Christmas Calendar 2015 - Classic Christmas kougelhopf

As I still had some kougelhopf cake using flour mix left from my Summer vacation to Alsace, I decided to try to "tame" this cake, as it last time, when I baked it outgrew my cake form. So this time I only made half the portion.


To twist the taste into more Christmas style, I have used vanilla sugar and dried orange peel. I still have 250 g kougelhopf cake mix left, so I will make another version for some Christmas guests using saffron later on this month.

Classic Christmas kougelhopf: - 1 cake

• 250 g kougelhopf flour mix
• 40 g sultana raisins
• 20 g dried orange pee
• 10 g fresh yeast
• 120 g water
• ½ teaspoon vanilla sugar
• almonds for top decoration

1. Dissolve the yeast in the water in the mixing bowl.
2. Add in the flour mix and vanilla, knead the dough on stand alone mixer, first 3 minutes on speed 1 followed by 10 minutes on speed 4.
3. Add in the raisins and dried orange peel and knead until they are distributed homogeneously in the dough.
4. Let the dough raise at 20'C for 1 hour.
5. Place almonds in the bottom of the kougelhopf form. Place the dough in the form on top of the almonds.
6. Let the dough raise in the form at 30'C for 1½ hour.
7. Heat up the oven (conventional) to 160'C.
8. Bake the kougelhopf in the lower of the oven at 160'C for 50-60 minutes.
9. Cool down the cake, before it is removed from the form.

Christmas Calendar 2015 - Cookies with chocolate, orange peel and walnut

It is time to get started working in my kitchen. I will start with an easy thing such as cookies, as you can not have a Christmas without cookies ! The perfect thing about cookies is, that they take very little time to make. And you can easily prepare the cookie dough in advance, freeze it down for later use. So you later on during the busy Christmas days easily can serve freshly baked cookies for guests or bring newly baked cookies as hostess gifts. Well I am ready for you to come around :-)

I have located this cookie recipe in a newspaper magazine (Livsstil week 48/2015). I decided to replace the dark chocolate with milk chocolate, as I do not like dark chocolate ! And instead of hazelnuts I decided to use walnuts, as I again prefer walnuts over hazelnuts.

The cookie dough is very soft, so I prefer to cool it down in the refrigerator, so I can cut the dough with a knife. Doing it this way means, that you avoid to mess up your fingers with cookie dough.

Adjust the baking time in the oven to your preference for either soft cookies or cripsy cookies.

Cookies with chocolate, orange peel and walnut: - 30 cookies

• 150 g milk chocolate - medium - finely chopped
• 75 g walnut - medium chopped
• 150 g butter - soft
• 150 g sugar
• 1 organic orange - only the peel finely chopped
• 1 egg
• 200 g (cake) flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

1. Whip the butter, sugar and egg with an electrical beater into a homogeneous mass
2. Mix in the orange peel, flour and baking powder and whip again.
3. Mix in the chopped chocolate and walnut with spoon.
4. Divide the soft cookie into two portions. Place each portion of dough on a piece of baking paper. 
5. Roll the cookie dough into longer string. Cover each cookie string in baking paper.
6. Place the cookies dough cold, either in the refrigerator or freezer.
7. Heat the oven to 190'C
8. Cut the firm cookie dough into slices of 1 cm.
9. Place the cookies on a baking tray covered with baking paper.
10. Bake the cookies in the upper part of the oven at 190'C for 15 minutes.
11. Cool down the cookies, before storing them in airtight containers.

Count down for Christmas

Count down for Christmas with the Christmas Calendar 2015 by Kitchen of Kiki

Another Christmas, where I am spending plenty of wonderful hours in my kitchen filling up all my tins as preparation for Christmas and the coming guests. It is actually my fifth season, where I am creating my very own Christmas Calendar !

As I create these various thing, I will be enjoying a tea calendar from Nute, which consist of the following teas:

• All Day Classic - black Chinese tea
• Christmas Tea - black Assam tea, 8% all spice, 5% cardemon, 4% cloves, natural flavours, 1% muscat nut
• Blue & Berry - 90% Chinese balck tea, 4% bluberry, natural flavours, 1% cranberry pieces
• Liquorice & Fennel - 49.5% South Indian black tea, 30% liquorice root, 10% fennel, 10% anis, natural flavours
• Strawberry & Camomille - 85% green Chinese tea, 5% camomille, 4% dandelion, natural flavours, 2% strawberry
• Autumn Tea - 84% green Chinese tea, 10% apple, natural flavours, 2% quince
• Green Earl Grey - 87.5% green Chinese tea, 10% lemon verbena, natural flavours, natural lemon flavours, mandarin oil
• Rooibos & Peppermint -  80% South African rooibos, 7% peppermint, 7% blackcurrant, natural flavours, 2% sunflower
• Earl Grey - black South Indian tea, natural bergamot oil, natural lemon flavour
• Lemon Moon - black Indian tea, 3% lime, 3% red grapefruit, flavours, 0.75% lime oil
• Black Morning Tea: Ceylon OP Blackwood black tea
• Rose & Berry - white Chinese tea, 5% blackcuurant, natural flavours, 2% rose petals.

In order to celebrate this jubilee I will re-share the most popular post of the previous four years as a kick start for this jubilee season. Perhaps I will celebrate this jubilee with making new versions of these most popular Christmas Calendar recipes ?

Christmas Calendar 2014 - World´s best cookies

Christmas Calendar 2013 - snow balls with butter and oat flakes

Christmas Calendar 2012 - marzipan role with nougat

Christmas Calendar 2011 - Christmas aquavita

I hope you will look by my kitchen a few times during December or perhaps even every single day :-) to see, what is going on and get inspiration for your own Christmas creations.

Christmas Fair at Trapholt 2015

The annual Christmas Fair at Trapholt has become a most-do-thing for me, as the level of the different art booths has a very high quality level. You can find "old" crafts people, which have been previous years as well as new crafts designers.

A good advise is to arrive from the very beginng, as this means you can get parking spots more or less next door to the museum. Besides from getting a good parking spot, you can also get a good look around the various arts and craft booths, before the fair area becomes over-crowed.

The entrance is free to both the fair as well as the museum, so you actually save 75 DKK, which is the normal entrance to the museum !!! The fair will also be open again today Sunday.
I will be back again next year :-)

So what could I "not live without" ?

Two urchins made Malene Lynggård, a new tea cup and little Christmas tree by Bruuns Keramik and a tea light candle holder by Lærke Langballe.

 

Creation of marzipan horn

During the Winter season Tuesday evening is normally my "evening off", as I am busy with in-door rowing and water ballet Monday - Thursday during a normal work week. However, Tuesday evening this week I had signed up for an "evening class" at Vanilla (patisserie in Vejle), where you could learn how to make a marzipan horn for New Years Eve.

We started off by getting a lump of marzipan mass of 485 g, which were divided into 11 portion of various sizes. Each portion should when by hand be rolled and shaped into different shapes, mostly cigar forms.

I was standing next to a man, who just was doing this very easy and neat. Somehow during the evening, he told that he had a back ground as baker. No wonder, why his marzipan horn was looking a million compared to mine !

During the baking the smaller marzipan parts should be placed on the inner part of the baking part, so they get less heat.

While the marzipan part were baking we had a go at making various chocolate part for the decoration of the marzipan horn. This is not one of my key competency areas. The chocolate was running over the top of the decoration "cornet", so I had chocolate on my hands and every where than on the decoration drawings.

After the baking process it was time for decoration the marzipan parts with the icing sugar. 

My capabilities of controlling the icing sugar pattern is another area of improvement. At least you can see, that I did the decoration myself without any assistance.

And when it is was time for putting all the different marzipan part together two and two using melted chocolate as glazing.

On my first attempt I managed to make a horn with hump !!!!

So I divided two part of the horn and turned them opposite, and finally I got the desired shape of a scorpion with a twist of the tale :-)

The marzipan horn is now stored in the freezer, so it will ready to welcome the arrival of the New Year.

Jerusalemen artichoke cream

A "fortune" in Jerusalem artichoke

I got a big portion of Jerusalem artichoke from the garden of my good friends in Horsens. Otherwise you can easily spend big amount of money buying these Jerusalem artichoke in the supermarket.

Having recently been dining out I discovered, that a more refined word for soup  is cream, so I decided to make my oven version of Jerusalem artichoke cream !!!

Jerusalem artichoke cream: 4-5 servings

• 700 g Jerusalem artichoke - peeled & chopped
• 1 onion - peeled & finely chopped
• 50 g butter
• 1 dl white wine
• 7,5 dl vegetable broth
• 2 dl dairy whipping cream, 38% fat
• 125 g mascarpone



Onion and Jerusalem artichoke enjoying themselves in butter

• salt & pepper

1. Peel the Jerusalem artichoke. Cut those into smaller pieces. Do similar with the onion.
2. Melt the butter in a cooking pot.
3. Add the chopped Jerusalem artichoke and onion, and it softly fry for 5 minutes without the vegetable turning brown in colour.
4. Add the white wine and let it evaporate from the cooking pot.
5. Add the vegetable broth and let the soup cook for 15 minutes, until the Jerusalem artichoke pieces are soft.
6. Add the dairy whipping cream. And blend the soup together.
7. Stir in the mascarpone
8. Season with salt & pepper. Cook up to the boil.
9. Serve together with bread.

Crazy about Kähler

I am crazy about the ceramics by Kähler (most of it), so when the art club at work made an arrangement at the shop Kähler and Friends, I was almost the first person to sign up !

The programme was a talk about the history of Kähler combined with enjoying tapas with some wine. After this we could go into the shops, where we would get 20% discount on our shopping !!!

You have to imaging how 30 persons (mostly females) were running over the street between the 2 Kähler shops, touching everything, checking their smart phones for various Christmas gift wishing lists, finally dragging their big shopping bags with them afterwards. And yes, I was one of the females in behaviour :-)

On my wish list (for myself) I had written down the new Urbania houses for tea light.

However, I also found a new green vase for green vase collection together with a tea light holder made in bone china (Stella).

Below you can find photos of the various displays in the shops together with a photo of my shopping basket.

Content of my shopping backet