Back to Business - Carrot Cake

I'm back from Europe and ready to cook again! If you want to read my adventures and see pictures of some delicious food - head to travelwithtee.blogspot.com.

On the weekend I made carrot cake cupcake with a recipe my friend Soph found (from the cake mistress). The recipe makes 12 cupcakes and 1 loaf but I halved it and made about 11 cupcakes instead :)

Carrot Cake

1/2 cup Brown Sugar

1/2 cup Vegetable Oil

2 Large Eggs

Pinch Salt

1/2 teaspoon Bicarb Soda

1 cup Self-Raising Flour

1 cup finely grated Carrot (around 2 large carrots)

1/4 cup Walnuts, finely chopped

1 teaspoon Cinnamon

1 teaspoon Nutmeg

1. Turn on your oven to 180 degrees. (I always manage to leave this until last...)

2. Grate the carrots - duh.

3. Add the brown sugar and oil into a bowl and beat until it becomes a relatively thick mixture.

4. Add the 2 eggs and keep beating for a few minutes.

5. Add the bicarb soda, salt, flour, carrots, walnuts, cinnamon and nutmeg and combine it with a wooden spoon.

6. Grease/line the cupcake tray with baking paper and then pour the cake batter in. They should be ready in about 15 to 20 minutes or until the they spring back when they are touched in the middle.

7. Once they are ready, leave them to cool. Then, ice them with delicious cream cheese frosting - either make your own or buy ready made like I did! (brilliant!!)

 

8. Eat as many as you want, because we all know veggies in cupcakes must mean they are good for you.

Gnocchi making 101

Two Saturday's ago was Gnocchi day. Nonna insisted that she cook Gnocchi before I went overseas and I sure wasn't complaining. It's a once in a blue moon thing, saved for birthday's and special occasions. More so, it's time consuming rolling all the Gnocchi and Nonna can't do it on her own.

Since I hadn't helped in a while I expected it to be much more difficult, but really it's not that hard!

So let's begin:

Gnocchi (this served 8 people with leftovers)
4kg of Potatoes (Desiree potatoes preferably)
4 eggs
6 cups of plain flour
1/2 cup Salt (you can be as generous as you like)
Your own pasta sauce (like a Bolognese sauce)

1. Steam the potatoes (skin on) until they are soft. Leave them to cool for about 5 minutes or so and then peel the skin off.

2. Using this contraption (not sure what it is called), place the potatoes inside and squeeze into a bowl. Leave to cool for about 15-20 minutes and stir occasionally so the bottom potatoes cool too. We left the bowl to cool outside. 

   

3. Add about 1/2 cup of salt, two full eggs and 2 egg yolks to the potato mixture and combine.

4. Slowly begin to add 2-3 cups of flour. After each cup, keep mixing and kneading the dough. You don't want the dough to be sticky...or hard...it's got to be thick and soft. 

5. Place the dough on a floured bench, and keep kneading and adding flour until the dough seems ready. Roll it into a long and very thick roll. The inside should look like below and the outside should be floury (if that is even a word).

6. Cut a slice of the big roll and the roll it out into a much thinner, snake-like roll.

7. Cut the small roll into piece roughly 2cm long.

8. Once all of the dough has been cut into gnocchi size pieces, out come the forks and it's time for gnocchi rolling time. 

Here is how to roll a gnocchi (my first YouTube video ever made!)

It should look like this!!

9. When you are ready to cook, boil a pot of water with a fair amount of salt. Once the water is boiled, place a plate or two of gnocchi in at a time. The gnocchi is cooked when the pieces float to the top.

10. Mix the cooked gnocchi with your sauce, add a more than generous amount of Parmesan cheese and you are good to go!

Mum and my Aunty ready to eat!!

Greaster Feaster

Months ago my friend Soph told me she wanted to learn how to make Tsourekia before Greek Easter. Being the uneducated Greek cook that I am, I offered to help/learn with her. For all of you that don't know what Tsourekia is, it is basically Greek sweet bread made at Easter time. It feels like an odd time of the year to have Greek Easter (Sunday the 5th of May), but every year the date changes so it's not always this late. 

So on the Sunday before Easter we took off. My Yiayia warned me it would take at least half a day - and she was right. It didn't help that I had scribbled down Yiayia's recipe over the phone - with minimal instructions and measurements. We really just guessed as we went! But here it goes... 

Tsourekia

Approx 80g fresh yeast

1 ½ cups milk

2 ½ cups unsalted butter

8 cups plain flour

1 packet of vanilla sugar (or a couple of teaspoons) 

6 eggs (medium size and at room temperature)

1 ½ cups sugar

1 10g packet of Mahlepi (Greek spice)

A teaspoon of Mastihi (other Greek spice- can be substituted for orange rind)

1. Place the yeast in a small bowl of warm water with a teaspoon of sugar and stir until it dissolves. It is important to make sure the water is just warm. Not hot or else you can burn the yeast. Cover the bowl in a plastic bag and leave the yeast to rise (by rise I mean kind of froth up) for 15 minutes or so next to somewhere warm (we put it next to a heater). Towards the end of the 15 minutes we added maybe a couple of tablespoons of flour to help it rise for another 5 minutes.

2. Pour 7 cups of flour in a bowl (only 7 just in case 8 is too much) and 1 packet of the Mahlepi

   

3. In a mixer, place 6 eggs with 1 ½ cups sugar and stir until its mixed and frothy. Yiayia's tip was to do the egg yolks with sugar separately to the egg whites. Next time...

  

4. Warm the milk in a small bowl and add in the orange rind and vanilla sugar. 

5. Melt the butter.

6. Stir the milk into the egg mixture.

    

     

6. Pour the yeast into the flour and mix well. Then fold in the milk/egg mixture. Finally, fold in the butter and make sure it is last! Don't know why, I just listen to whatever Yiayia tells me to do. 

7. Mix the dough until it looks roughly like below. It is quite sticky and soft. Cover it with a towel and let it rise for an hour in a warm place. 

8. Once the dough has risen to double-tripe it's size, lightly knead it. 

9. Roll 3 portions into thick long rolls. 

10. Plait these rolls like you would on your hair and then place them on a cooking tray, in a warm place, to rise for another 15 minutes. 

11. After they have risen again, lightly brush on some egg yolk mixed with a little cream or milk. This will give it a shiny look when it is cooked. We used both egg yolk and egg white so it was shiny, but not as shiny as it could have been. 

Also sprinkle some sliced almonds on top or alternatively, sesame seeds. 

12. Cook at around 180 degrees for about 25-30 minutes or whenever they look brown on top and ready to eat. 

13. ENJOY. They are amazing when they are fresh out of the oven. You can even freeze them and eat them later. Best served with butter, cream or even sour cream. YUM 

The two best cooks I'll ever know....

My inspiration to learn how to cook is driven by the two greatest cooks I know - my yiayia (greek grandma) and nonna (italian grandma). Both are amazing cooks in their own special ways.

I was named after my yiayia but unfortunately did not inherit her incredible cooking skills. This woman can cook anything, but especially nails the sweet stuff (cakes, biscuits, Greek sweets etc).

Her pancakes are to die for. I don't know how she does it but she makes them so perfect in size, so fluffy and so tasty!

The best thing about yiayia is that she can watch a cooking show on TV (she watches them all), see a recipe she likes, and make it the next day (without writing down any measurements). To top it off, she gets it right EVERY time. And if she doesn't, she get's creative and puts her own spin on the recipe. I think she really enjoys cooking and whatever she makes is always super tasty. She also tries to be quite healthy due to a kidney transplant she had years ago. She's pretty knowledgeable about nutrition.

 



Yiayia's pancakes



And again...

My nonna on the other hand, never ventures from the norm. She has her set meals and cooks them the same every time. They are amazing. Nonna mainly cooks savoury foods such as pasta, soups and meats. Her pasta sauce makes my heart sing (too bad I realised much of the delicious taste came from her overuse of salt) and her gnocci is the best on this planet. I've helped her make gnocchi many a time and hope to conquer it myself soon. It's a day task though and needs a few assistant chefs.

Nonna also loves the herb rosemary and uses it with chicken, pork and potatoes. She has passed down the love of this herb to me and I use it whenever I can. Another one of nonna's talents is making any veggies taste delicious. Now this is a real talent.

It's her tradition every Christmas to make 'crostoli' which is pretty much deep fried pastry coasted in sugar haha! But it's great and she makes BOXES full of them. This is also a day task where a few of the family are involved, especially now that she's finding it difficult to walk. That's why I love my nonna, she is the most determined woman I know.





Nonna's crostoli



I hope I can master the art of cooking like they do one day.....