Apple oatmeal crumble

I love that I live in a country where all four seasons show. I know that the Finnish winter is long by some standards and more prominent than some of the other seasons, but we still get all four of them, no doubt about that. It seems to me that mostly when one season is drawing to an end, I am ready for the next one to roll in. Having four seasons gives the year, and life in general, more of a rhythm and pace. During these last 12 months, I've loved our seasons more than maybe ever before.

Last winter was at times very, very cold and snowier than I can remember for a very long time. When you're wearing enough, the coldness isn't a problem. Besides, you can always go inside, where it's warm, and in Finland it really is warm inside, because the houses are properly insulated and keep the cold out even when it's absolutely freezing outside. And I adored the luxury of having a lot of snow. The summer again war a lot warmer than a typical Finnish summer. I loved the warm weather, but by the end of August, I definitely was ready to welcome fall.

I love fall. True enough that I love all seasons, but I do love fall. I love it when the weather gets crisp and it's easy to breath. I love the bright wonderful colors that maple trees and aspens flaunt with. And when the leaves drop down to the ground and make a rustling sound when you walk through them. Later they might get a silver lining from the morning frost. I'm a visual person and can just stop on my way to look at something I think is beautiful. I love the colors of autumn. To me, apples seem to mirror  all those colors and things I love about fall. So that's why, fall is the perfect time to make apple oatmeal crumble.

I couldn't believe myself, when I realized I haven't posted this recipe! This, my absolute favorite fall dessert! A recipe that I have, in my opinion, pruned into perfection by making it all over again, with little tweaks and modifications. It certainly is time to share it now! This is the ultimate comfort food for me.

Apple oatmeal crumble

1 BIG apple or a couple of smaller ones

2 tbl brown sugar

about 100 g / 1 stick (½ cup) butter

1 dl /  ½ cup sugar

2 tsp powdered cinnamon

3 dl  / a full cup oatmeal

Butter the dish. Peel the apple(s) and slice them and then put them in the dish. Crumble the brown sugar on top of the apple slices. Prepare the tosca crumble by melting the butter and sugar on a saucepan. Mix in the cinnamon and then the oatmeal. Mix together and add on top of the apples. Bake in 200 C / 390 F for about 20 min. Serve with vanilla ice cream. Enjoy preferably wearing comfortable clothes and watching your favorite show on television. Best when warm, but works well warmed up in the microwave oven the next day, assuming there's some left.

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"Fake" rye bread

Rye bread - A Finnish thing

I'm a subscriber (and I always struggle with spelling that word!) of a Finnish magazine Kotivinkki that also publishes recipes of really good-looking and tempting dishes. For some reason, however, I have not really tried out the recipes before. Maybe it's because I don't want to get my precious magazine all covered with flour and stains that I usually can't escape when cooking or baking from a cook book or some written recipe. I don't know. Anyway, this month's issue was dropped down to our mailbox and the theme of this month's recipes in the food section was something that finally made me use the magazine as my guideline in the kitchen. Bread.

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Sweet potato soup

Oh. My. Word. 

This was THE fall dish for me. My new go-to comfort food to rescue me from the dreary rains of the season that I know are just around the corner. Trying to scare and depress me. But I'm not afraid. Because I have this recipe up my sleeve. And candles. (And the occasional bite of something chocolaty, which I'm not going to say out loud, because my new healthy diet, where by the way this dish falls into.)

This soups was as simple as it gets. It didn't take too much time either. So ideal for fall. Even the color's right and reminds me of maple trees that can get so bright orange that they're like torches burning bright even when it rains. This soup made me feel satisfied and comforted and hopefully you will have the same feeling. On the side I served some rolls I made the day before. The dough was from my go-to bread recipe, with the exception of improvising with seeds and flours.

Sweet potato soup

approx. 1 kilo / 2.2 pounds sweet potato
1 liter / 4 1/5 cup water
two vegetable stock cubes
freshly ground pepper to your taste

Peel the sweet potato(es) and cut them into rough cubes. Put them in the pot and add the water. When the water is boiling add the stock cubes and the pepper. Let cook until the sweet potato is soft and done. Puree the soup. Done. ENJOY!

I told you it was simple :)

The Simplest Sweet Potato Soup

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Texas Sheet Cake

Continuing with the American dishes. A couple of weeks ago my hubby had his birthday and for that I decided to try this recipe I got from a dear friend in the States. I could not miss out on an opportunity to make this cake as it contained both chocolate and cinnamon together (both of which I adore!)  and I was pretty sure that the buttermilk would do only good things for this cake.

I was not disappointed. This cake was delicious! Wonderful! The frosting could've been a bit firmer but I was pretty sure it stayed so runny because I didn't get the American measurement of it, or maybe I should have let it set a little while longer. Which I was not able to do because this cake smelled so divine! It also could be that it's supposed to be fairly runny? I don't know. Anyway, it did not bother me one bit and I'm sure to make this cake again some time. Which unfortunately won't be very soon, as I've decided to buck up and take a closer look at what I eat and exercise more. The summer really messed up my eating routines... My only chance is to make it and take it - not being the only one eating it besides my husband - and hopefully there will an opportunity like that in the near future.

I'll give you the recipe as I was given it plus giving the Celsius grades. With the amount of powdered sugar I'd just add it as you go until you think the consistency is right.

Chocolate Sheet Cake or Texas Sheet Cake

1 c. buttermilk
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt
2 eggs
2 c. granulated sugar
2 c. flour
1/2 c. butter
1/3 c. vegetable oil
4 tbl. cocoa powder
1 c. water

Preheat oven to 375 F / 190 C degrees. In a large bowl, combine first six ingredients. In another bowl, combine sugar and flour. Bring butter, oil, cocoa, and water to a boil on the stove. Pour over flour mixture and mix well. Add chocolate mixture to the buttermilk/egg mixture. Pour into a greased sheet pan or jelly roll pan and bake for 25 minutes. Frost while warm.

Chocolate Frosting

1/2 c. butter
6 T. milk
3 T. cocoa powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 bag powdered sugar

On the stovetop, combine butter, milk, cocoa, and salt until the butter is melted. Do not boil. Pour into a large bowl and add powdered sugar, until it is to the desired consistency. Should be spreadable. Frost the yummy warm cake, and don't forget to lick the beaters. Enjoy!!

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America's Most Wanted Recipes

In the previous post I mentioned the trip to the States. This book is from that trip, a gift. (Thank you!) Its purpose is to offer copycat versions of the dishes that are popular in the restaurants of the United States. Eating in is a lot cheaper than eating out and with this book you can create your favorite restaurant dishes and enjoy them in the comfort of your own home. For me this book is wonderful also because I couldn't go out into a restaurant to eat these dishes even if I wanted to! Not all the restaurants mentioned in the book are familiar to me, so I'm probably going to do some online research about the places to get an idea what kind of restaurants they are and what kind of food they usually serve, before starting to cook from this book.

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Lemon Meringue Pie

Now I actually have a good reason for the pause in blogging: vacation. For the whole of July we were almost everywhere but home and I have not baked or cooked a lot. Besides, the weather has been so hot and humid (and unlike Finland) that even the thought of a hot oven has convinced me to stay put near the fan and not to heat up the already too warm an apartment even more. But now we are back in the normal course of life and it's even a little bit cooler (although not a lot) and we hosted a meeting for our Bible Study group last night so I decided to bake something, and deal with the consequences of a hot oven.

During our vacation, my husband and I together with his parents spend two weeks in the State of Washington, USA to visit some newly found family of my father-in-law. Therefore, I found it only proper that the first recipe I blog after that trip is something typically American. I took this recipe from a cook book that I got for last Christmas called Maailman ihanimmat leivonnaiset (The world's most wonderful pastries). It is a Finnish cook book put together by a couple of journalists from the Finnish food magazine Maku (Taste). This was the first recipe which I tried from the book, although the wonderful pictures have drawn me to browse it through a number of times before. As this recipe is probably known to my readers across the Atlantic, I will give the recipe as it is in the book i.e. in metric measurements.

I really loved the combination of the little sour lemon pudding and the sweet fluffiness of the meringue. This is the first time I did this pie myself and I'm sure it's not the last. This was fairly easy and quick too, and not difficult to make it gluten-free, if you just use gluten-free flour.

Lemon Meringue Pie

about 10 pieces

Crust:
100 g butter
3 dl flour
2 tbs sugar
½ tsp baking powder
1 tbs water

Filling:
1½ dl sugar
2 dl water
1 dl lemon juice
2½ tbs corn starch
4 egg yolks
50 g butter
1 tbs vanilla sugar

Meringue:
4 egg whites
1½ dl sugar

Line the springform pan (about 24 cm in diameter) with a baking parchment. Grease and flour the pan.
Make the crust. Mix the dry ingredients with the room-temperatured butter. Then add the water and squeeze the dough to an even texture. Press the crust on the bottom and on the sides of the pan. Put the pan in the fridge for 15 minutes.

Heat the oven to 200 C. Put another piece of parchment of top of the dough in the pan and pour about 3 dl of dry peas, beans or rice. Press the parchment a little bit so that it stays on properly.
Bake it with the weight for 15 minutes on the lowest rack of the oven. Then take the weight off and bake for another 5 minutes.

When the pie crust is in the oven, make the filling. Measure all the ingredients except the butter and the vanilla sugar into a saucepan. Whisk continuously while the mix heats up until it thickens and starts to boil. Take the pan off the heat, add the butter and vanilla sugar while whisking.

Whisk the egg whites in a clean dry bowl until it is properly foamy. Add the sugar little by little. Continue to whisk until the foam is hard and glossy.

Pour the lemon filling on top of the pie crust and even. Spoon the meringue on top and make little waves in it. Bake the pie for another 10 minutes until the meringue is golden.

The pie is at its best just after cooling down.

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The Foodie Blogroll and a Contest Win

I recently applied to be a part of the Foodie Blogroll. Some of you may have noticed that I now have a red widget on my side panel: that is a sign of me being a member of that online community of food bloggers. I'm still getting to know the site and familiarizing myself with the content of it as well as all the wonderful food blogs it contains. Some features I have already noticed, one of these being contests. Most of them are for citizens of United States and/or Canada, but some don't have country restrictions. I took part in a contest and actually won something after being a member for only a couple of days! My prize was a eBook called Healthy Snacks to Go by Katie Kimball.

I haven't had the time to thoroughly go through this book, but I glanced at the recipes and they definitely seemed like something that I could and would like to try out. My husband and I usually only eat one warm meal a day and both our lunches usually consist of granola bars, fruits, sometimes from porridge or berry soup etc. We both try to eat light and healthy and eat our dinner around 5 or 6 pm and therefore we are content for the rest of the evening. These kinds of recipes could bring nice change to our usual lunching routines, so I'm definitely going to take a closer look at the recipes. In order to give you an idea what kind of snacks Katie Kimball is talking about, here's the table of contents for the book. The book is on sale and you can buy it online.

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The perfect oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

I use Google Reader a lot. I mean - a lot. Two years ago, just before I started my own blog, I found the amazing supply of food blogs out there. I originally meant to find one foreign one and one Finnish one that I would visit actively and the other ones I liked would be visit more randomly. Guess how long that decision lasted? I don't think even a month, especially after I discovered the usefulness of Google Reader. It was very easy for me as a Gmail user to also start using Reader, and that on the other hand allowed me to follow a larger amount of blogs. Nowadays I have at least a couple of dozen food blogs in my Reader and I check it on a daily basis and usually notice pretty quickly when my favorite bloggers have posted something new. I also use the Share, Star or Like features that Reader offers and by using them, expand my list of "want to try" recipes. That way, whenever I feel like trying something new, I can just click at my shared or starred items and browse through them seeing what inspires me the most at that given time. This recipe has been on the list ever since I saw it in Joy The Baker in the end of April. A week ago I got a sudden inspiration to make these. An added bonus was that I could use my new measuring cup set and didn't have to try to convert the measurements into metric ones.

These turned out oh, so well... Luckily I decided to make the whole batch and not halve it, which was something I also considered. No, I didn't eat them all at once, although it wouldn't have been anything out of the ordinary, instead I offered some to friends that came over, saved a couple for the next day and from the rest I made a couple of stashes in the freezer, so I'll have the pleasure of enjoying them later too and not gain ALL the weight at once.

What I most loved about these was the texture. They were big, crisp on the outside and just soft enough from the inside. This is exactly how I like my cookies. I yet have to achieve the same texture in ordinary chocolate chip cookies, but with these I really hit the mark and next time I'm making the normal chocolate chip cookies, I'll make them as big as these and see what becomes of them then. Until then, I at least have a full-proof oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe.

I was in a bit of a hurry while making them, however, as well as live in Finland instead of the States and not the mention feeling a little bit creative, so I made some moderations to the recipe in regard to for example ingredients. I will give the recipe as I made it. As I can't buy chocolate chips ready like is the case in US, I've developed a habit of buying a chocolate bar (about 200 g) and funneling my sometimes occurring frustration of not being able to buy chocolate chips into smashing that chocolate bar into pieces and using them instead of the ready chips. Works quite nicely. This time I bought a new-comer in the chocolate genre, Marabou Polka, which is Kraft's basic milk chocolate with pieces of Polkagris, i.e. mint candy, in other words candy canes, only not in cane form. I think the mint gave a nice addition to the cookies and to the sweetness of Marabou's milk chocolate, which is sweeter than Fazer's, my favorite brand.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

adapted from Joy the Baker which again adapted from Southern Living

with the size of the dollops I made, makes a bit more than 2 dozen cookies

ca. 1 cup vegetable oil

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup brown sugar, packed

2 large eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups uncooked oats

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

200 g milk chocolate bar with mint caramel pieces (Marabou Polka)

ca. 1 cup orange juice

Before starting to bake, chill the chocolate in the freezer and break into about chocolate chip sized pieces.

Mix the sugars and oil and add the eggs, beating well. Add the vanilla extract and beat until blended.

Whisk together the oats, flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and salt. Add to the oil and egg mixture slowly beating on low speed until just incorporated. Add the orange juice until the texture of the batter seems right. Stir in the chocolate chips. Make big dollops of the batter (I used an ice cream scoop).

Bake at 350 degrees F / 175 C (I forgot to check what 350 F is in Celsius and took a wild guess and baked them in 200 C) for 10 to 13 minutes or until they’ve reached your desired doneness.

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Bread with cute figures

Last Sunday we visited the newly opened IKEA Tampere (website only in Finnish). Being thoroughly exhausted from the Christian youth event called Karkkugospel that had been organized the previous day and us being there from dawn til dusk, we didn't make any big purchases, but one thing (and actually the only thing) we bought (cost only 3.95 €) were these immensely cute cookie cutters that I have been wanting to try our ever since getting hold of them.

Today then, I made up an excuse to use them for something. Because I've developed a sudden urge to get more fit (although that sadly hasn't yet forced me to exercise a great deal) and thus to pay attention to what I eat and especially the health factor of food, I ruled out the possibility of actually making cookies with these cookie cutters. I thought about cutting cute animal figures out of watermelon slices (which I might just still do later on, I thought it as a fun idea) but as I forgot to jot "fruits" down to my husband's list of grocery shopping yesterday and hence being without them at home and getting more and more anxious to do SOMEthing with these wonderful shapes, I googled a recipe for the kind of bread that is thin and fills the whole of the baking sheet (if anyone knows the real name for this kind of bread, please educate me!) and decorate it with the outlines of different animals. (Wow, wasn't that a long sentence!) And here it is, straight from the oven!

And here it is, about 3 minutes later!

I wouldn't have believed that the recipe searched for so quickly and without much of an effort could produce such a delicious outcome! The crust was crisp and the bread tasted and felt like it had a lot of yummy roughage. The texture was perfect and even though the bread wasn't thick enough to be halved, it worked just fine as a thick one layer. And the figures are just so fun! I didn't much plan how I placed them on the sheet of dough and that's why the end result is so haphazard, but I learned from this experience too and next time I will place the figures in even lines and cut them into squares with a e.g. pizza cutter so that it's easy just to break up the bread into pieces. I made some slight alterations with the recipe itself. There wasn't a mention about what flour to use, so I used one third of wholewheat flour, second third was medium-coarse wheat flour and the last part was a ready-made flour mixture for making rolls. When flattening the dough on the baking sheet, instead of using more flour, I oiled my hands and flattened it like that. I though it gave the bread some extra crispness as well.

Bread made easy and fast

500ml / 2.1 cups water

4 dl / 13.5 oz oatmeal

1 bag (á 11 g) dry yeast

1 tsp salt

1 tbls sugar

50 ml oil

6 dl / ca 20 oz flour

Mix the oatmeal and dry yeast in the warm (42 C / 100 F) water. Then add the rest of the ingredients and mix smooth. Pour on a baking sheet and flatten the dough as an even layer. Let rise for 30 minutes. Cut into squares (and cut the figures as well, if you will). Bake in the middle level in 225 C / 440 F for 15 minutes.

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New measuring cup set!

Here it is, my new measuring cup set! Isn't it wonderfully green! They even have little spouts!

I like it from all angles! I'm thoroughly in love with this set! It includes four parts: 1/4 cup, 1/3 cup, ½ cup and 1 cup. I really like having this, because it makes it so much easier to make American recipes. As the European and Finnish way is to use the metric system, i.e. liters and their parts, like deciliters and milliliters etc, practically all my measuring cups are for measuring metric measurements. I have two bigger measuring cups, that hold 500 ml all in all that have cup measurements on them as well, but having only a couple of big ones is a bit difficult when I need to use cup measures more then once while making something. It means that with liquids I have to wash the measuring cups to be able to use them again, even though I might need it just to measure 1/4 cup. This new set means that I can let the dishwasher do the washing, like it should be in the first place.

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