nutella = success

I finally did it. I successfully converted and tweaked my recipe to fit Finland's climate and sea level. My delicate bakeress confidence is restored to its rightful place.
This is actually one of my favorite recipes, because anything with nutella...I'm sold. The sour cream adds a tang to it to keep the sweetness in check, without that its kind of an overkill. They're also a lot more dense than cupcakes would be, and lemme tell you I would pick a muffin instead of a dainty cupcake any day.
So if you've got some left overs of nutella (doubtful, i eat it in spoonfuls each night), bake up a batch of these babies.

NUTELLA SWIRL MUFFINS

1 1/4 c flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs (room temperature)
3/4 c sugar
1/2 c butter (softened)
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 c sour cream (room temperature)

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Oven at 350.
Sift all dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl whisk together eggs and sugar, add rest of wet ingredients- sour cream last. Combine both mixtures together. Place in prepped muffin tins/cups. Dollop 1-2 tsp nutella in each muffin cup and with a toothpick, knife or fork make swirls.
Bake for 23-30 minutes.

crispy and crumbly...

I recently had a lil family get together and promised I'd bring a dessert. So far baking on another continent, and different sea level has proven to be tricky- seems like nothing works out. My cake burned, my cookies were too crispy, under done, over done, burnt, gooey...aka. a complete mess, leaving me with no confidence in my baking skills, none whatsoever.
So I decided on a good ol' reliable recipe which never fails me. Its absolutely perfect and heart warming as long as you have a scoop of ice cream. And lo and behold....It was gone in seconds. :)
May i present...

APPLE CRISP

filling:

5-6 apples peeled and sliced (better if they're a softer kind of apple)

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tbs lemon juice (fine without)

1/3 c sugar

topping:

1/2 c brown sugar

1 c oatmeal

2 tsp cinnamon

1 c butter (room temp or from the fridge is best actually)

1/2 tsp salt

the drill:

set oven at 350.

prep the apples, toss in lemon juice, cinnamon, and sugar mixture- place into lightly buttered pan.

mix all dry ingredients for topping, then add butter and mix till it becomes crumbly and lil clumps form.

if the mixture seems dry and isn't holding together add a bit more butter. a lil' more butter never hurt anyone :) sprinkle crumble mixture on top of apples till almost all the way covered. bake for 40-50 minutes. sometimes even 30 minutes will do the trick, just depends on how crisp your apples are.

Enjoy with a huge ball of ice cream - perfect for those cold, misty days you wanna cuddle and stay home watching TV.

traditional twist...

Christmas is approaching (yay!) so i decided to do a lil twist on a classic finnish christmas treat - Luumutorttu (translates to plum tart/pastry). They're usually shaped to look like stars, however mine ended up a bit more artistic looking than your everyday geometrical star shape. The traditional treat has plum preserves in the middle but since i like adventure i replaced it with some raspberry jam. After all they are my favorite berry- what doesn't go well with it?

RASPBERRY TART

 (vadelmatorttu)

You'll need:

3 sheets of premade pastry dough
(im sure you can find some made by the Pillsbury dough boy)
1 egg
1/2 c (1 1/4 dl) raspberry preserves or jam
2-3 tbs corn starch or potato starch
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Defrost the pastry dough if frozen, cut into 6 squares, so you'll get two squares from one sheet. Make 2 inch slits on each corner of the square- you should have 8 corners now.

Take some starch and mix it into the jam, dollop some on the center of the square then fold over every other corner and press into the middle to make a star shape.
As you can see...my corners didn't stay in the middle and flopped over to the side instead...still looks fancy ;)
Bake as long as it says on the dough box.
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Time to get into the Christmas spirit,...might as well since stores are stocked with decorations and playing the same ol' music too.