Edible Gifts | Finding Feasts

Traditional Finnish Gingerbread Biscuits – Piparkakut

Traditional Finnish Gingerbread Biscuits – Piparkakut … If I were to choose one thing that is significantly Christmas to me, and for most Finns I would assume it would have to be the mounds of gingerbread biscuits that come out at this time of year.

My Nana has always been the one to stock the family with these delicious, spice laden, thin crispy biscuits. She would have tins of them, and knowing how much my sister and I loved them, would keep a continual stock of them throughout the year that we would have with coffee along with other lovely sweets.

I recently acquired a Finnish cookbook published in 1966, Kotiruoka by Uusi Laitos (translates to Home Cooking or something very similar) This is Nana’s and has been well thumbed through. It has nine different recipes for gingerbread cookies… NINE!

The Finnish/Nordic way is to have them neat, no fancy icing decorations and the shapes are simple hearts, stars and a scalloped circle… although I have, in the last several years, started a little tradition with my son and we now decorate large cookies cut from my gorgeous Donna Hay Christmas Bauble Cookie Cutters. The large size means the cookies can be intricately decorated and look stunning (my son channels Jackson Pollock when decorating these)

This amount makes about 50 cookies depending on the size of your cutters, but believe me they will disappear, and very quickly! Going with the FinSki’s theme for edible gift ideas, package them up in little bags or old biscuit tins and give them as gift.

Hyvaa joulua! Blondie

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Danish Sweet Cheese Pastries From Scratch

Danish Sweet Cheese Pastries From Scratch comes direct from Nigella Lawson’s, How To Be A Domestic Goddess cookbook. I chose this one for the mere fact that it’s a food processor made dough, which in my mind will make the dough making process easy and clean… hahaha!!

To start with and probably the one thing EVERYONE mentions about this dough is just how moist, messy and sticky it is… and they weren’t wrong. It’s like glue!

In the original recipe it asks to mix the dry ingredients then add the cold butter in the food processor then add this to the combined wet ingredients. That was far too messy for me, considering everyone’s comments on this particular pastry recipe, so I did it slightly different – I did it all in the food processor. The result was still a success, but you are still going to get dirty trying to remove the dough from the processor into a bowl for it to prove.

**Brainwave** Leave the dough to prove in the processor bowl! Will let you know how it goes the next time around.

Get your hands dirty and have fun!.. Blondie 🙂

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Red Pepper (Capsicum) Sauce

Spicy Red Pepper Sauce — Click image for recipe

Red Pepper (Capsicum) Sauce… Bella and I both love to head to the bargain corner of the grocers hoping to get a great big stash of vegetables or fruit to make into a sauce, jam or some other condiment that takes our fancy. They are generally still firm and beautiful but get relegated to the back of the store after a week or so and sold off cheaply. Tomatoes, capsicum, passion fruits, leeks, cauliflower etc, it’s the grocery shop forage – you don’t now what you will get, if anything, but it’s the thrill of the hunt in the city.

So after a successful gathering session I came home with 10 big capsicums. I knew that I wanted something zingy and spicy with a big hit of heat, so I started looking through recipes online for the one that was going to be the perfect fit. A Roasted Red Pepper Sauce popped up and I knew straight away that this was the one. It’s from Bobby Flay’s Mesa Cookbook (this one will most definitely be added to my collection) and it’s just a stunning sauce! Bobby Flay apparently describes this sauce the ‘work horse’ of his restaurants, and I can see why as I have now used it to marinade chicken, eaten it as a dip and have basted fish on the BBQ with it!

Tonight I’m making Chicken Quesadilla’s with it… or maybe Mexican pizza’s?

Enjoy

Blondie

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Olive Oil and Zucchini Chocolate Mini Cakes

Olive Oil and Zucchini Chocolate Mini Cakes are a stunningly moist and slightly spiced chocolate cake that will certainly be enjoyed by all.

The original recipe is from Julie Le Clerc’s gorgeous cookbook, Little Café Cakes.

Needing a treat for the school lunch box lead me to this one but with what I had in the cupboard it turned out a little different. To start with I used Dutch processed cocoa powder, which you aren’t suppose to use with baking soda but since the recipe also asks for baking powder I took my chance. I used 2 large zucchini’s so there was A LOT of zucchini. I threw in dried cranberries and chocolate bits for extra sweetness as it wasn’t very sweet but the end result was surprisingly good. I have written the recipe to what Julie Le Clerc documented – adding the cranberries and chocolate bits… oh and using olive oil rather than canola, just to show you that you can mix up recipes a little and still end up with a great end result.

As I used so much zucchini I ended up with some extra mixture so poured it into a pie tin and made an extra large soft cookie that master M absolutely loved! More so than the actual cakes so I will remember to make more of the giant ‘cookie’ next time.

These are dark, moist and tasty – enjoy! Blondie

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White Chia Seed Banana Bread

White Chia Seed Banana Bread is a great way of incorporating the healthy goodness of chia seeds into your kids’ lunch boxes. Plus they are so fun to eat as they are little balls of popping seeds that all kids will love.

This is part of my New Years resolution, the one where I have to make one recipe from any book or magazine that enters my house, and as you can see below, sadly I have fallen way behind…

So in order to get back on track I have made an important decision, that is, I am allowed to be inspired by recipes within the books and magazines, hence this little gem of a recipe.

Vol.2 of Nourish magazine 2014 had a big article on chia seeds with some nice recipes, but I really needed something for the lunch box, which is where I chose to incorporate the seeds into my normal Banana Bread recipe. Voila, a popping banana bread that I know Seb is going to love.

Popping seeds of goodness… Blondie xx

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The Easiest Banana Bread Ever w/ Lemony Cream Cheese Frosting

The Easiest Banana Bread Ever w/ Lemony Cream Cheese Frosting… So the question of what to do with old bananas would pop into most peoples minds at some point while they look at their decaying fruit. A bright spark of an idea will envelope them as they remember that they love banana bread and surely it can’t be too difficult to make…

Bella and I are both guilty of leaving bananas too long on the bench and having them eventually end up in the garbage, but no longer! I will forever now be making banana bread because this recipe is so, so simple. You just bung all the ingredients into the food processor and blitz, spray your bread tin and throw it into the oven for one hour – and what an hour it is. The house fills with the aroma of freshly baked banana bread, scented with vanilla and cinnamon that lingers hours after the baking has finished.

The Easiest Banana Bread Ever w/ Lemony Cream Cheese Frosting is a moist, dense cake that has a fine crumb and holds it’s self well to toasting or eating fresh. It will keep in your fridge for ages, just lightly cover it and if you want the feeling of freshly baked banana bread then pop a thick slice into the microwave for 5-7 seconds and it bounces back to it’s old self – moist and slightly warm, yum!

Forever a classic – Blondie 🙂

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Smoked Sweet Chilli Sauce

So what can you do to improve on the pantry staple, sweet chilli sauce? Smoke it of course!

Smoked Sweet Chilli Sauce is an amazing accompaniment to all the dishes you have your standard with but with a unique smokey flavour… and you know how much Bella and I love things smoked.

Serve it with seafood or baste chicken kebabs or pour it over a big dollop of sour cream.

Hot and smokey… Blondie

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