Raspberry and vanilla custard pie

This recipe is kind of a mixture of recipes and ideas. Mommy likes fruit cakes and likes custard. So what else would be more ideal than this specific pie for her birthday?!

I think though the size of the pie dish I used was probably far too small. I used a 26cm dish and had some of the dough left for an additional little pie dish. So maybe a 28-29cm would have been somewhat more ideal?
I actually used 600gr raspberries, but I actually did not have enough space in my dish so I used it for the small dish, too.

Ingredients

600gr raspberries
6 tablespoons caster sugar
1 tablespoon potato starch
1 portion Sweet pie dough
1 portion Baking vanilla custard

Raspberries for decoration

Instructions

Mix the raspberries with the sugar and the potato starch.
Put the sweet pie dough in a pie dish of about 28cm.
Add some of the baking vanilla custard in the bottom of the dish over the dough.
Add the raspberry mixture.
Fill the dish with the rest of the custard.
Bake at 220 degrees Celsius without fan. I did bake it with ventilation and I burnt the shit... :(
After 20-25 minutes, the pie should be done.
 

Baking vanilla custard

This custard is meant to be used in pies and should be baked with the pie. It is not meant as vanilla custard to be eaten as is.

Ingredients

300gr milk (1,5% fat)

180gr cream (40% fat)

240gr caster sugar

145gr egg yolks

30gr potato starch

Instructions

Mix sugar and starch with egg yolks. Whip it until well mixed.

In the meantime, cook up the mixture of milk and cream. When it cooks up, take it off the heat, put in the egg and sugar mixture, cook up again and whisk together. Remove from heat.

Sweet pie dough

This is a recipe for pie dough. The recipe is originally French, but the Italians do use a similar recipe for doing a pie called "crostata".

Ingredients

250gr flour
125gr butter
75gr sugar
1 pinch of salt
1 egg

Instructions

Mix flour, sugar, salt and butter together until you get a sandy mixture. Add the egg and mix until you get a dough. Put it in a plastic bag for food and distribute the dough so it gets thin. It will cool down quicker.
After half an hour, take out the dough from the frigde and mix it again with your hands to get an elastic consistence. At this point you can use for your pies.

Note! I have had the less smart idea to make it a little sweeter by adding some additional sugar. Bad idea. The pie gets more crunchy and the taste is less enjoyable.

Spirea × cinerea 'Grefsheim'

Having an orange house requires some white flowers that tone down and contrast the house colour. We had seen these pretty beautiful plants flourishing around town and decided it would be the best of choices. Don't you agree? This plant is called in Swedish "Norsk brudspirera 'Grefsheim'".

1st May 2014, Spirea x cinerea 'Grefsheim'

From the beginning we believed that we did not want a real hedge so we just decided to go for some plants sparsely distributed in the corner area of the garden. The result looked little phony to be really honest. I remember a night some years after after we had put up a wall and planted the same kind of plant around the whole corner area and they had started to grow bigger and bigger. We then looked back at the pictures from the first plants we had and nearly cried from laughing.

Anyway, what we learnt from that is that it is a good thing to have a wall or similar to make sure that the "weeds" cannot attack the poor hedge from multiple sides.
Actually, after we planted the hedge, the ground sank and the plants landed far too low. Again, learning from your own mistakes, remember to use existing ground, too, when planting an hedge and also make sure that you plant way above where you want them to be. Taking the plants out and putting them back in was both costly and very time consuming and the plants took a big hit from it the same year.
Fertilizing did help recovery a lot.

1st May 2014, the hedge these days

Quite a few years later, 7 years I would say, this is the result. And it seems to be getting bigger and bigger.

I actually wonder how much bigger it will get.

If you look at how this plant looks like, you will see that there are very long branches covered with flowers all along.











The small flowers are really cute.

1st May 2014

They are not much larger than a 0,5 cm or so. Mh... Little unsure. Probably I should have put my fingers next to it for comparison. But now unfortunately I didn't so you will have to live with the lack of proportions to compare with it. :)
The plant flowers during a short period of time, maybe 1-2-3 weeks. Little unsure. The photos are taken a few days after the blooming came up.




Today, 13th of May, the blooming is going away. Still it is rather ok. So let us say 2 weeks minimum. But during that period, it is really wonderful.
Furthermore, thereafter, the leaves are also impressive and even though it turns into green, it is still very beautiful and flourishing. Will try to remember to take some picture this weekend and also further down the summer, just to let you see how this really looks like in late summer.

Healthy granola bars

I normally sit too late at work and then get hungry. I also often have evening activities such as dancing. And even, like today, I come home hungry from a free diving training starving. I often crave for some quick energy. Normally, I find it in some huge amount of food. Huge amounts of food make your stomach far too big, which implies that you can eat even more next time you eat. You become insatiable.

Now I got the idea of doing some healthy granola bars Not sure of what is really healthy, but I guess that fruits and nuts are healthy and if topped with some olive oil and honey, they still should be healthy.

So let us give it a try. This is my first granola bar test.

Ingredients

500gr raspberries (actually, mine were frozen, but it should not be a big difference)
270gr oat flakes
200gr peanuts (rinced of salt with water)
100gr sesame seeds
50gr peanuts as they come (with salt and fat) to give the mixture a somewhat salty touch
100gr sunflower seeds
50gr flax seeds
75gr hazelnuts + 50gr walnuts (actually, I tried to use the Christmas nuts I still had and cracked what I had. Actually in the amount of hazelnuts, a few peanuts were used, too)
gr apples
gr pears
130gr honey (this is what I had, but I highly recommend you double the amount as the thing became quite tasteless with this amount)
2dl water

Instructions

Turn on the oven at 225 degrees Celsius. When the oven is heated, I sank the temperature to 150 degrees Celcius and baked the apples and pears for about 35 minutes.
 In the meantime I mixed the rest of things apart from the water and the honey, which I actually melted together first and then into the mixture. The apples and pears were also mixed up all together into the oat mixture.

I put the dough into 2 pans, one little and one large. I tried to have the mixture to 1cm thick.

Then I put the pans in the oven at 150 degrees Celsius with fan.

Hydrangea petiolaris

One day I walked through the little part of the town I live in with my whole family. It was winter time and the snow had fallen in great amounts and the cold had really taken over.
And at some point, I simply saw the most beautiful of flower. It had a wonderful form. It was frozen and had taken a brownish colour. But still you could see the whole beauty of it. I could not take my eyes off it. After some further investigation, I came to the conclusion it needs to be hydrangea petiolaris.

2nd May 2014, Hydrangea petiolaris

And I also came to the conclusion that I also needed to  buy such a flower for my garden.

Unfortunately, after further investigation, it turned out that that flower had the tendency to spread out a lot and I have never found a suitable place for it. So the dreams went on for years.

And one day, it just happened. I went to Bauhaus and they had it. Well, everyone actually has it... But this time, logical thinking did not stop me. So I hit the cash register with a pot of hydrangea petiolaris.

I placed in a regular flower bed. No peat. I have the feeling it would need peat. But well... Now, it's too late. I had the feeling it required something to cling onto and I only had one such a place. 

So now the next step will be to find a plant that covers its lower parts as, according to the instructions, the first 35cm from ground should be protected from sunlight so that the plant does not get burned by sunlight.

It is also interesting to find out whether it will grow well there or not.

Carrot and nut muffins

One day I was sitting on my ass and thinking about my new healthy life, my stomach only filled with broccoli soup and somebody writes something about carrot cake. Carrot cake must be healthy. Good for my eyes. Nuts are healthy, too. Good for my skeleton. So, just to start my healthy life with full power, I decided to go ahead and try a new recipe. So what is the result?! The batter is indeed amazing. The baked muffins are not so amazingly good or anything. To be honest, I wish I simply would have licked off the whole batter raw instead. But well.... At the beginning, I was thinking I would make cupcakes out of this baking production. But how much I tried to imagine this, I cannot see how they would fit together with cream cheese frosting! So... well... no frosting on these guys...

Ingredients

125gr butter
1,5dl sugar
3 eggs


100gr nuts (walnuts, pecan nuts, hazelnuts, etc - can be mixed)
300gr finely grated carrots
4dl flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1,5 teaspoon vanilla sugar
1dl milk
Optional filling: pears (apple would do, too)

Instructions

Turn on the oven at 175 degrees Celsius with ventilation.
Make sure that butter and eggs are kept at room temperature for a while (not that I did that, but it seems the result could have been slightly better if I had done it).
Make sure that the nuts are just reduced to a fine crumble and the carrots are finely grated.
Mix butter with sugar. Add one egg at the time. Mix until fluffy.
Mix in the walnuts and the carrots. Add 2dl flour and mix little. Add 1dl milk and mix little. Add the rest of the flour, baking powder and vanilla sugar.
If you want, fill with a piece of pear (or apple).
Put in muffin forms and bake for about 25 minutes.

Boiling eggs to perfection

If you ask me, the most difficult task a person can have to do in a kitchen is to boil eggs to perfection, whatever perfection might be. Probably a question of taste.
Me, myself, I love soft boiled eggs, where the the white is hard boiled but the yolk is only somewhat a little thicker than normal. That is  my perfection. But somebody else might like it differently.

For some reason, I never get it as desired. Never. Or nearly never. And I am saying.... NEVER.

So the new year has come and this is when I will do some empiric studies about cooking eggs.

Actually, this idea came up to me while cooking eggs for breakfast this morning. And just because I wrote "NEVER" multiple times and actually stressed it, I did succeed amazingly well (not perfect, but near enough) with at least one of the eggs.
This is though in no way an empirically proven way to achieve an exact timing. But until the measurements are done with precision, this will have to do.
I have an induction stove so the changes in temperature are immediate.
This is what I did: Small pot filled with water at room temperature. Eggs were completely under water.

Cooking up water to boiling temperature on my stove at maximum regular speed (9 out of 9).
When the water cooked, I turned it down to 2 (out of 9). Left it on for 5 minutes.

I think 4 minutes and 30 seconds would have been ideal. I left the eggs on during the time I tasted the one first egg and they became far too hard. If you ask me. That can have taken 1 minute or so. Faar tooooo crazily sensitive if you ask me.... :(

But well... Let me see...
Pot as before
1,5 liter water at room temperature
Put eggs in from the beginning
Cook at speed 9 until boiling
Measure time to do so.
Test different speeds from that moment on and different times:
Speed 0: 5 minutes, 6 minutes, 7 minutes
Speed 2: 4,5 minutes, 5 minutes, 6 minutes, 7 minutes
Speed 4: 3 minutes, 4 minutes, 5 minutes, 6 minutes, 7 minutes
If no perfection is yet achieved with the above try different times and speeds.