Joulutortut {Finnish Christmas Tarts}

December 27, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

Christmas has come and gone, and I have managed to come down with a case of what might be strep throat… but in all honesty, I don’t mind that much because it gives me a legitimate excuse to lie on the couch and do nothing for a few days! The lead-up to Christmas, what with all the prepping and shopping and baking and traveling to visit family while still working full time, is absolutely exhausting, and I’m ready for a break, sick or not. But I wanted to tell you about these beautiful little Finnish Christmas tarts before the holiday is too long past, because they were extremely delicious and pretty fun to make, not to mention fun to say (in your best Swedish chef accent): “YO-lou-TOR-tou”.

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Cranberry White Chocolate Lemon Tea Braid

December 13, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

Along with the perfect Christmas dessert and the best Christmas cookies, every year I’m on the look out for a delicious holiday breakfast or brunch pastry – and this year, I think I may have stumbled on it kind of by accident. I had half a batch of challah dough in my freezer, a container of cranberry sauce leftover from Thanksgiving, and I’d just seen a photo of the beautiful poppy seed tea “braid” from Luisa Weiss‘ Classic German Baking – and it all came together in a swirly braid filled with cranberry sauce, white chocolate chunks, and lemon zest, glazed with a lemony icing. It was a huge loaf, so I gave some to friends and planned to take the rest to work to share with my colleagues… but plans changed when Nate and I discovered how good it was, and we ate it all ourselves! (Sorry, colleagues!)

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Torta Della Nona

December 7, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

Creamy custard inside a crisp, cookie-like tart shell, the whole thing flavoured with vanilla and lemon and topped with toasted pine nuts. Is your mouth watering yet? It should be, because I’ve just described an Italian dessert called Torta Della Nona and it is SO GOOD. Translated as “grandmother’s cake”, this was the November Daring Kitchen Challenge hosted by Ginger-Z, and of course, I’m over a week behind schedule for posting about it. But once again, better late than never – this one is worth the wait!

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German Apple-Quince-Almond Cake {Apfel-Quitte-Marzipan-Kuchen}

November 20, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

I’ve been eagerly anticipating Luisa Weiss‘ new book, Classic German Baking, ever since she first started sharing her adventures in recipe development about a year ago. I have yet to get my hands on the actual book, but since its release, several recipes have popped up online, including one for a completely gorgeous apple-marzipan cake, which is described as “epic“. In the fall, I’m a sucker for anything apple, and almonds are quickly becoming my favourite flavour for almost everything, so this cake was immediately added to my weekend baking list.

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Apple, Pear and Quince Speculoos Crumble

November 16, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen Leave a Comment

I got Dorie Greenspan’s Baking Chez Moi for my birthday this summer and spent about three days straight reading it from cover to cover. By the time I was done, I had bookmarked so many recipes that it looked like this:

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Vanilla Poached Quince

November 11, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

A few weeks ago, my kitchen was overrun with apples, pears, green tomatoes, and quince. Apples and pears are fairly routine autumnal fruit to deal with (I made apple sauce and dried pears, among other things) and the green tomatoes became green tomato mincemeat, but the quince left me at a bit of a loss: up until my Mum delivered them to me in a box, I’d never even seen one in person, let alone cooked one. Quince are a rather unusual fruit in the same family as apples and pears – in fact, they look like a cross between the two, only their waxy yellow skin is also covered in peach-like fuzz. They have a delicate floral – almost tropical – smell that is incredibly deceiving, because they are totally inedible raw – hard, woody, and mouth-puckeringly tart, even when ripe. When you go to prepare them for cooking, they are very difficult to cut and core, and their flesh oxidizes and and turns brown almost immediately.

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Decorated Swiss Rolls

October 27, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

This month I hosted the Daring Kitchen challenge and invited the group to make decorated Swiss rolls, aka “deco rolls”, in the style of Japanese food blogger and cookbook author Junko, who has taken the internet by storm with her adorable “kawaii” versions. This concept is a standard French pastry technique with the use of décor paste to create a pattern on a joconde sponge (which was tackled by the Daring Bakers back in 2011), and making it into a Swiss roll is an obvious next step, so when I was preparing this challenge, I decided to try it the French way. Unfortunately the results were not stellar – the décor paste cracked and the filling escaped when I rolled the cake up, because the décor paste was harder and less flexible than the surrounding sponge cake.

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Torta Hrapocusa (Dalmatian Dol Cake)

October 13, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 1 Comment

I got all proactive and made September’s Daring Kitchen challenge recipe – an almond and walnut cake called “hrapocusa” – at the beginning of the month, and then of course didn’t get my act together to post about it on time. Like, at ALL. Sigh. ANYWAY. Back in September, Jason of Daily Candor challenged us to make this regional specialty of the tiny town of Dol on the Dalmatian island of Brac. The torta hrapocusa is a two-layer cake primarily composed of nuts, with a bottom layer of orange and cherry liqueur-scented almond sponge cake and a sugared walnut topping that is meant to resemble the rocky shores of the island. This is certainly a unique cake and one that I never would have come across without the Daring Kitchen!

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Apple Pies and Pastry Tricks

September 23, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

Now that it’s officially fall, part of me is like, “where the heck did summer go so fast?” and the other part of me (the part that prefers slippers to shorts and likes putting on a jacket to go outside) is all, “FALL! I’VE BEEN WAITING SO LONG!” Other than the wardrobe options, I love this season because pretty much every year, someone or other gives me a bunch of baking apples from their tree or their parent’s tree or their cousin’s neighbour’s son’s teacher’s tree. Everyone has apples to give away and I will happily take them all, because it means I can make apple pie, and that is about my favourite thing to make.

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{Naked} Carrot Wedding Cake

September 10, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 1 Comment

In July, I made a wedding cake for my friend Clare and her now-husband Tony. I’ve known Clare for most of my life – we first met in grade 1, and we shared the unique experience of having parents who were teachers and/or principals in a small town, thereby ensuring that most of our friends had been either taught social studies, ukulele, French and/or given detention by our mum or dad. We were in French immersion together from grade 7 onward, and I have a vivid memory of dressing as the Spice Girls with a group of friends for one of her epic birthday parties (I, slightly unconvincingly, was Scary Spice). We sort of lost touch after high school when we both moved away to university and started Adult Life, but I was totally thrilled when Clare told me she was getting married and asked if I would make her cake. Obviously, I said yes!

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