Thursday, 12 June 2014

May 2014 Daring Bakers challenge: PÃO DE QUEIJO




This month's Daring Bakers' Challenge took us on a trip to beautiful Brazil! Renata of "Testado, Provado & Aprovado!" taught us how to make Pao De Queijo, tasty cheese buns that make the perfect snack or treat, and that will make your taste buds samba!
I am posting this challenge very late but better late than ever. I have been very busy lately with work so , I haven't had time to concentrate and bake something. These little ”cheese breads” were very very easy to make and after I made them I was wondering why it took so long for e to make them.
Anyway, the recipe I chose was the fake pao de queijo, since it's impossible to find tapioca starch here in Sweden or at least I haven't found anywhere. These ones are made with potato starch, something very easy to find here, they are very tasty and ridiculously easy and fast to make. If you want to try and make them I would advise you to make at least the double amount, since it yielded only 9 small cheese balls to me. You can also take them to a next a level and fill them with extra cheese or cheese and ham, I think I will try this next time I make them. I used parmesan cheese and they had a very nice taste and they were as salty as needed going great with the chicken soup we ate them with. So, here is the recipe, it is the one provided from the Daring Bakers challenge host. If you want to try the real ones with tapioca you can also find them to the Daring Bakers site.

Monday, 9 June 2014

Two-tier Fraisier cake






Last month I had my birthday! We had a birthday party for me and my boyfriend's best friend since our birthdays are close. So, I made 2 birthday cakes! For me this year, I made a 2 tier-fraisier cake, a French cake consisting of a genoise sponge, créme patisiére, strawberries and a marzipan disc on the top. I always wanted to try and make it, it looks so nice and it is made with two of my favourite things: strawberries and vanilla cream. It was not as difficult as I thought to make. You just need to be concentrated and careful.Well, the sponge for me is always a challenge because you never know if it will rise or not. You need to be very careful, because if you lose a lot of air it will never rise.However, it is really fun to make and really tasty! And in the end you have a really pretty cake!
 I also made a snickers cake, so that we have something with chocolate too. The recipe for the snickers cake is coming soon.
As I mentioned before I made a 2-tier cake. The recipe for the sponge is for 1 cake. I made 2 sponges and cut 2 10 cm circles from the second sponge. The cream, syrup and strawberries are enough for both. If you want to make one cake use the two thirds of the recipe. But since my second cake was pretty small, if you want a cake full of cream and strawberries use it all and you can have very little left. So, this is the recipe for the fraisier: