LunaKnit

It's been a bit quiet here on the blog for a while, and I'm sorry about it. My mind has been a bit elsewhere lately and the short time I've had for myself has been dedicated to some seriously needed relaxation - on some nights I've even been too tired to knit if you can believe it! After all, I always say knitting is my meditation! First baby-Theo was sick. We still don't know what was wrong with him but he was just screaming without any apparent reason. We even had to spend one night at the hospital because they wanted to have him monitored to find out the cause. The doctors think that he might have had a bad reaction to some vaccinations he got earlier in the week, or maybe his little tummy ached, we don't know for sure. It's so hard when they are so little that they are not yet able to tell you where it hurts... He's fine now, so don't worry about him. After that Magnus was away for a business trip for several days and me and Theo wer...

Here's a few of my favourite things: hamburgers, brownies and chocolate chip cookies. I've been looking for the perfect recipe for each one of the above mentioned for years and even though I have tried at least tens of different recipes that have been promoted as "the best" I still haven't quite found what I'm looking for.  After my wheat allergy diagnosis a couple years ago I needed to start the whole process again from scratch. Not only did I have to try all my favourite recipes again to see if they still work, but I also had to learn a whole new technique of baking and find the perfect flour combination for each one of the recipes. Too often have I noticed that my once tried-tested-and approved recipes just didn't work when substituting wheat with the likes of rice and corn flour: the dough often becomes either too loose and sticky or hard and brittle to bake in the normal fashion. I've mastered most dishes but often with quite unconvention...

I've been having an incomprehensible craving for carrot cake for a few days now. First I was blaming the pregnancy for the sudden desire until yesterday when I sat down to continue knitting my Vector scarf and really took a good look at the yarn I was working with. Just look at it! What does it remind you of? In my opinion it's exactly the color of carrot cake! The colorway is called Goldcrest but I would suggest taking renaming it under serious consideration. (The yarn is Supersoft 100% uld from Holst Garn.) Carrot cake is on of my all time favorites. I never seem to get bored of it. If I could choose only one cake to eat for the rest of my life carrot cake could very well be it. I usually like frosting more than the cake itself but carrot cake is one of those rare treats that work just fine on their own - it could be served without the frosting just fine - but the combination of those two is unbeatable in my opinion. I usually use this recipe when I make ca...

These were my favorite treats as a child: I remember we made (and ate) them often and they were the staple at every kids' party and get-together. The cake bites were easy enough for children to make on their own, we always had the basic ingredients at home and the colorful sprinkles appealed to every kid on the block. And most importantly they were delicious, almost too sweet had there not been the coffee flavor to tone the taste of sugar, moist and very addictive. We called them mokkaruudut which could be translated as mocca squares but I've heard they are called kärleksmums or love treats (or more literally "love nom") in Sweden, and I'd much rather use that name. Now days it's very seldom that anybody makes the mocca cakes anymore, and if someone has baked them the usual reaction from everybody I know is an enthusiastically nostalgic one. I still love them but somehow they have fallen off my usual cooking grid and it must be years since the last...

It's a while since the last time I posted  a recipe on this blog! It's not like I haven't baked anything, but it's usually been so late at night that taking decent photos has been impossible and by the time it has been light again everything has been, well if not gone, at least half eaten... This recipe started out as a classic French Tarte Tatin but it has been modified quite a few times, first by my grandmother and then by me. The recipe is copied from some old cook book with handwritten notes by my grandma so it's very precious to me. Today I will share it with you. Tarte Tatin is originally an upside down apple tart, but I've noticed it's hard to get the crust right with gluten and wheat free flour. It just doesn't want to stay in one piece so that you could neatly lift it on top of the filling without it crumbling to pieces. So I've modified the cake to be baked right-side up, i.e. the crust is in the bottom and the filling comes in t...

I got at least 10 kg of apples from my co-worker. She has 8 apple trees and apparently this has been a good year for apples: she said she's literally drowning in them. I was just happy to get some, since we live in an apartment and don't have our own trees. Another reason why I happily accepted the apples was that a few days earlier Magnus's father (who is usually my source for berries, rhubarb, plums and other home-grown produce) called and said he didn't really have apples to offer this year: they had been infected with monilinia which makes the apples rot in the trees.  This weekend has been apples galore at our place and I've been cooking apple mush by jarfuls. I also made three (yes you read correctly, THREE) different apple pies. And no, we won't eat them all at once (even though I would like to). I've been slicing them into smaller portions and putting them into the freezer to take out and warm whenever we feel like having a sweet treat with ...

A couple of our friends called yesterday evening and said they would be visiting Vasa today and asked if they could come over. It's nice to see them, because they live in another city and we don't get to see each other as often as I would like. I thought I would bake something good to serve with coffee, but we didn't really have any flour at home, because I had been baking bread last week end and used up everything we have.  Our nearby little grocery store does not have any of the gluten and wheat free flours that I like to use so I had to come up with a plan B and make do with whatever I found in the cupboards. And for once, my little adventure in the kitchen paid off! Because this cake was really good: something I will definitely make again. It was juicy, fresh and summery.  I'm sorry about the poor quality of the photos: I had to snap them really quickly before serving and we ate the whole cake, so I can't take any more photos... Maybe next time...

Last Saturday was my name day. I'm not quite sure if celebrating one's name day is solely a Scandinavian tradition, or if it is popular in other countries as well. I've never heard that it would be as big a thing anywhere else as it's over here. All the commonly used names have their own day in the Finnish and Swedish calenders, and the daily newspapers always tell you who's name day it is on that specific day, so you can congratulate them (if you know people by that name, that is). Every Finn can tell you when their name day is if you ask them. So mine was on Saturday, along with the other names belonging to the family of names formed from Sarah. When I was a child we had a tradition that mum would bake a strawberry cake on my name day, and I would get a small present, something like a chocolate bar or a bag of candy. Magnus is used to a different kind of name day celebration: he's convinced that the person whose name day it is should be the one baki...

A couple of days ago we decided to go to the nearby park for a picnic. The day was really warm and we didn't feel like sitting at home, so we prepared our dinner and took it with us. The menu this time was Banh Mi sandwiches (get the recipe for our favorite meal here ), strawberry tart and rosé champagne. There is no better way to enjoy a lazy summer evening in my opinion!  STRAWBERRY AND VANILLA TART RECIPE for the crust: 1 dl corn flour 1 dl rice flour 0.5 dl coconut flour 0.5 dl corn starch 50 g butter (room temperature) 1 dl sugar 1 egg pinch of salt for the filling: 3 dl double cream 2 eggs 1 dl + 1 Tbsp sugar 2 tsp vanilla essence 1 dl corn starch 500 g 300 g fresh strawberries (I ate the rest while preparing the tart, ha-ha!) Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celcius. Grease your pie form with a spoonful of butter. (Mine has 27 cm diameter.)  Put the flours, the butter and the sugar into a food proce...

I  got two plastic bags filled with rhubarb from Magnus’s father. He has it growing in his garden but doesn’t really use it himself. He has numerous bushes of different berries as well but doesn’t have the energy to tend to them or pick the berries so I’ve had the privilege of emptying his garden for the past few years. We had only a minimal freezer in our last apartment (you could fit like 4 litres of ice cream in it and that’s about it) so saving berries and other produce for winter has been impossible until now. We have a bigger freezer now and I’m enjoying the opportunity to receive more produce from Magnus’s father than we can eat in the next few days. So now I have about 5 litres of chopped rhubarb in the freezer waiting for winter. Our friends came over yesterday. They are house-sitting and taking care of our cats while we are on vacation and we went through everything they should know while we are away. I decided to use some of the rhubarb I had and make a pi...

I eat a lot of fruit, but still it often happens that there are overripe fruit in our kitchen. I don’t want to throw them away so I try to use them when I cook. Slightly too ripe or battered fruit often work in smoothies, but if they are much more overripe they can often still be used in baking or other warm dishes that require fruit, for example mango-curry. I try to minimize the house hold waste and if I see a product that has its “best before” –date coming to close, I try to use it immediately. Yesterday I realized we had some milk that was going old and two almost brown bananas: what else is there to do than use them as an excuse to make banana muffins? We had all the other ingredients already at home, but I had to do a quick run to the little grocery store downstairs to get some chocolate. For some reason there is never a surplus of chocolate reaching the end of its self-life at our home, I wonder why… Banana muffins are really easy and quick to make: you jus...