The Snowman and I.
The first snow fell this evening so we went to Kungsparken for a walk. It’s wonderful to walk when it snows; to hear the snow crunch under your feet and to get snow flakes in your face. When we came to the park I built a snowman which we named Rupert. I think that he’s cute :-)
The first snow every winter is special, isn’t it?
Christmas is slowly approaching, and today is already first Advent. The word Advent is derived from Latin and means arrival, the arrival of our Lord . First Advent is the beginning of the ecclesiastical year and the time while awaiting the arrival of Lord Jesus Christ and Christmas. The tradition is to light one candle on the Advent candlestick, adding on a candle for each following Advent Sunday until all four candles are lit. I didn’t find our Advent candlestick today ( which is hidden somewhere in our cellar) so we just lit some normal candles instead. Yesterday we had my brother and a friend over for some Adventsfika, and we ate newly baked Gingerbread biscuits (Pepparkakor) and Saffron buns (Lussekatter). We also drank warm mulled wine (Glögg) which is very typical before and during Christmas. Glögg is served in small small mugs and if you want you can add some almonds and raisins to your mug. I will provide you with the recipe for Lussekatter in a few days, so you also will be able to bake these typical Swedish Christmas buns.
A mug of warm Glögg with almonds and raisins.
Pepparkakor, behind them are the almonds and the raisins.
Lussekatter, Saffron Buns.
The whole Advent table, with the Glögg heater in the center.
Joanna from Joannas Food mailed me a few days ago, asking what I do with all kitchen trash.
Some apartment houses have special trash rooms for recycling and composting, but in our house we just throw all garbage in the same dumpster. Which means that we throw everything… no recycling except of newspapers and bottles. The newspapers are placed in a special dumpster and the large plastic bottles used for mineral water or soda we take back to the store for recycling. Glass bottles we tend to stack a long time, until we get tired of them and try to find a special glass recycling that can be found here and there. The rest of the trash is packed in the plastic bags that we get when we buy our groceries. I don’t know many people at all who compost their left overs or recycle emtpy cans, probably because we lack the possibility.
The Groke, Little My and Moominmamma as Swedish Gingerbread biscuits
This is my entry to Sugar High Friday’s and Is my blog burning’s joint virtual cookie swap. Jennifer and Alberto have asked all food bloggers to share their favourite cookie recipes, creating a big virtual cookie swap. I want to share two recipes, both tried this week but already loved. The first one is ordinary Pepparkakor (Swedish Gingerbread Biscuits) which I baked today and the second one is Sunflower Seed Cookies which I made a few days ago. It was my first time baking Pepparkakor from scratch, and it was so much easier than I thought. Yesterday I prepared the dough and today I baked the cookies. The recipe is simple and you get an immense amount of delicious cookies, perfect now when Christmas is approaching. The Sunflower Seed Cookies are just delicious and they are so easy to bake. The cookies are chewy with a light taste of caramel; delicious delicious! Bake them now, you won’t be dissapointed!
Pepparkakor
200 ml water
200 ml golden syrop
425 gr brown sugar
250 gr butter
2 tsp baking soda
1 tbsp ground cloves
1,5 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp ground Seville orange/bitter orange/pomerans (can be omitted if you don’t have it)
1 kg wheat flour
Bring the water, syrup and sugar to boil. Pour the mixture over the butter and let everything dissolve. Add the remaining ingredients. At this point the dough is very sticky, but it’s supposed to be like that. Let the dough rest in the fridge overnight.
The next day you take as much dough as you need and roll it out on a floured surface. Cut out cookies and then bake in the oven at 175 degrees Celsius for about 8 minutes. Repeat, repeat and repeat as the dough will never end… :-) I made quite a lot cookies today, but I still have an enormous amount of dough left in the fridge so now you now what I will do tomorrow….
When the cookies are cool, you can decorate them with icing sugar and a small small amount of water and a smaller amount of lemon juice (to keep everything white and nice).
Sunflower Seed Cookies
200 gram room temperatured butter
250 ml caster sugar
4 tbsp golden syrup
250 ml wheat flour
200 ml whole wheat flour (grahamsmjöl)
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp vanilla sugar
150 ml Sunflower Seeds
Heat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius. Combine butter and sugar until white and fluffy. Add the syrup. Combine the dry ingredients and mix everything until you have a flexible dough.
Divide the dough into 3 equal parts. On a floured surface, roll out every part of the dough to a length almost as long as your baking sheet. Transfer the 3 lengths to your baking sheet, leave space between them as they will expand. Sprinkle some extra sunflower seeds on the lengths and then flatten them slightly. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes. When a bit cooled, cut the lengths into diagonal cookies. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely.
Welcome to the new home of A cat in the kitchen . I have exported all old posts and comments from Blogspot, but I’m not done with all the categorising of the old posts yet. I will also add links of course. If you encounter any error or so, please tell me about it.
I love weekend mornings, to get up late and then have a nice long breakfast. To have time to read the newspaper and just relax. We often make smoothies for breakfast on weekends, but we didn’t have any milk today and we were to lazy to go to the store. So we ate an omelette with Parmesan, red onion and tomatoes. To that we had black coffee, Yalla drinking yoghurt and crisp rye bread. I almost feel ashamed to tell you when we ate breakfast today… at 1 p.m… but we were at a party last night, so we had a good reason :-)
Kungsholmen in Stockholm
It’s been a busy week, just like the week before. It’s happening a lot here and I feel bad for not posting so often anymore. I havn’t baked or cooked much lately, but I have a bunch of cookies and cakes to post about that I’ll try to post during the coming week.
We’re moving. Or actually we’re not moving yet. At this point we’re searching for appartments in Stockholm and we’re also establishing contact with an estate agent here in Gothenburg so that we can sell our appartment. Fredrik’s office moved to Stockholm last autumn, for about 10 months we took turns commuting on the weekends as he had a temporary appartment there. In June this year he got a special deal commuting to England every second week and working from home the rest of the time as we thought that we spent to little time with each other. In January/February next year the project is closing and there are no jobs for game designers in Gothenburg. As you all know I had to leave my job so we decided to move to Stockholm, where we both have jobs. I can easily change office within my new job at the consultant company. We both feel sad for moving, we will miss our familys even though it’s only 3 hours by train to Stockholm. The biggest problem is finding an appartment though. We went up just a few days ago as we were invited to the release party of the game that Fredrik’s been working with for the last few years, and because we wanted to see and make a bid on an appartment that we had fallen in love with. The appartment was just as wonderful as on all the photos that we had watched on the internet but we were shocked by the bidding; the prices in Stockholm are insane. “Our” appartment increased by $143 000 in just a few hours, leading to an insane high price per square metre – probably one of the highest this year. Anyway, we are still dissapointed that we lost the bidding but we’re searching for new appartments everyday.
When we were in Stockholm we stopped by at Gray’s, the American food store. We bought some Oreo cookies and I really have to say that I like my homemade Oreos much better, especially since they don’t stick as badly in your teeth :-)
Tanuki is on his way to cheer up Clare and Kiri!
Each weekend food Bloggers around the world share pictures of their cute cats. This week the event is hosted by Masak-Masak and is dedicated to Clare who had a terrible accident, and to her lovely cat Kiri of course.
Clare and Kiri! We are thinking about you and hope that you get well soon. Tanuki even tried to post himself to you, just to cheer you up. A lot of hugs from us all.
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