Saturday 20 February 2016

Nutty Cookies with Hazelnuts and Almonds

Hi everyone!
This cookie is one of my childhood baking things I want to remember. My grandmother on my mother's side baked these cookies, or a cookie close to this cookie, and I imagine it was one of her favourites because they are very easy to bake and also very delicious. And that is also my favourite combination ;) If it was exactly this recipe I don't know but I think they taste like my grandmother's cookies.






Nutty Cookies with hazelnuts and almonds (40 cookies)
100 grams of hazelnuts without the shell
100 grams of almonds
2 deciliter sugar
1 tablespoon potato flour
2 eggs

Garnish
Hazelnuts
100 grams of baking chocolate

How to...
1. Put the oven to 200 Celsius (175 Celsius for convection oven)
2. Grind the nuts in a almond grinder and put them in bowl.
3. Add sugar, potato flour and eggs to the bowl and stirr it all together until you get a firm batter.
4. Use your fingers to portion out small balls on baking plates (use baking paper or grease the pan!)
5. Push one hazelnut in the middle of each ball, if the almonds are very big you can divide them in two.
6. Bake in the middle of the oven for about 8 minutes.
7. The cookies are easily getting stuck on the paper so remove them from the paper before they cool.
8. Tempering 50 grams of baking chocolate over water bath (melt and heat to 45 Celsius, add the rest of the chocolate and let it cool to 25 Celsius, then heat it to 30 Celsius - done!)
9. Dip the bottom of the cookies into the chocolate and lay them with the up side down to solidify.



Happy baking everyone! :)
 

Saturday 6 February 2016

Shark Fin Mittens

When the winter time is here it is neccessary to have great mittens to warm your frozen hands during the chilly evening walk with the dog, or bear, or whatever... If you are going to have mittens, why don't you spice them up with some cool shark fins! :) Well, that was the question I asked myself and then I came up with these cuties!




The pattern for these mittens is actually a combination of two patterns which is a bit strange, well... that is the way I am really... mixing and matching freely between patterns to make my "own thing". I don't know why I can't just let it be, it happens only sometimes when I really like a full pattern and then I can use is like crazy haha! The patterns is from Drops Design Studio's website where you can find many many free patterns - a treasure of creativity!
The idea with the sharkfins is my own idea, I have not seen it anywere else. Since I think it it terribly hard to work intarsia knitting I decided to sew these shark fins with stitches after I finished the mittens so it will look like I have knitted them :) Why make things the hard way when you can make it the easy way, right?

Happy knitting everyone!