Time for Pancakes!!

Today I have a short and simple recipe for you. You can use it as an inspiration for breakfast or tea at five o’clock :) I’m sure that you know this type of dessert. It’s time for pancakes!!! You must prepare ingredients that are below:

2 cups of flour ( it’s about 320g )

2 eggs

1,5 cup of milk

75g of melted butter

3 teaspoons of baking powder

3 tablespoons of sugar

1 pinch of salt

The most important thing is to sift the flour in a large bowl. Then add sugar, baking powder and salt. Beat eggs, add milk and butter. Then mix it together with flour in bowl. Your batter is ready. Now, heat a pan on the stove. Put the butter into the pan wait until brown on both sides.

If you are a traditionalist, use a maple syrup. I really like to eat my pancakes with yoghurt, cherry jam and banana. Very good recipe for pancakes you will find on page of Nigella Lawson. She propose to eat pancakes with bacon!

 

Christmas cookies and the icing

  It’s windy today so I’m sitting at home. A lot of time to think about last week. All Christmas holiday season is an occasion to spend the time with my family and these moments are the most important for me. Every year I spend a lot of time in my kitchen before Christmas to prepare lots of cookies and cakes. In this…sorry...last year it was the same. I found a new recipe for gingerbread cookies and this is my favourite. Cookies are not so thick but delicate in taste and full of spices. I used a special kind of icing to decoration. White egg mixed with castor sugar are an excellent icing that will not change the colour ( it stays white ) and is dry very quickly.
 

 The second kind of Christmas cookies were walnut-filled snowballs. They were very tasty but not easy to bake. Maybe I will try to prepare them one more time. I have some photos to show you my Christmas cookies:

Gingerbread Cookies
 

Snowballs cookies
 

Dumplings with onion, potatoes and white cheese

I was always thinking that preparing good dumplings is one of the most difficult things in cuisine. I’ve changed my mind when I found this recipe. I’ve prepared dumplings with onion, potatoes and white cheese for Christmas and my family loved it. You will need as follows.

For filling:

250g of white cheese

1 chopped onion

0,5kg of cooked, mashed potatoes

Salt, pepper

1 tea-spoon of butter

For dough:

300g of flour

200ml of hot water

Put the pan over a medium heat. Add one tea-spoon of butter and chopped onion. Cook until translucent. Mix mashed potatoes, onion and cheese with spices. Than the filling is ready.

Put flour and water into a bowl and mix with a large spoon. Knead the dough with your hands until smooth. Divide the dough in half and roll out the first part until 3mm thickness. Cut into rounds with a cup. Place one tea-spoon of filling into the centre of each round. Press edges of each round together. Continue with the second part of dough. Cook dumplings in boiling salted water during 3-4 minutes. 

Cherry Pie with Cardamom

I promised you to write about one excellent recipe with cardamom. So today you can discover a new taste because of  cherry pie with spice that I was writing about two days ago. At first, you must prepare ingredients like: 

For short-crust pastry:

200g of flour

2 egg yolks

100g of butter

30g of icing sugar

2 tablespoons of cream ( take it directly from a fridge, it must be cold)

Put all ingredients in a bowl and mix with your hands very quickly. Cover the bowl and put it into a fridge for 30 minutes.

For filling:

0,5l of milk

1 vanilla pod

140g of sugar

4 egg yolks

50g of flour

Put milk with vanilla pod in a pot and place it over a heat. Mix egg yolk with sugar. When it will be like polish kogiel-mogiel add flour and mix it together. Remove the vanilla pod from the pot and add the mixture of yolk, sugar and flour. Simmer the milk until smooth. Cool before you will put it in a pastry.

Preheat oven until 180°C. Now you can take the pastry from the fridge and put it on a baking sheet. One more time put the baking sheet into fridge during 10 minutes. Then bake pastry during 20 minutes until gold colour. Put the milky filling into baked pastry.

Cherries with cardamom:

0,5kg of cherries

4 tablespoons of brown sugar

1 tea-spoon of cinnamon

0,5 tea-spoon of cardamom

2 tea-spoons of starch

Put cherries with sugar, cinnamon and cardamom in a pot and heat it. When it will be very hot, add starch and mix all together. Put cherries into the milky filling.

Now you can prepare a good coffee and taste your cherry pie! 

This recipe I found here: www.kulture-raz.pl/

Spices: Cardamom

 

Today I decided to write something about cardamom. It’s the third most expensive spice after saffron and vanilla! Cardamom comes from the ginger family. For the first time it was founded in south Asia, in countries like India, Pakistan, Nepal. Nowadays Guatemala and India are the biggest producers of cardamom in the world. You can find two different forms of cardamom: green and brown. The second one is popular in Asia and Australia. You will hardly find it in polish shops. The green cardamom with minty aroma and strong taste is a common spice in Europe so you can buy it easily. Generally we use cardamom pods and seeds that you can hold in a small jar. You can buy also cardamom powder.

 

Cardamom is very popular as an ingredient in Indian dishes but you can use it also to prepare a delicious dessert for the New Year’s Eve. I will give you a very good recipe in my next post.