or read Hebrew, I had no idea who he was – nothing about the commercial could give me a clue as to his identity, but because of the ad’s ubiquity, I became obsessed with trying to find out who he was. It was not until 2009, when I was in Oslo, that I found out that this iconic singer is Arik Einstein. I am not even sure how I found out his identity – I think that I may have Googled “Israeli singer” and something like “Fiddler on the Roof” because one of the clips in the commercial I had seen looked like it could be some kind of musical, like “Fiddler on the Roof” – I know, it sounds like a crazy and stereotypical long shot. BUT… it actually led me to the name of some other Israeli musician, which in turn led me to a lot of information about other Israeli singers, which finally (FINALLY!) led me to a picture of the man I had seen in the commercial so many years earlier.

Arik Einstein!

After that, I actually listened quite a bit to his music, much of which I really enjoyed. Quite by chance, yesterday I was looking for information about the musician Keren Ann, and she wrote on her Facebook page on 26 November that Arik Einstein had died. I would never have found out otherwise, so it was an interesting path of… chance. Like so much information discovery these days. I am thus remembering these old stories of how I first discovered this Israeli mystery man, found out who he was, and really came to appreciate the music. (My god the world is so much smaller, and information so much easier to find than in the “old days”. My mom and I used to go on pre-internet wild goose chases to find different music we would hear in tv commercials and shows. That was always a challenge. It is so much easier to find everything now, but then, our investigative and questioning skills are certainly suffering for it.)

RIP Arik Einstein!

RIP research and investigative skills (or at least the kind that are not online)! (And this is for the average person. Plenty of academic and scientists still do plenty of hands-on research and investigation and more traditional, well-trained journalists will follow leads and actually talk to people, track down other forms of information – as they should!)