Swirl cookies

Dear all,

It must be cookie season! Today I present swirly cookies:

Two types of dough, one chocolate, one vanilla:



Placed on top of each other, cut to size, and then roll 'em up!



Cut into slices you get swirly cookies, yum yum!



Merry Christmas!

xoxo Jennifer

xmas cookies

Dear all,

Today I have some cookies for you. X-mas cookies! Even better, they are 3D christmas tree cookies. Unfortunately I did not take enough pictures but you can use your imagination, I'm sure!

The 3D cookie is made by baking a base and a tree (and then you can put them together). Here are is a before and after decorating picture series:






Now you may have noticed a funny shaped christmas tree in the first picture. That's right, that's not a christmas tree but a moustache. A what!? My friend has moustache shaped cookie cuttes and here is what we made of them!! Christmas moustache anyone?



Happy Holidays everyone!

xoxo Jennifer

Sinterklaas & Speculaas

Dear all,

In Holland we celebrate something called sinterklaas around the 5th of December. It is similar to christmas in a way with an exchange of gifts etc. There are also certain kinds of sweets we eat around this time of year. For a small get together with friends I made some of the more traditional sinterklaas sweets:

First up: kruidnoten (also referred to as pepernoten, althoug this is incorrect). They are little round cookie type sweets, flavoured with speculaas (a combination of cinnamon, ginger, cardamon, nutmeg, white pepper and cloves).





'Speculaas' is the name of the spice as well as the biscuit. A popular version of this sweet is the 'filled speculaas' - it is the speculaas cookie with almond paste as filling (the same stuff found in stollen). Here is my version:



So it consists of a layer of speculaas cookie, then a layer of almond paste (mixed with a bit of egg) and then another layer of speculaas.



Put some almonds on top to decorate, and voila!



And finally, another treat is the 'banket staaf', made of puff pastry and almond paste. Made into the shape of an 's' for 'sinterklaas'.



Once baked it looks like this! So we topped off our evening with a trio of filled speculaas, banket staaf, and de-licious green tea scones with white chocolate made by a good friend. Wowie!



Almost christmas now, I wonder what lovely treats we have in store...

XOXO Jennifer

Jelly Castle

Dear all,

Recently I realised a long cherished dream: Roxy and I made a jelly castle (or made a good attempt at anyway). We made it for her bf's birthday... check it out!

So a jelly castle involves lots of jelly (and waiting....) and in this case, lots of funky candy to decorate with . We had dinosaurs, an octopus and various other colourful decorations.



The waiting was done between layers, as we had 6 colours. I used my castle baking tin for this project (makes sense, right?) and poured the jelly in one layer at a time, letting it set in the fridge for an hour in between each layer. We put in dinsosaurs as watchmen. We watched Pirates of the Caribbean for mid-layer entertainment, which may or may not have led to inspiring us to put a treasure chest in the jelly castle!



Making the castle was time consuming but not very difficult. Getting it out of the mold was going to prove more difficult. I had read a suggestion to put the whole thing in warm water to loosen it up - but I did not know how long it was supposed to be put in warm water and as it turned out, I put it in a bit too long... The towers started melting and an octopus was found swimming in the innter moat!



Fortunately it did not melt so much that the dinosaurs were able to escape and it kept its castle shape - sort of - and all in all it was jelly good fun (har har).



And what happened to the treasure chest? It was guarded ferociously by an orange T-rex. arrrr.



See you next time for some sinterklaas yumminess!

XOXO Jennifer