Magic Cobbler

I have mentioned several times on the blog, that husband and I eat almost exclusively home-made food, including desserts. It happened gradually, but I became kind of a foodie over the years and I spend more and more time reading and watching recipes, researching ingredients and experimenting in the kitchen.

 I am so satisfied, when I try new spices, new cooking methods, new ingredients and new proportions. This led me to growing some of my own spices, as well as collecting spices, when we travel. But more about this - perhaps in another post.

This summer I came upon a video about an easy American dessert, the vlogger called magic cobbler. Traditional cobblers originated in British American colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries. Lacking standard baking pans or proper ovens, settlers improvised by dropping raw dough over spiced fruit in cast-iron Dutch ovens over open fires. As it baked, the dropped dough puffed into a rough, "cobbled" top layer resembling a cobblestone street.

Unlike the standard cobbler, which uses biscuit dough and which I made some years previously, the Southern magic cobbler involves melted butter, over which a light mixture of flour, milk and sugar is poured and finally a handful of fresh or frozen fruit is gently arranged on top of the batter.

My version is light on sugar and heavy on the fruit and I've been making these all summer long with all sorts of seasonal fruits - strawberries, cherries, apples, pears, apricots, peaches, plums, nectarines, figs and random combinations thereof, as per the content of our fridge and fruit basket :)

Ingredients:

• 40 g butter + 10 g sunflower oil
• 80 g sugar
• 160 g milk
• 100 g flour + 5 g baking powder
• 250 g fruit 

Preparation:

Cut the fruit into small bites or slices, you can cover them with some vanilla sugar, if you want. The amount of fruit is arbitrary - 200 g is probably the minimum, but I've gone up to 600 g with some fruit.

Place the mixture of butter and oil in the baking dish and put it in the oven to melt at 200C. I get the best results, when the oil mixture is hot, just close to the point, when the butter begins to burn - be careful not to overpass this point, as butter contains milk solids, that scorch quickly over high heats. Meanwhile prepare the batter, mixing sugar, milk and flour with baking powder. You can add your favourite dessert spices here - unfortunately my folk do not enjoy most of the spices I love - cinnamon, vanilla, fig leaves powder, mahleb, lemon, but you can go as crazy or as moderate as you please with these.

Take out the baking dish with the hot oil and pour the batter in the center of the oil - it will spread and begin cooking even before you put it in the oven. Arrange the fruit pieces carefully on top of the batter and place the dish in the oven. It takes about 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the amount of fruit. A tooth pick test in the center of the pie will show you if it is completely done.

I absolutely love mine with coffee, but you can serve it with milk, tea or any other beverage of your choice. The dessert is light, it does not contain eggs and is not too sugary - if the fruits are sweet, I reduce the sugar to 70 or even 60 g, as I really dislike dishes, that are too sweet . The texture is soft and the combination of the caramelized crust with the baked fruit is exquisite. Together with the crumble - another recipe I should revisit on the blog, this is our most favourite dessert this summer!

Carob Muffins

Carob powder is such a divisive ingredient in our family - husband loves it, Gaby tolerates it, the rest of us find it unpleasant. So lately, I've been baking two different batches of muffins with jam, to suit our different tastes. As carob is sweet and meanwhile flour-like, I had to adjust the recipe a lot, to take its unique qualities into account.

Here is an example of the recipe, executed with ricotta and strawberry jam.

Ingredients for the muffins:

• 1 egg
• 20 g sugar + a pinch of salt
• 60 g ricotta 
• 60 g milk 
• 35 g sunflower oil
• 25 g carob powder
• 80 g flour 
• 5 g baking powder

Preparation:

Beat the egg with the sugar, add the oil, ricotta and milk and mix. Stir in the carob powder, the flour, mixed with the baking powder. Half fill 6 muffin forms with the batter. Place a teaspoon of jam in the center of each muffin form, the fill in the forms with the rest of the batter. Sprinkle with a pinch of brown sugar on top of each muffin. Bake in a preheated oven at 200C for 30 min, until a toothpick test confirms readiness.

i made also a batch for myself and others, with normal sugar and flour and spiced with baked fig leaves - did you know, that baked fig leaves make for a very interesting spice? I brought a few leaves with me from Greece and made myself a small jar of dried powder, that I love to add to my muffins. Unfortunately, it lost some of its potent with time, I'll have to research further how to prepare and store it, so that the essential oils would last longer.

Husband loves to have his carob muffins with milk, I enjoy mine with my morning coffee and German lessons. Life is good, when everybody is happy, nicht wahr?

Sprouts

My latest obsession - sprouts. I've grown sprouts before, but this new procedure that I follow, is so easy and failure-proof, that I believe everybody should try it.

I'm not going to preach about sprouts, the information about their richness in vitamins, especially C, B6 and Folate, fibers and micro-elements is widely available and well-known. And unlike other otherwise healthy ingredients, sprouts are actually very delicious, adding crunch and freshness to any salad or meal.

My first experiments were with lentils and I'm sprouting presently mung beans as well. Here are the steps I follow:

1. Place 2 tablespoons of seeds in a jar, preferably bio-seeds, they shouldn't be treated with chemical and should be intact, not crushed or shelled. Fill the jar with fresh water, cover it with a cotton mesh and leave between 8-12 hours to awaken the seeds. Dependent on the plant, you might need to keep the seeds in a dark place, like for mung beans, or on a kitchen shelf for lentils, where they would get some light, but not direct sunlight.

2. After the initial 8-12 hours period, drain the water, add fresh water and drain it again. Tilt the jar at a 45° angle, so that any excess water can be drained and the seeds can get sufficient airflow, in order to prevent mold or bacteria growth.

3. Repeat this procedure twice or three time a day (mung beans are hardier and thirstier). You'll see the first small white roots poking from the seeds on the second day.

I took these pictures near the window, because of the better lighting and to show off my gorgeous orchid :), but I usually keep the jar on a kitchen shelf away from the window.

4. The growth process is very rapid, lentils are super easy to grow and my sprouting success rate was nearly 100%. On the third day you'll notice the small green stems of the plant, growing from the opposite side of the seed. 

5. The sprouts are ready to eat on the 5th day, but you can leave them a little longer, probably a week, if you want them bigger. Once they have grown big enough, you can store them in a glass container in the fridge for up to 5-6 days.

The initial impetus for my decision to grow sprouts was the uniquely delicious Korean meal I tried in Vienna - Dak Bibimbap. I used my first harvest of sprouts to make a Bulgarian version of the meal with the products I had at hand - boneless chicken thighs, rice, green peas and lentil sprouts and everybody at home polished off their earthenware bowls - it was heavenly delicious. My next experiment will be a sort of Dak Bibimbap with chicken. rice, carrots, sauteed mangold, cucumber and mung bean sprouts. Can't wait for the tiny seeds to grow :) 

Cake with Jam and Custard

I LOVE my morning coffee. It's a ritual, it's a religion, it's a sacred rite and communion.

And I love coming up with ideas for the small sweets I eat with my coffee, while doing my Duolingo exercises and reading my German book, all part of my morning routine.

Our dessert with the morning coffee today was a spongy cake with jam filling and custard coating - a perfect combination of textures and sweetness. The 40 g of sugar in the batter makes it very lightly sweet, almost neutral, the jam filling gives a sudden spike of sugary strawberry taste on some bites and the creamy custard with grated bitter chocolate on top smooths the texture and enhances the moisture of the bite.

Ingredients for the cake base:

• 1 egg
• 30 g sugar + 10 g vanilla sugar + a pinch of salt
• 100 g yogurt 
• 35 g sunflower oil
• 100 g flour 
• 5 g baking powder

Mix the batter, pour in a baking form and bake for 25 min in a preheated oven at 200C. Use an apple corer to form holes in the baked cake. Put the extracted cores of cake aside to be turned into crumbles later. Fill the holes with jam.

Ingredients for the custard:

• 1 egg
• 40 g sugar
• 30 g flour
• 300 g milk 

Cook the custard on the stove and pour it on the jam filled cake. Cover with the cake crumbs. Grate a piece of dark chocolate on top. Serve with hot coffee and enjoy!

Easy Homemade Refrigerator Pickled Vegetables

Ever since we tried the recipe for these mixed pickled vegetables, we've been making them in factory amounts. They’ve become a winter staple on our table—a perfect, crunchy replacement for fresh salad. Packed with vitamins and fiber, they are incredibly easy to make and keep well in the fridge, or on the balcony, if your fridge is full and the winter is as chilly as it’s been lately in Sofia!

For our latest batch of mixed pickles we chose red cabbage, however we usually use white cabbage and you can use either, according to your preferences.

The veggies here are about 5 kg:

• 2 kg red cabbage
• 1.6 kg cauliflower
• 0.6 kg carrots
• 0.5 kg celery stalks
• 0.3 kg red peppers 

Wash and cut all the vegetables into small pieces. The finer you slice the cabbage, the more delicate the texture, though it’s certainly not an exact science! Our secret tip: We like to microwave the carrots and cauliflower for a few minutes first. We’ve found we prefer them slightly softer rather than raw. Since we make this at least twice a month, we've refined it to our liking. It might take you a few experiments, until you find your own "perfect" crunch.

After the veggies are sliced and mixed, we cook the brine. For this 5 kg mixture of veggies we put:

•  2 tablespoons salt
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 250 g apple cider vinegar (one cup)
• 150 g sunflower oil (2/3 cup)
• a few grains of black pepper and allspice

We bring the brine to boil, pour the hot brine over the veggies and mix thoroughly. Let the mixture sit at room temperature for a couple of hours to begin curing; then, move it to the cold to slow down the fermentation.

We use a food-grade plastic container for the initial mixing, but we prefer transferring the pickles to glass jars for long-term storage. While they are ready to eat in just a few hours, the texture softens and the flavor only gets better with time. These should keep for months in the fridge—though in our house, a 5 kg batch barely lasts two weeks. Apparently, 5 kg of veggies isn't that much for a family of adults :)

Karpatka Cream Pie

Karpatka is a Polish type of cream pie, that is in fact a big eclair. I've loved eclairs with a passion ever since I was a tiny little girl, so consider me sold on anything eclair in advance.

As I try to minimize the use of processed sugar and butter in our sweet treats, I made a budget version with reduced sugar and sunflower oil, which was a big success at home.

First I made the cream - in my version it is simple custard cream:

Ingredients for the cream:

• 2 eggs
• 50 g flour
• 50 g sugar
• 500 g milk
• vanilla
• 1 tbsp butter 

After the cream was cooked, I covered it with cling foil and set it aside. Then I made the eclair dough.

Ingredients for the eclairs:

• 100 g milk
• 100 g water
• 100 g sunflower oil
• 125 g flour
• 1 tbsp sugar 
• pinch of salt
• 4 medium size eggs  

Preparation of the eclair dough:

Bring the milk, water and oil mixture with added salt and sugar to boil, reduce the heat, add the flour and stir, until the flour is absorbed and the dough is smooth and doesn't stick to the walls of the pot. Take the pot off the plate and leave it to cool a bit. Beat lightly the 4 eggs together and start adding them gradually to the dough. A lot of energetic and strenuous stirring is required to incorporate all the 4 eggs into the dough, so in this case I used the available helper - my husband :)

Once the dough was ready, I divided it into two fairly equal round cakes and baked them free form in the oven for 20 min at 200C. However, I wouldn't recommend it, as the eclairs puff up a lot and came out pretty shapeless. Next time I would bake each cake separately in a ring cake form.

In order to make a descent looking cake, I cut my eclairs to fit the ring cake form. Of course, I preserved the cuttings, cooked some pudding and I made three additional bowls of pudding with eclair cuttings. Thus we had our dessert in the evening and the cake could peacefully stay in the fridge overnight.

I decorated the cake with fresh mint, frozen blueberries and a dusting of powdered sugar and in the morning I also added some melted dark chocolate (not pictured here), which was heartily approved by son and husband. 

All in all, an easy and affordable holiday dessert, I would unreservedly recommend it.

Persimmon Cake

I had two medium size persimmons in the fridge that were getting over-ripe, so I decided to make them into a cake. This summer we went full throttle into the cream cake territory and I made almost two dozen cream cakes with berries we picked on our hikes, or bought at the market.

The recipe I chose is more a sort of an algorithm I follow for cream cakes, covered with cake glaze. The cake is made of three layers - a hard layer, which might be made of biscuits and butter or baked cake, a cream layer, often custard, cheese cream, sour cream or a combination thereof and a fruit layer, made of berries or slices of fruit, covered with cake glaze.

Ingredients: 

Biscuit layer:

• 200 g cracker biscuits
• 100 g melted butter 

Cream layer:

• 50 g powdered sugar
• 200 g sour cream
• 1 blended persimmon 

Fruit layer:

• 1 thinly sliced persimmon
• 1 pack red tortenguss 
• 30 g sugar
• 220 g water 

Preparation:

The cake involves no baking, and almost no cooking but for the cake glaze. In order to prepare the biscuit layer, first grind the biscuits. I used the remaining content of a pack of wholegrain crackers and brought the quantity up to 200 g with some of my home-baked lemon biscuits. Then mix the biscuits with the soft butter, spread the buttery crumbs on the bottom of a cake dish and press. Leave in the fridge for at least half an hour to cool and harden a little.

Meanwhile blend one persimmon, add the fruit to 200 g of thick 20% sour cream and fold in 50 g of powdered sugar. Spread the creamy layer over the biscuit layer.

Finally cut the second persimmon into thin slices and arrange them on top. Even better if you have more than one, then you could tile the slices on top of the cream. Cook the tortenguss (cake glaze) according to instructions and spread the hot glaze over the fruit slices. 

Place in the fridge and leave overnight. Serve with coffee and enjoy!

Jam-Filled Muffins

The parking lot for the hiking trail in the village of Sirishtnik is a small square at the end of the village, near some abandoned houses. The people and the houses are now gone, but the fruit trees are still giving fruit and mid-November there were some scattered quinces on the grass under the quince tree at the end of the parking lot. Last year, when we hiked there more or less at the same time of year, we gathered a handful of fruits and made quince jam, which came out very aromatic and delicious.

This year the quince harvest was even bigger and we made almost a dozen and a half jars of jam, which should last us years :) Here is the method and recipe we applied this time:

The total amount of quinces we gathered was 3.5 kg. We washed them and put them in hot water to boil until soft, so that they would be easier to cut and clean. Then we took them out of the water (which we preserved), let them cool and cleaned them. After all cores were removed, the harvest yielded about 2.5 kg quince meat. To that we added about 1 l of the water, in which the fruit was cooked and blended them with a hand blender. Then we added 1.8 kg sugar to the mash and let it stay in a cool place for a couple of hours.

Once the sugar had completely melted and soaked in the quince mash, we added the juice of half a lime and brought the jam to cook at medium heat for an hour. once the jam was cooked, we poured the hot jam into the clean jars and turned them upside down to cool, no boiling of the jars is required.

I used the jam to make a batch of jam-filled muffins. This is probably my fifth batch of muffins with jam core lately. I've been experimenting with the batter and the filling method and though I wouldn't claim that I've nailed it, I am pretty happy with my latest results:

Ingredients for the muffins:

• 2 eggs
• 80 g sugar
• 200 g yogurt 
• 70 g sunflower oil
• 200 g flour 
• 5 g baking powder + a pinch of baking soda
• 5 g spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves) + a pinch of salt 

Preparation:

Beat the eggs with the sugar, add the oil and yogurt and mix. Stir in the flour, mixed with the baking powder and the spices. Distribute the batter in 12 muffin forms. Place a teaspoon of jam in the center of each muffin form, stirring it lightly to push the jam inside the batter. Bake in a preheated oven at 200C for 25 min, until a toothpick test confirms readiness.

Enjoy with your fresh coffee or tea.