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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A New Year, A New Look {Alice Medrich’s Chocolate Truffles}

January 11, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 15 Comments

Alice Medrich's Chocolate Truffles | Korena in the Kitchen
My blog turns four years old this month, and instead of a cake, I decided on a complete overhaul. I moved from WordPress.com to a self-hosted platform (apologies to anyone who tried to access my blog last Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday – I was having some technical difficulties) and as you can see, I installed a new theme (which includes a functioning recipe index!!). I’m still figuring a few things out and making some tweaks here and there, so if you run into any issues, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope you like the new look as much as I do!

Now, on to more important matters: these chocolate truffles. I make truffles every year as part of my Christmas baking, but this year I decided to a try an unusual recipe. Instead of a classic ganache made with chocolate and cream, the base for these truffles contains chocolate, butter, and – here’s the weird part – tempered egg yolks and water! The recipe and technique come from chocolate legend Alice Medrich, so I was confident that the truffles would be good despite their unorthodox ingredients. I wasn’t quite prepared for just how good, though: so chocolatey, so silky smooth, so melt-in-your-mouth amazing.

Alice Medrich's Chocolate Truffles | Korena in the Kitchen

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Lemon Curd Macarons

January 2, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 14 Comments

Lemon Curd Macarons | Korena in the Kitchen

Happy New Year, friends! Here’s to 2015 being the sweetest year yet, and what better way to start a sweet year than with a lemon curd macaron? Given that you can buy lemons and oranges year round in any grocery store, it can be easy to forget that citrus is in fact a winter fruit. However, the explosion of different varieties of lemons, oranges, and grapefruits during the colder months of the year proves that nature still works on a schedule, and that schedule clearly states that citrus coincides with winter, making a lemon curd macaron a perfectly Christmas-y (I made these as part of my Christmas Baking) or New Years-y thing, indeed.

Lemon Curd Macarons | Korena in the Kitchen …

Linzer Cookies

December 23, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

Linzer Cookies | Korena in the Kitchen

If you’re looking for the perfect Christmas cookie, I think I may have found it: the Linzer cookie. Last year I made a Linzer torte – rich walnut pastry spiced with cinnamon, cloves, and lemon zest filled with raspberry jam – that ended up being my favourite item on the Christmas Baking List, and I couldn’t wait to try it in cookie form. They have that traditional Old World Christmas feel thanks to their Austrian roots, and are just fussy enough (rolling the dough, cutting out the cookies, assembling them, etc) to fall into the “special occasion” category.

Linzer Cookies | Korena in the Kitchen …

Classic Molded Shortbread

December 21, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

Classic Molded Shortbread | Korena in the Kitchen I’ve had this post “on deck” for about two weeks now but just haven’t been able to find the time to add the pictures and actually publish it. I remember when I was posting three times a week on this here blog – now I’m lucky if I can manage three posts a month! However, with it being the 2014 Christmas Baking Season, and with all the blog-worthy baking that has been coming out of my kitchen, and fact that I’m off work for a few weeks over the holidays, maybe I’ll actually be able to get it together to post a few more times before this month is over…

Classic Molded Shortbread | Korena in the Kitchen …

Cocoa-Cinnamon Palmiers {and what to get the foodie on your list}

December 12, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

Cocoa Cinnamon Palmiers | Korena in the Kitchen As the foodie in my family and circle of friends, over the years I have received a good amount of useful, useless, awesome and/or strange kitchen gadgets for Christmas. And while I always appreciate a gift and the fact that someone thought of me when they saw those silicon pot holders or these teeny tiny tongs or this decorative cheese knife or that Slap Chop (OK, so maybe the Slap Chop ended up at the thrift store…), there’s only so much room in my kitchen. In my case, the kitchen gadgetry gifts are combined with being “the one who likes cats”, which explains how I came to own not one but TWO cat-shaped ceramic creamers.

cat creamers | Korena in the Kitchen …

Christmas Baking 2013: Salted Caramel Chocolate Truffles

December 31, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

I’ve been making chocolate truffles at Christmas for at least ten years, ever since a friend of my Mum’s let me know how easy it was – just make a ganache of melted chocolate and cream, let it cool, then shape and roll in cocoa powder. Some years I decide to get fancier and dip each truffle in tempered chocolate. I usually spike the ganache with some kind of booze, but this year I made the caramel version I’ve had bookmarked for years in one of my Canadian Living cookbooks. All it entailed was cooking sugar into a caramel syrup, adding cream, and pouring it over chopped chocolate to make the ganache filling – simple, yet delicious. Because of the extra sugar in the caramel, these truffles were very sweet, so I added a pinch of salt to balance it out and made them into tiny portions (in hindsight, I wonder about using some portion of unsweetened chocolate in the ganache… perhaps an experiment for next year!).

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Christmas Baking 2013: Chocolate Cardamom Orange Ribbon Cookies

December 30, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 4 Comments

Every year I spend several hours composing a list of the Christmas cookies I will bake, and inevitably once it’s “complete”, I come across a new recipe that I have to try, and the list gets edited once again. This was one such recipe. I love the orange chocolate combination as well as the chocolate cardamom combination, and these cookies contain both. Plus they are quite pretty with their stripes of different coloured dough. The flavours are subtle, but they have a great crisp texture and as I mentioned, they look really great. Definitely a welcome addition to this year’s Christmas cookie tins.

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Christmas Cookies 2013: The Round-Up

December 29, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 14 Comments

As promised, I’m back with cookies. Or more accurately, pictures of cookies, links to recipes, and more promises. I have recipe posts in the works for two of the following goodies, so stay tuned and bookmark this post as inspiration for next Christmas!

Christmas Cookies 2013 | Korena in the Kitchen

Christmas cookie sweatshop

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