Desserts and Sweet Treats | Finding Feasts

Tippaleipä – Finnish Funnel Cakes

Finding Feasts | Finnish Funnel Cake — Click image for Tippaleipä – Finnish Funnel Cakes recipe

Tippaleipä – Finnish Funnel Cakes… Every year I have been meaning to get these up on the website and every year I miss the 1st of May by a day. But not this year! Here it is, finally.

The 1st of May is a huge event in Finland; it marks the beginning of spring (amongst other things) with large festivities in the towns and cities. Lots of drinking and lots of food is consumed from May Day Eve (it’s as big as Christmas for the Finns). It’s a time for friends, family, students, workmates to get together and party.

These deep fried fritters are consumed by the truckload and are perfect street food. One hand holds a fritter, the other hand holds a glass of Sima – a Finnish fermented lemon drink. With their slightly crispy outside, they are soft and warm inside with a dusting of icing that looks like snow sitting on an odd shaped snowflake.

But who needs a party?… These take but moments to whip up and only moments to devour.

Happy Vappu! Blondie 🙂

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Amazing Coconut Roughs

Amazing Coconut Roughs… These are truly amazing little treats to have on hand for when you need a little energy boost… and fantastic for primary schools as they are free from most things that some kids are intolerant to – There is always one kid that can’t have gluten or eggs or sugar etc, in a class and it’s a shame that they always miss out on treats.

I will definitely be making them into little egg moulds for Easter this year!

Guilt free eating – Blondie 🙂

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Christmas Tree Ice Cream Cones

You would have had to been living under a log the last few weeks to not know that it is Christmas in 11 sleeps!

I am a Christmas junkie! I love the food, the wine, the decorations and of course the planning which starts for me as soon as humanly possible! Our Christmas tree goes up religiously on the 1st of December however if the 1st should happen to fall on a week day then you can legally without offending the Christmas spirits put your tree and decorations up the weekend before! Decorating is a huge event, the boxes come out, the Buble Christmas tunes are pumped and I plot around the house with with a glass of champagne whilst Imogen decorates the tree. The hubby on the other hand prefers to have a beer or two at the local, however he is getting better with the decorations going up!

It turned out that this year hubby had two work functions each night so paper art decorations in hand Imogen and I decorated our lounge and dinning room. Very proud of our colour coordinated efforts!

Back to the food aspect of Christmas! These little ice cream cone Christmas trees are too easy to make and the kids will love helping decorate them!

You need to ensure that the ice cream freezes well otherwise it will melt too quickly when you take the cones out. Although we didn’t have this problem, they were all gobbled up within seconds of coming out of the freezer!

If you have a Christmas inspired desert then please feel free to share!

Merry Christmas and Wesołych Świąt!

Bella 🙂

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Traditional Finnish Gingerbread Biscuits – Piparkakut

Traditional Finnish Gingerbread Biscuits – Piparkakut … If I were to choose one thing that is significantly Christmas to me, and for most Finns I would assume it would have to be the mounds of gingerbread biscuits that come out at this time of year.

My Nana has always been the one to stock the family with these delicious, spice laden, thin crispy biscuits. She would have tins of them, and knowing how much my sister and I loved them, would keep a continual stock of them throughout the year that we would have with coffee along with other lovely sweets.

I recently acquired a Finnish cookbook published in 1966, Kotiruoka by Uusi Laitos (translates to Home Cooking or something very similar) This is Nana’s and has been well thumbed through. It has nine different recipes for gingerbread cookies… NINE!

The Finnish/Nordic way is to have them neat, no fancy icing decorations and the shapes are simple hearts, stars and a scalloped circle… although I have, in the last several years, started a little tradition with my son and we now decorate large cookies cut from my gorgeous Donna Hay Christmas Bauble Cookie Cutters. The large size means the cookies can be intricately decorated and look stunning (my son channels Jackson Pollock when decorating these)

This amount makes about 50 cookies depending on the size of your cutters, but believe me they will disappear, and very quickly! Going with the FinSki’s theme for edible gift ideas, package them up in little bags or old biscuit tins and give them as gift.

Hyvaa joulua! Blondie

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Poppy Seed Pate Cake with Baked Ricotta

This is a Polish marriage made in heaven! Poppy seed cheesecake or as I now call it, Poppy seed pate cake with Baked Ricotta!

You might remember that a while ago I came across this tub of poppy seed pate mixture at my local continental grocer.

Happily handing over my cash to the register operator I ran home and ogled hundreds of recipes for poppy seed mixtures. Most of them called for ingredients that I didn’t have and being a Sunday I was determined to not have to venture out into the shops again.

My pantry had Anzac biscuits that had a week left prior to the use by date and sugar. In the fridge I had butter, a kilo of ricotta and eggs.

What on earth did you do with the Anzac biscuits I hear you ask?

Well, as crazy as it sounds they were the base for the cake, a baked base! At first when I put all the ingredients together I had a mini melt down, I remembered that when you typically make a cheesecake base with digestive biscuits, you don’t bake the base. You let it set with the cheese on top.

With my cheesecake about to go into the oven, I couldn’t give up now, no matter how large the error was!

When the cake was in the oven at 180º C the butter melted slightly and leaked onto the bottom of the oven tray, but once the cake cooled down my baked Anzac biscuit base was amazing. The hard set biscuit base complemented the softness of the baked ricotta and poppy seed pate.

The rest of the cake was divine too!

Will I make this exactly the same again…hell yes!

What errors have you made in the kitchen that have ended up working out ok?

Bella

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Danish Sweet Cheese Pastries From Scratch

Danish Sweet Cheese Pastries From Scratch comes direct from Nigella Lawson’s, How To Be A Domestic Goddess cookbook. I chose this one for the mere fact that it’s a food processor made dough, which in my mind will make the dough making process easy and clean… hahaha!!

To start with and probably the one thing EVERYONE mentions about this dough is just how moist, messy and sticky it is… and they weren’t wrong. It’s like glue!

In the original recipe it asks to mix the dry ingredients then add the cold butter in the food processor then add this to the combined wet ingredients. That was far too messy for me, considering everyone’s comments on this particular pastry recipe, so I did it slightly different – I did it all in the food processor. The result was still a success, but you are still going to get dirty trying to remove the dough from the processor into a bowl for it to prove.

**Brainwave** Leave the dough to prove in the processor bowl! Will let you know how it goes the next time around.

Get your hands dirty and have fun!.. Blondie 🙂

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Homemade Sweetened Yoghurt & Bread

Homemade Sweetened Yoghurt - Small Batch — Click image for recipe – Small batch sweetened yoghurt

Homemade Sweetened Yoghurt & Bread… Yoghurt is a simple enough food to buy but it can get expensive. I particularly like the sweetened yoghurt freshly made at my local grocer; it’s lusciously thick and creamy and lightly sweetened but we do get through quite a bit of it so this is the focus for my homemade yoghurt.

After reading the final results of other people’s homemade yoghurts (the main complaint being that it wasn’t as thick as store bought varieties, alot even separated) I chose to add a thickener, pectin to be exact, just to be safe … I really wanted to replicate my favourite yoghurt and quickly. If you aren’t in a hurry then ideally leave it to strain in a muslin cloth over a bowl to catch the whey. This will produce a deliciously thick and creamy yoghurt -You won’t be able to strain it if you have added gelatin or pectin.

Yoghurt is basic enough to make, the challenge is having a source of heat to keep it warm for 10-12 hours (times do vary immensely though). I decided to do the esky method, but you can do any of the following methods:

put it in a non draughty area with a towel around it
place it in a thermos
remove the shelves from your dehydrator and leave it at 45°C / 113°F
place it on a brewer’s heat pad with a tea towel over it… they all do the same job.

Your yoghurt can set anytime from only a few hours, but you can leave it for as long as a day. The sour taste will get stronger the longer it’s left.

If you want a basic greek yoghurt then omit the sugar and vanilla and any thickeners. Just make as the method below and then pour into a strainer lined with muslin and leave to drain in the fridge till you have achieved your desired consistency.

It’s important to use freshly opened, ‘live’ yoghurt in your first batch to ensure the bacteria is at it’s freshest then, importantly, remember to make sure you to set aside a 1/4 cup of your yoghurt to use as a starter batch to get another lot of yoghurt going. You can generally get about 4 cycles from your homemade yoghurt before you will need to buy a fresh batch of live yoghurt to use as your starter.

Other variables you can use when making your yoghurt include using pure cream or half cream with half milk instead of straight milk.

After you have tried your hand at yoghurt then get stuck into my Sweet Yoghurt Bread Rolls…

This recipe comes direct from a website I stumbled across, Pure Enjoyment. I didn’t alter anything in the ingredients, (I think that is only the second time I have ever done that!) It’s faultless! Thank you so much for sharing this with the world

The crumb is a lighter version of brioche but with a flavour that has a delicate tang due to the yoghurt. I used my homemade Sweetened Yoghurt for this recipe but you could certainly go out and buy a favourite yoghurt (at Pure Enjoyment she and quite a few of her followers used a chunky fruit yoghurt) The aroma is heavenly and it’s just so moreish.

Timeline if you were to make it on the weekend… take 10 minutes to make the dough after breakfast and then leave to prove till lunch time, spend another 10 minutes – if that – making the 10 balls and then leave to prove till 20 minutes before afternoon drinks. Cook and then you have amazing sweet bread rolls to have with a beer.

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