Strawberry cake with gelatin

First of all, I so apologize for the unforgivable silence. What can I say? I just seemed to need a break. Anyway, I mean to be publishing some recipes in the near future, that have been waiting to be published a long time. And I will probably publish all of them in English. I'm not yet sure, will all my future postings be only in English, but these most probably will. If you have any comments or suggestions to make as to what kind of blog you hope this to be, or to the language it shall be written in, feel free to leave a comment!

This cake I made for a wonderful get-together with friends in August. The recipe is from a Finnish site Pirkka. On top of the cake I have raspberries, I had not looked at the recipe carefully enough before shopping for ingredients and took only a liter of fresh strawberries, which went into the filling. I had some fresh raspberries however and thus I decorated the top of the cake with them.

16-20 servings

Ingredients:

Cake:

2 eggs

100 ml / a bit over 4 cups sugar

3 tbs boiling water

3/4 dl / 2.5 oz flour

2 tbs potato flour

3 tbs cacao powder

½ tsp baking powder

Moisturizing:

50 ml juice, for example blackcurrant

Filling:

1000 ml fresh strawberries (or 500 g defrosted strawberries)

100 ml / ca. 0.4 cups sugar

300 ml double cream

250 g milk curd

3 tsp vanilla sugar

2-3 tbs lemon juice

On top:

ca. 50 ml strawberry jam

100 ml fresh strawberries

150 ml blackcurrant juice

100 ml / ca 0.4 cups gelatin/jelly sugar

1. Heat up the oven to 200 C / 390 F. Grease a pringform cake pan (about 24 cm / 9.5 inches in diameter) and sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Measure the flour, cocoa powder, potato flour and baking powder and stir together. Boil the water. Beat the eggs and sugar into a thick light foam. Add the boiling water into the egg foam little by little, stirring the whole time. Sieve the flour mixture into the foam in a few patches. Mix on the lowest speed of the mixer. Pour the matter into the pan. Bake in the lower part of the oven for 11-13 minutes. The cake is done, when it comes off from the sides of the pan.

2. Let the cake cool for a moment and take it off the pan and let cool on a rack. Wash the pan and cut pieces from baking paper in order to line the pan. Cut the cooled cake into two same sized round pieces and lay the bottom part on the bottom of the pan. Moisturize the cake with the juice.

3. Slice the fresh strawberries for the filling. Sprinkle half the sugar on top of them. Let the leaf gelatins soak in cols water for at least 10 minutes. Whisk the cream, add vanilla sugar and put in the fridge to wait. Mix together the milk curd, strawberries and the rest of the sugar. Heat up the lemon juice in a small saucepan. Add the dry squeezed leaf gelatins into the juice and let dissolve. Let the mixture cool down a bit and add into the milk curd-strawberry mix and stir well. Add the whisked cream in and mix well. Pour the mixture into the pan. Place the other half of the cake on top and let set over night in cold.

4. Take the rim of the cake pan away as well as the baking paper piece lining it. Spread a thin layer of strawberry jam on top of the cake. Cover the top with sliced strawberries. Prepare the jelly according to the instructions in the package. Spoon it over the strawberries first little and then as a thicker layer. Let the cake set in a cool place for a little while. Serve.

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Strawberry pie topped with meringue

My friend invited my husband and I to celebrate her birthday and in the invitation email it was mentioned that guests can by all means include something yummy on the table. Because of our very plentiful strawberry supply I wanted to bake something out of them. The discuss forum at the Martha Organization website helped me once again. Although I have not made meringue since being a teenager I wanted to try out this easy recipe. I used oil instead of butter and gluten-free flour instead of regular. I also used whole frozen strawberries but you can use fresh berries or pieces of frozen berries as well. Also fruit pieces could work well here.

Base:

1 dl of cooking oil
1 dl of sugar
1 egg yolk
1 egg
2 dl of flour (I used gluten-gree, as mentioned)
1 tsp of baking powder
½ tsp of cardamom
½ dl of milk

Topping:

1 eggwhite
¾ dl of sugar
ca. 3-4 dl of whole frozen strawberries
ca. ½ tsp of vanilla sugar

almond chips on top

Prepare the meringue first so that the base does not have to wait. Beat eggwhite and sugar into a thick foam. You might want to add the sugar little by little, but I didn't.

Stir oil and sugar together. (If you use softened butter, you should beat the butter and sugar into a foam.) Add the egg and the egg yolk and beat. Mix up the dry ingredients and add to the foam mixture together with the milk. Stir only so much that everything mixes together.

Pour the base into a greased pie dish. Add the strawberries and vanilla sugar into the meringue foam and stir. Pour the mixture on top of the pie base and spread it evenly with a fork. Sprinkle almond chips on top. Bake for 35-40 minutes on the lowest rack in 175 C.

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Blueberry pie with strawberries by the Marthas

The day after the strawverry operation brought us guests that had more strawberries with them to give to us! I slightly changed my plans about dessert and blueberry pie ended up being a strawberry-blueberry pie. My favorite recipe for making a blueberry pie is the one I found online from the homepage of the Martha Organization. I came across it once as I was looking for a recipe for a big pie that covers to whole baking tray and I'm delighted about easyness and the foamy result.



The fantastic blueberry pie by Marthas (a whole tray)

1 egg
3 dl of sugar
1 cream viili, a form of viili, but made of cream
2 dl of milk
6 dl of flour
3 tsps of baking powder
125 g of margarine (which I have often replaced with 1 dl of cooking oil)
ca. 7 dl of berries

Mix egg and sugar. Add the cream viili, milk and the mix of flour and baking powder and towards the end also oil or melted margarine. Spread the butter onto a baking tray covered with baking paper. Sprinkle the berries on top. Bake in 200 C for about half an hour.

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A proper wife!

Last summer I was so new a wife that in many sense I was just learning the art. Naturally I still have a lot more to learn, but this summer I took a step further than last summer and freezed strawberries. In my childhoom I have been helping in cleaning and freezing the strawberries and those 5 kg boxes full of that red gold of earth have always associated to "home" in my mind. Now, having done the same thing in my new own home I feel even a stronger sense of home. In doing the same thing that my mother has done proves it again that I have my very own home now. It's at the same time a wonderfully self-sufficient and a dependent feeling. I have my own home, but I'm very much dependent on this home and family and extremely happy about it.

My husband started his summer holiday recently and as the celebration of it we had some of the fresh strawberries accompanied by thin Finnish pancaked and vanilla ice-cream. The pancake batter was a left-over from the previous evening and was sufficient for a one pancake, so there isn't a lot of pancakes, but it was all that we needed. The recipe is from my father-in-law and is indeed delicious:

4 dl of milk

1 egg

½ tsp of salt

2 dl of flour

Just mix it up and fry both sides with oil or butter. Make them thin and the size of the frying pan.

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