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! :)
 

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!

Drawing Best Friends

Usually when I choose faces to draw they are all serious looking with no visual teeth or smiles. The reason is naturally because it is easier to draw something plain without special edges and curves. This time I tried something different. I found a great photo of my sister in law Liselotte and her friend making funny faces, and I started drawing right away because of the inspiration and the challenge!

I used lead pencils to make this drawing and the range of softness lies between F to 6B. I used a stomp to make the shadows. 

If I would point out one thing I am the most satisfied with in this drawing, it would be how the tongue turned out because that part was really tricky! 

Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Icing and Coconut

This cake is very common on the Swedish "fika" table when we drink coffee or tea while we sometimes eat pastries or just a little biscuit. This cake is usually baked in a large oven pan with high edges (about 3-5 centimeters) and that is mentioned in the recipe below, but this time I tried using an ordinary baking pan with removable rim (diameter approximately 24 cm), which works equally great.

I admit that I am not a fan of coconut (not the texture nor the taste), however, this cake is the only cake with coconut that actually works fine with me :)

Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Icing and Coconut
150 grams of butter or margarine
2 eggs
3 deciliter sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar
1 tablespoon cocoa
4 1/2 deciliter flour (wheat)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 deciliter milk

Icing
75 grams of butter or margarine
1-2 tablespoons cold coffee
1 tablespoon cocoa
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar
3 1/2 dl icing sugar

Garnish
Coconut flakes

How to...
1. Put the oven for 175 degrees Celsius.
2. Melt the butter and let it cool down. 
3. Whisk the eggs and the sugar until it becomes a white and fluffy texure.
4. Mix the flour, vanilla sugar, baking powder and cocoa and add this mixture alternately with the melted butter into the egg mixture. 
5. Pour the batter into a greased oven pan (about 30*40 centimeters) covered in bread crumbles.
6. Bake in the lower part of the oven for about 15 minutes.
7. Let the cake cool.
8. Melt the butter for the icing into a sauce pan and then add the rest av the ingredients into the sauce pan while stirring.
9. Spread the icing on top of the cake and spread the coconut flakes over. Work fast because it will harden quite fast. 
10. Cut the cake in squares.

Purple Wool Kilt

This year I wanted to make something of my own to wear on Christmas Eve (that is the big celebrating day in Sweden) and it turned out to be one of my favourite garments - the kilt. I made another pink squared kilt last summer in the same style but this one is made of wool fabric and in a more traditional fashion where the pleating is narrower and the fabric is darker in color.
I really like this fabric, it is heavy and have colors of red, black, purple, yellow and green which makes it easy to match with other garments in other colors. I bought a couple of meters extra of this fabric, so maybe it will be a dress or a jacket in the future too :) However, I will never wear them at the same time as this kilt ;)

 The pattern is home made by my mother. She made me several kilts of this kind when I was a  teenager so I have used my old kilts to make my new ones. I have decided to make and wear more kilts in the future because it is such a nice and cool garment, especially when it is modernised and made in a more feminine way like this one.

Blue/Green Baby Hat

Hello and welcome to a new year of creativity! I think the best way to start the new year of 2016 is a cool, colorful and fun baby hat for those chilly winterdays :)

This pattern is from Drops Design Studio's website and I can really recomend their patterns, they have a lot of baby patterns and they are all free. If you are lucky you can even find a video tutorial on their website for your garment, or at least get technique tips from their videos. The link I attached in this post for the pattern is in swedish but if you would like other laguages than swedish you can easily change the language in the bar to the left under the picture in the pattern. Isn't it neat?! ;)

For this hat I used a green/blue acrylic yarn from RedHeart. I really like the color and the thickness is great for me, I think the result is getting smooth and nice.

Happy knitting everyone!

Soft Pink Teddy Bear

It is teddy bear time!
As I was browsing trough my patterns I found this very cute teddy bear, and since I got a lot of fur fabric in different colors from my husband for my birthday I finally found what I was going to do with it (beacuse I wanted to make something really nice). For this bear I chose a pale pink fur fabric and since the fabric was about 1,5 m long I only used about 30 cm width! That means that I have almost 1,5 meter width left ready to be used for something else.

The whole body is one piece, the only separate pieces are the nose and the ears which I have sewn by hand. The instructions were not easy to follow when it came to the nose area since the pictures were very dark and authors used dark brown fabric. In the end I just got a bit frustrated and I made some own decisions and it came out good. I usually is quite impatient with patterns and if I don't understand right away I just do my own thing and hope for the best. However, this time I really pushed myself to understand for a long time but it didn't work out. I think the result is good and I will stick to my own routines if I do more bears of this model. The pattern I found for this bear is coming from the same book I used for the Soft Toy Elephant.

Happy sewing everyone!