It is not yet over! There are still some cookies that I would like to bake, probably a bunch tomorrow and the honey cookies for my dad on Tuesday. Yesterday, I baked Lebkuchen and prepared these no-bake cookies.
Ingredients:250 g grated almond
150 g sugar
120 g chocolate2-3 tablespoons Kirsch
2-3 tablespoons water
Grate chocolate and mix it with the almond and sugar. Add Kirsch and chocolate and knead it together. This needs a medium portion of patience. Roll out dough between two sheets of baking paper sprinkled with sugar and cut out any kind of form you like. Let the cookies dry over night.
It seems that I am turning into a soup fan! I haven't ever prepared so many soups like this autumn-winter season and I even have many "must cook" soups on my list. Some days ago I prepared a sweet corn soup flavoured with lemongrass, ginger and curry. Frankly, I couldn't imagine that a corn soup can be so delicious!
Ingredients:300 g sweet corn
1 onion
500 ml vegetable or chicken broth
1 tablespoon butter1/2 teaspoon curry powder
2-3 lemongrass
1 small piece of ginger
70 ml cream
Heat butter and saute chopped onion. Add curry powder, crushed lemongrass and sliced ginger and fry until you start to smell the spices. Add sweet corn and broth and cook for about 10-15 minutes. Remove lemongrass and ginger and puree the soup. Then press it through a strainer. Beat cream and stir it into the soup. Season and serve.
At the begining of the month I mentioned, that this year I am going to bake mainly Swiss cookies for Christmas. Before I decided for one I checked a smaller bunch of recipes, but at the end I chose again Robert's recipe. Mailänderli are traditional Swiss butter cookies with a light lemon flavour. When I baked them I wasn't sure how dark the glaze should be and as you can see they turned out quite light, but nevertheless they are very delicious!
Ingredients:
250 g butter
250 g sugar
450-500 g flour
zest of 1/2 a lemon
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 pinch of salt
1 egg yolk and some cream for the glaze
Whisk butter and sugar in a warm bowl unil fluffy. Stir in egg, egg yolk and lemon peel and whisk for 10 minutes. Sift flour and knead a dough, but be fast. Leave it in the fridge for 2-3 hours. Roll out dough about 1 cm thick and cut out cookies. Leave them again for 2-3 hours in the fridge. Preheat oven to 180°C. Glaze cookies with the egg yolk-cream mixture and bake them for 13-15 minutes.
One of the first dishes I had when I moved to Switzerland was sliced veal liver with rösti. Strangely, I haven't ever prepared it myself until some days ago. The recipe is simple and fast and the result is totally delicious. Unless you are not a liver fan...
Ingredients:
500 g veal liver
1 onion
1 sprig thyme
35 g butter
200 ml brown veal stock
30 ml cognac
salt, pepper
Slice the cleaned liver and chop the onion. Sauté onion in butter. Fry sliced liver together with the thyme leaves for a minute and a half on both sides. Set the liver aside. Add cognac and brown veal stock, reduce. Put the liver back to the pan cook for another minute, season and serve.
The canton of Basel is renowned for two of its biscuits: the Basler Läckerli is a hard biscuit made of honey, almonds, candied peel and Kirsch. It is a speciality that is enjoyed all the year round. The Basler Brunsli is generally enjoyed at Christmas in Switzerland. It is made of almonds and cocoa or grated chocolate. The first Brunslis were made around 1790 using cocoa powder. As I wanted to stay traditional and authentic, I decided to make it that way and not with chocolate. And the recipe? It comes straight from Basel from Robert of lamiacucina. Be careful! Brunsli is highly addictive! Here is another Brunsli recipe with chocolate.
Ingredients:
250 g grated almond
250 g powder sugar
50 g cocoa powder
2 egg whites
2 tablespoons Kirsch
1 pinch of ground clove
1 pinch of salt
Beat slightly the egg whites. Mix grated almond, powder sugar and ground clove, then stir in the egg white. When the dough is getting together add the Kirsch. Place the dough in the fridge for at least 2 hours, but better over night. Roll it out between baking paper about 1 cm thick and cut out forms. (Usually it is rolled out on sugar, but I left this out.) Leave them in the fridge for 1 hour before baking. Preheat oven to 190°C and bake the Brunslis for about 8 minutes or less if you cut out small ones like me. They should still be slightly wet inside.
Stollen is a bread-like fruitcake made with yeast, water and flour, and usually with zest added to the dough. Candied orange peel and candied citrus peel,raisins and almonds and different spices such as cardamom and cinnamon are added. Other ingredients, such as milk, sugar, butter, salt, rum, eggs, vanilla, other dried fruits and nuts and marzipan may also be added to the Stollen dough. Except for the fruit added, the dough is quite low in sugar. The finished cake is sprinkled with icing sugar. (source:wikipedia) 
Raindrop posted about a quark stollen some days ago, that she presented in a form of a cute Christmas tree. This made me want to bake that stollen. So here it is: my first stollen, but definitely not the last!
Ingredients: (recipe adapted from tutitippek.hu)150 g butter, room temperature150 g sugar
8 g vanilla sugar
2 eggs
few drops of Amaretto250 g quark
500 g flour
1 pinch of salt
1 teaspoon spice mix for Christmas cookies15 g baking powder
3-4 tablespoon rum
250 g raisins
150 g candied orange and lemon peel100 g sliced almondmelted butter and icing sugar
Soak raisins in rum for 2-3 hours. Whisk butter, sugar, vanilla sugar and eggs until foamy add amaretto, rum and stir in quark. Mix flour, baking powder, salt, spices. Stir the flour mixture, the drained raisnes, the candided lemon and orange peel to the quark batter. Stir in the sliced almonds. Roll out the dough on a floured surface about 2 cm thick and fold the sides to the middle, then fold it in half and flatten it on one side. Bake for 50-60 minutes on 170°C. Brush with melted butter as long as it is still warm and sprinkle with loads of icing sugar.
The third dish I prepared from the 3 Star Chef by Gordon Ramsay: butternut squash velouté with sautéed ceps, parmesan crisps and mushroom and white truffle tortellini.
I chose this simply, because that butternut squash I bought in September was still in my pantry waiting to be cooked. I had many plans with it, but I never realized any of them. Like in the other dish, I couldn't buy all the ingredients: instead the white truffle trimmings I used some truffle paste and the scallops I left out, yeah you guess it, the overfishing problem. It was also a good opportunity to try the vegetable stock, and I must say I was a bit concerned about the star anise in it, but it wasn't strong at all and it gave a nice touch to the velouté. By the way, these were my first tortellini ever and I guess I still have to practice!
The butternut squash velouté is definietly something, that is going to be on my menu plan in the next pumpkin season!
Sundays. When I was a child a usual Sunday's lunch always included a rich soup with loads of vegetables and boiled meat. I remember I always prefered to eat that soup after it was a few days old, I never liked it fresh and I only took one or two spoonful and nobody could convince me to eat more. Not even with the trick saying one for mommy, one for daddy... But when this soup was warmed up the day after I could eat one bowl after the other. Sometimes my mom also prepared a garlic sauce to serve with the boiled meat and the veggies. If I started to smell garlic, I always closed the door and didn't come out for hours. I hated it. Once I got really curious and tried a bit of her sauce and I was thrilled. I wanted more and more of it. The next time she served it, I tried and thought bleee. She said it is the same sauce I loved so much the last time, and I was sure it can't be, it is ugly. I bet it she added a tiny bit too much garlic, that was what bothered me. Lately, when I was cooking a big pot of soup, I remembered that sauce, so I called mom, and asked for the recipe and prepared the next day among the boiled meat, potatoes and vegetables.While preparing it, I lost myself in childhood memories, and I messed the sauce up, because I changed the quantities of the oil and the flour. Though I was wondering, huh that can't be, so much flour and so little oil, but I didn't care much. So I had to start it all over again and at the end it tasted just like at home.
Ingredients: 5 tablespoons oil
2 tablespoons flour
2 garlic cloves
4-5 ladle bouillon
salt, pepper
Chop galic very fine with salt. Heat oil and add flour and whisk until well mixed. Add garlic and stew for a minte or two. Pour soup over it and cook it until it has the desired consistency.
Served with boiled meat, potatoes and vegetables out of the soup. If desired sprinkle meat with some fresh horseradish.
There was that portion of veal stock that I saved from freezing and it ended up in my lunch yesterday. I was craving for fresh pasta with fresh mushrooms. I had some Shimeji, some champignons and fresh porcini in my fridge.
So, I prepared a portion of herb patterned pasta and served among a simple, yet rich mushroom sauce. It is not a big deal to make this kind of pasta.
Just roll out the dough as usual with your machine and then when it is rolled at the second thinest stage place washed herbs on it (for example: chervil, parsley, tarragon, basil and sage) and then fold the dough over itself and run it again through the pasta machine. That's it!
Ingredients: 500 g mushrooms
1 onion2 tablespoon butter
250 ml veal stock
2 tablespoon Madeira
50 g creamfresh parsley
salt, pepper
Clean mushrooms and chop. Heat butter and add chopped onion and fry it together with the mushrooms. Add veal stock, Madeira and cook for 5 minutes. Stir in cream and bring it to cook again, stir in chopped parsley, season and serve.
