Hot Cross Buns V6.0

April 10, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 10 Comments

On the Saturday of Easter weekend, we painted our living room. Painting a room doesn’t seem like a big job until you start, and then it becomes apparent just exactly how huge of an undertaking it really is – or rather, just how much prep work there is, what with all the buying of tools and prep and sanding and taping and cutting-in of edges before you even get to the actual painting. All this to say that by Saturday night, I was so exhausted I could barely see straight – yet somehow I still managed to be shaping spicy, citrusy, dried fruit-laden dough into hot cross buns at 11:30 at night, as one does when one doesn’t think Easter is Easter without hot cross buns. So yes, like last year, we are talking about hot cross buns two weeks after the fact.

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Maple Stroopwafels

March 27, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen Leave a Comment

Maple Stoopwafels | Korena in the Kitchen

This post is two days late for International Waffle Day, and is not exactly your traditional Easter Sunday fodder (Happy Easter! Hot cross buns forthcoming!), however today is Daring Kitchen reveal day, and I’ve been waiting to share these babies for weeks. This month, the Daring Kitchen made stroopwafels, a sweet treat of Dutch origin in which a waffle cookie (“wafel”) is sandwiched together with buttery caramel syrup (“stroop”). Honestly, with a concept like that you can’t possibly go wrong, however if I didn’t already have such a soft spot for Dutch baked goods (see: plain and gevulde speculaas, peperkoek, and schichttorte), I might have let this challenge pass me by, because stroopwafels require the use of a rather specific cooking appliance that I do not own and didn’t really want to purchase: a waffle cookie iron or pizzelle iron. But, having been introduced to exactly how delicious stroopwafels are by my half-Dutch friend Lynette, I made the effort to take a ferry to Salt Spring Island to borrow a waffle cookie iron from her dad just so that I could make them myself!

Maple Stroopwafels | Korena in the Kitchen …

Serbian Katmer Pie

March 1, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 1 Comment

I’ve made a lot of different kinds of flaky pastry, and this month with the Daring Kitchen challenge, I made yet another. This version, shared by Milkica of Mimi’s Kingdom, comes from Serbia where it is used to make a dish called katmer pie. The pastry for katmer pie falls into the same sort of category as phyllo or strudel: thin sheets of dough brushed with butter, wrapped around a sweet or savoury filling.

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White Chocolate Grapefruit Poppy Seed Cake

February 14, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 5 Comments

This is not technically a Valentine’s Day post – February 14th just so happens to be the day I’m pressing “post” on something I’ve been working on veeeeeeeery slowly for the past 2 week. The only thing vaguely Valentine’s-y about it is that the inside is a little bit pink, but the point of today’s post is this: If you’re looking for a cake to put underneath your white chocolate peony, look no further. Without the peony, this cake looks plain on the outside but it is actually anything but – starting with the fact that it is flavoured with grapefruit. Lemon, orange and lime usually get all the citrus attention in baking, but replacing the lemon in lemon poppy seed cake with grapefruit and pairing it with white chocolate mousse frosting is pretty brilliant.

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How to Make a White Chocolate Peony

January 27, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 18 Comments

This month marks a new direction for the Daring Bakers, who have now joined forces with the Daring Cooks in a single monthly Daring Kitchen Challenge. Shillpa of Cakeline the Journey kicked off this new format by setting us all the challenge of cake design – specifically the use of “edible clays” such as fondant, gum paste, and/or modeling chocolate to create fully edible cake decorations. I hardly need an excuse to bake a cake, so I was right into this challenge.

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Gingerbread Cottage

January 7, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 11 Comments

The twelfth day of Christmas was yesterday and now technically the holidays are really over, but I’m nothing if not always slightly behind the 8-ball when it comes to seasonal posts. So bear with me on this one.

The holidays at our house left a slick of butter, a cloud of sugar, and a trail of cookie crumbs. SO MANY cookie crumbs. I went hog wild with baking Christmas cookies two weeks before Christmas, so by the time Christmas actually happened, we absolutely didn’t need any more baked goods in the house. But I needed a baking project to take on between Christmas and New Year’s, and I decided on a gingerbread house. I know, I know – it’s a baked good, but I wasn’t planning on eating it. Gingerbread houses are generally made of “construction grade” gingerbread and royal icing glue, both of which are rock hard and not exactly prime snacking material. Plus, I just really wanted to make a gingerbread house, and one of the perks of adulthood is that sometimes you can do what you want!

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Chocolate Peppermint Pinwheels

December 23, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

I took these photos at 8:30 pm on December 21, literally the darkest day of the year. It’s awfully difficult take take natural light photos when you never see your house in the daylight during the week. Blogging is such hard work!

I plunged into the Christmas cookie madness with both feet last week and spent every evening after work baking cookies. I think I was averaging two recipes a night in preparation for our annual pre-Christmas trek to Vancouver to see family, which coincided this year with my remarkable grandfather’s ninety-eighth (!!) birthday. These cookies in particular are a re-make of a childhood favourite that I remember asking my mum to make every year. Something about the spiraled layers of different coloured dough mixed with the flavour of peppermint and chocolate makes me feel all nostalgic.

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Lemon Pistachio Biscotti

December 16, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

I had a jarring realization this past weekend that we were less than two weeks away from Christmas and that I hadn’t started any Christmas shopping – or worse, any Christmas baking. But then I remembered that I had actually baked and sent off holiday cookies for the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap several weeks ago, so all was not lost. I participated in the Cookie Swap in 2013, then missed the sign-up deadline last year, so I was pretty excited to be part of it again this year. Participants pay a small entrance fee to raise money for the Cookies for Kids Cancer campaign, and then are matched up with three food bloggers to send cookies to. In return, you receive cookies from three other bloggers. These are the goodies that I got in the mail:

Vegan candy cane shortbread from Kacey of The Cookie Writer
Vegan snickerdoodles from Lisa of The Viet Vegan
Three different kinds of brown sugar cookies from Allison of The Bacon Eating Jewish Vegetarian

Merry Christmas to me, indeed!

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Jamie Oliver’s Charming Eccles Cakes

November 24, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

We recently upgraded our cable TV situation and we now get a channel that plays a lot of Jamie Oliver shows, which is just fine by me. A little while ago we watched the Jamie’s Great Britain episode where he visits Yorkshire and makes eccles cakes: little puff pastry rounds traditionally filled with currants. Normally this kind of thing doesn’t appeal to me – too mincemeat-y – but I remembered back to the tiny delicious eccles cake I had at Abkhazi Garden and how it tasted exactly like Christmas, and suddenly I was consumed by the desire make Jamie’s eccles cakes, which include apples and a good dose of spice and citrus zest.

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Chocolate-Bottomed Maple Bourbon Pecan Pie

November 14, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

I made this chocolate, bourbon and maple syrup-laced pecan pie about a month ago for Canadian Thanksgiving after finally admitting that I don’t like pumpkin pie all that much – I mean, it’s OK, but I can think of probably a dozen other desserts I’d rather eat. And after tasting this pie, all I can ask myself is, “why was I holding on to pumpkin for so long?!” Gooey maple custard, crunchy pecans, a good dose of bourbon, and some dark chocolate to cut through the sweetness: now THAT is a pie worth making every year. It sounds like a lot of things going on in one pie, but they are all the perfect complement to one another. The only thing that could have used some work was my pie crust, which – to be honest – has never been the tender, flaky masterpiece I’ve always wanted it to be.

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