Things I enjoy this weekend

... blue-blue spring sky. I feel so happy when I see such blue sky and a brightly shining sun. I missed them so much in winter. I'm so looking forward for warm spring days and green leaves and grass to appear.

... morning pancakes. I like cooking some pancakes in the morning on weekends in a slow and peaceful weekend atmosphere. And then enjoy eating them with a cup of morning tea or coffee. Just perfect beginning of the day!

... my new kitchen supplies for cake decoration. I was thinking about such tools for a while, but haven't decided to buy till I saw these two. The left one is a decoration pen and on the right side is a cake cream pastry injector. I've found them in a local supermarket, but you can find similar items on amazon, like this decoration pen and this cream injector. I haven't tried them yet, but I'm so excited to do this soon!

... banana cookies. In one of the evenings this week I suddenly felt that I need to bake something, but I had only one dark banana in my fridge. I started googling and found this lovely recipe. As it requires about 2-2,5 bananas and I had only one, I decided to substitute second banana with a few tablespoons of apple jam. I also added some chocolate pieces and chopped walnuts. The cookies were delicious with a nice banana smell and taste. I definitely recommend this cookies, especially if you like bananas.

Now I'm going to enjoy the second part of my lovely weekends.
Don't forget to enjoy yours!

Weekend pleasures

The week has flown quickly and we are enjoying our weekends again. Today we were blessed to have some long-awaited warm sunshine. It is a rare event at this part of the year, that's why it is so enjoyable to walk under it and soak it's lovely energy. We decided to go for a walk to one of the Kiev's parks - the park of Partizan Glory. It is quite large and includes a part of pine forest and few lakes. They are still covered with ice allowing people to walk on them. Another lake was full of skating children.

Take a look around. I haven't been on a walk for quite a while. We had a very cold and snowy winter this year. Hope spring will come soon and we'll be able to enjoy such warm sunny walks more often.

The sky was blue and looked unusual after all the grey days we've had.

Another little pleasure was on my table today. I finally tried to make a carrot cake! I used Lucy's recipe and it came out very yummy. And I have to mention it's really very quick to make.

See that little nose trying to steal my piece of cake? Actually, that's what I always deal with while taking photos anywhere in my apartment. This little fluffy helper is following me everywhere and she doesn't like to be turned back. Taking photos becomes a real challenge, especially when it comes to crochet things, she loves them most of all.

I was also preserving some orange zest. I dry it and add to my tea to give it a nice orange aroma.

Hope you are having a pleasant weekends! See you soon.

♥Heart♥ shaped chocolate cupcakes with light frosting, chocolate shavings and mandarin zest

Hope you are all having a lovely day. My day was full of good mood, nice atmosphere and little pleasant things. It's been a regular working day, but with a special feeling of happiness, that makes you smile, like in a beautiful sunny day, even with grey weather outside. This chocolate heart muffins with light frosting and some chocolate shavings and mandarin zest on top were one of those pleasant things.

I've bought this form few months ago while shopping for the new year presents. Actually I've bought two of them - one went to my grandma and another is happily used by me. And I have to say I'm pretty satisfied with it.

I used this recipe with slight modifications to make the muffin dough. I added cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate, omitted adding 1 orange juice and putted my favorite spices in there. So the overall list of ingredients is:

• 120 g flour
• 150 g sugar
• 10 g vanilla sugar (can be replaced by vanilla extract)
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 40 g melted butter
• 1 egg
• 125 ml milk

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 170°C (325F).
2. Mix the flour, sugar, vanilla sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger and cocoa powder together in a bowl.
3. Add the butter and mix until combined.
4. Whisk the egg and milk together in a jug.
5. Stir the egg and milk mixture into the flour mixture until just combined.
6. Spoon the mixture into the paper cups or other cupcake forms and bake for 10-15 minutes for small cupcakes and 15-20 minutes for larger ones, or until risen and golden-brown and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.
7. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool for 10 minutes.
8. Decorate with frosting, chocolate shavings and fresh mandarin/orange zest.

I made chocolate shavings and mandarin zest using zest grater like on this picture.
And I used this recipe to make frosting. I have already written about this frosting in one of my previous post saying that it is really good - very light and smooth.

Adding some banana hearts for decoration. Bananas taste absolutely great with this frosting. Probably I'll try to make such banana cream once. What can be better than a combination of chocolate, bananas and whipped or alike cream.

Looks nice, doesn't it?

I've made some bite muffins in paper cups using the dough leftovers.

So my Valentine's day was sweet and pleasant. How about yours?

Things I enjoy this weekend

Today I'm enjoying...
... crocheting heart shaped cup coaster;

... crocheting few more squares for my blanket;

... home brewed coffee;

... tiny chocolate muffins (recipe in the previous post);

.... trying new frosting for my muffins (recipe here - everything that is written about the taste and consistency of this frosting is true - mild, smooth and light as air);

... color pencils - I feel an inexplicable need to draw some nice colorful pictures like in childhood;

... looking trough my notes regarding Valentine's day ideas;

... watching Feature playing with a little pink crochet circle I made for her, she adores such things, and I can actually continue crocheting after she gets piece of what I have - that's a kind of fee;

... weather outside my window - a lot of snow again.

Hope you are finding something enjoyable in your weekends as well!

Chocolate Baby Muffins with chocolate chips

I like making muffins almost as much as eating them, especially when it comes to making tiny baby chocolate muffins in colorful paper cups.

That's so much fun and such a pleasure for eyes. It's not time consuming and easy enough to do this with kids. Afterwords it's a real chocolate heaven. So if you consider yourself as a real chocoholic you'll definitely like the result.

I used the next recipe for this little cute chocolate muffins.

Ingredients:

• 25 g butter
• 1 egg
• 0.5 cup milk
• 0.8 cup flour
• 0.3 cup cacao powder
• 0.6 cup sugar
• 0.5 teaspoon baking soda
• 0.5 teaspoon baking powder
• 0.25 teaspoon salt
• 0.5 cup milk chocolate chips

Instructions:

1. Preheat over to 180°C (400F).
2. Melt the butter in a microwave and let it cool. Just remember, that we are using eggs in this recipe and everything should be cold enough not to cook eggs.
3. Mix everything together and stir well until smooth.

4. Fill your paper cups with the prepares mixture about 2/3 full.

5. Bake about 10 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the muffin comes out clean.

6. Take out of the oven and let the muffins cool a little bit.

You can decorate them putting some whipped or butter cream on the top and adding some chocolate sprinkles. Eat them in a peaceful cozy atmosphere in a family circle with your favorite tea or coffee.
Have a pleasant weekends!

January 2013

Hello, my dear readers. I'm so happy to write here again!
Let's talk about January. The first thing that comes to my mind related to January is of course the New Year and Christmas (we - the Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January following the old calendar style). I usually celebrate these holidays with my family at home, near a decorated Christmas tree, yummy food and nice and cozy holiday atmosphere. Of course, we baked some gingerbread cookies or pepperkakers as they are called in other countries.

This already became a tradition for us and this is the third year we do this. Here are the links to 2011 and 2012 pepperkaker baking. Oh, I adore smelling all those beautiful spices. I usually put a lot of them into my cookies, such as cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, pepper and some orange zest. Just look at those yammies, mmm.... I should start making them more often, then just on Christmas, cuz that's such a pleasure.

This winter we are having a lot of snow here in Kiev and mostly a cold frosty weather. You know, I like when everything goes as it should, it's good to have snow and frost in winter and warm sunny weather in summer. Here's the view from my window in one of the snowiest and windiest days.

And look at this frosty window.

It's been a little bit warmer last few days, but it's still tons of snow around here. And sometimes it's so needed to visit a cozy warm cafe. We love visiting Lviv Handmade Chocolate place. This guys have really tasty chocolate and coffee with cinnamon, nice decor, lovely atmosphere and good old music.

I treated myself with a few colorful yarn balls for future projects lately. Feel absolutely happy with the colors I've chosen. I have already tried the pink one - it looks great - I'll show you later.

Hope you are doing fine and having a great weekends! Wish you lots of inspiration and creativity for the whole upcoming week!

Weekend baking - Cherry Pie

I like baking, especially on weekends, when I have enough time to come up with an idea of what and how I'd like to bake. This time it was a cherry pie. I had a lot of cherries, that needed to be used somehow. Pie is an awesome usage of cherries.

Here is a super easy, light and tasty summer cherry pie recipe.

Ingredients:
1. Frozen puff dough.
2. Cherries.
3. Sugar.
4. Semolina.
5. Walnuts.

Instructions:
1. Unfreeze the puff dough and put it on the baking tray. Don't forget to put baking paper under it. I like using ready-made puff dough. It makes baking fast and easy. And it is light enough for summer baking.
2. Put a good layer of cherries. I removed cherry pits beforehand.

3. Strew with sugar and semolina to cover the cherries. Semolina will absorb extra cherry juice. You can use breadcrumbs for the same purpose.

4. Put walnuts on the top. You can use any other nuts, seeds or sprinkles you prefer.
5. Wrap the edges of the dough so that cherry juice couldn't flow out and burn.

6. Bake until the edges of the dough became golden and crusty. Actually, make sure the dough is cooked.
7. Make your favorite tea/coffee. In my case it was a mix of black tea with orange peel, sage, oregano and wild strawberry.

8. Enjoy the pie.

And have a nice day! ;)

Happy Easter or Easter bread baking

Hi, everybody! Thanks for stoping by! This is my Easter post. Sorry for a little delay, I had to sort a lot of photos :) So be patient, I'm going to show you a lot of photos. Pictures usually decribe everything much better then words. S0 first of all Happy Easter to all of you.

Hope you enjoyed this great holiday as much as I did. I spent it with my family in my small native town Pryluky, cooking, eating, walking, looking old family photos and doing other pleasunt things.

Before I write about how we cooked our Easter bread, I want to mention few pleasant things that were waiting for us at home.

First we enjoyed some radish-wild leek salad...

ate some nice cookies that my mom baked for us...

with our traditional herbal tea.

Then we've got a little bit of flower therapy. My mom bought some gourgeous white petunias to plant (we did that later).

And beautiful daffodils. They smelled fantastic.

And of course we enjoyed our cat's company. He definitely was happy lying in the sun. And his nose had exactly the same color as the pale pink stones on the tree near him. By the way, I want to introduce you my cat. His name is Kuzma and he is 16 years old. He is quite old for a cat, but, thanks God, he feels great and continues to make us happy with his cuteness.

One more lovely thing was my mom's crochet project. She's working on a crochet patchwork blanket. We had a lot of unused yarn at home, that is perfect for such thing as blanket.

Next day in the early morning we started cooking Easter bread - traditional in Ukraine, using our old family recipe. Such Easter bread is called "paska" ("паска") in Ukraine. Here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

- milk (1 litre=33.8 oz.)

- sugar (5 glasses)

- eggs (5)

- active fresh compressed yeast (100 grams=3.5 oz.)

- flour (as much as the dought will take, aprox. 1 kg=2.2 lb)

- raisin (0.5 glass)

Instructions:

1. First we need to make a leaven. We need a big bowl. Put 5 glasses of sugar on the bottom.

Add yeast.

Add warm (not hot!) milk and mix well. Leave for 2 hours in a quiet warm place.

2. Separate egg white from the yolk. Add 5 yolks.

3. Add small portion of flour.

Mix well and continue adding small portiones of flour until dought won't stick to hands.

Note: It shouldn't be very tight, just don't stick to hands. Add raisin. Leave for few hours to let it grow about 1.5-2 times.

3. Split dought into small portions. Put each of them into separate baking pan, covered with oil. Beaten 1 yolk and cover the top of each bread with this mixture, using a brush.

4. Bake in the over at 120°C (250°F) for about 1-1.5 hours.

5. Prepare a glaze in such proportion: 200 grams (7 oz.) of sugar powder for 1 egg white. Beaten well and cover the top of each bread. You can also put some sprinkles or whatever you want on the top. I added some sprinkles, I showed you in the previous post.

This recipe isn't the easy one. It took us almost all day and we were very tired, but happy, cuz we've got 12 beautiful yammy Easter breads in fact and we've spent a great time all together with my mom and grandma, listening stories about grandma's childhood, how did they prepare to Easter and celebrate his holiday. I really loved that, especially the stories. I like history in general and of course I like my family's history. That's an important and very interesting topic for me, so I always enjoy such stories and I'm very grateful to my grandma for telling them.

Then traditionally we went to the church to bless our Easter food. We usually do this at 3 am on Easter Sunday. Here are some photos from the church.

You can see a lot of people standing with their Easter food (Easter bread, colored eggs, meat, salt, etc.) to bless it before eating after keeping a 40 days long fest. Few words about colored eggs. In Ukraine the traditional way of coloring eggs is using onion peel. Ukrainian women keep gather onion peel for some time before Easter. Eggs are boiled in water with a lot of onion peel, that's why they get intensive browny-red color. The color deepth depends on the time you boil eggs. It can be from 30 min to 1 hour.

After that we went home, ate our Easter food, tasted Easter bread - it was fabulous. Then we slept a bit and visited our grandma. She has a big collection of cactuses. Just look at this.

These two are just huge. They are about 10 years old.

This one is also nice. I had never seen such before.

And some more photos from our evening walking (I warned you, that I'm going to post a lot of photos :)). Enjoy!

I also have a great fruit & sour cream jelly recipe to share with you, but I guess that's too much for one post, so I'll write about it in the next one. See you soon!