Super simple Nutella cupcakes

Today I'm sharing a quick and simple recipe that I really love. I like baking, but I rarely feel like I have the time to, especially if I'm just making something for Keith and me. That's why I like this recipe - it only takes three ingredients and very little time!

These Nutella cupcakes have a more brownie-like texture than regular cupcakes, which I appreciate. I made them several times over the summer, and they usually go over very well. If you want to make them really decadent, a coconut or cashew cream frosting should work well with the Nutella flavor - I usually just powder some icing sugar on the top, since the cupcakes are so rich as they are.

Three-ingredient Nutella cupcakes

Ingredients
1 cup Nutella
2 eggs
1 cup flour

Instructions
Preheat your oven to 175 C (approx. 350 F). Put cupcake liners in a muffin pan (this recipe will make around 12 cupcakes). Whisk together Nutella and eggs in a medium size bowl. Add the flour, and whisk until blended. Spoon batter into the pan, filling the liners about half-way up.

Bake for 8-12 minutes, just until the tops have set and cracked slightly. Test with a  toothpick in the middle, the toothpick should come out wet and sticky. Allow to cool.

Enjoy!

Rustic Walnut Bread Recipe

Fall is really here! It's been getting darker in the evenings, and last week we had several days of rain. I've been going into fall mode by cooking hearty (and probably not-so-healthy) dinners - and baking!

Walnut bread is a favorite of mine - so simple to make and always turns out well. This time I made one small loaf and several hamburger buns (to go with this awesome recipe for black bean burgers - seriously, try it!).

This recipe is easy to vary according to your own tastes (and what you happen to have in your cupboards). You can use any type of milk and experiment with different types of flour. I added in some spelt flour this time, because I love it's rich nutty flavor. It's also easy to veganize the recipe - just leave out the egg for brushing.

My recipe uses fresh yeast because that's the kind that is most widely available in Sweden, but you can easily adapt the recipe to use dry yeast if that's what you prefer.

Rustic walnut bread

Makes 2 small loaves or 15 buns

Ingredients

50 grams fresh yeast
2 dl cashew milk (or any other plant based milk)
4 dl hot water
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
750-850 grams flour (I used mostly all-purpose white flour,  with some spelt and rye mixed in)
3 dl chopped walnuts

Optional:
1 egg (to brush)
1 dl white sesame seeds 

Instructions

1. Crumble yeast into a large bowl.
2. Mix cashew milk with hot water (the mixture should be warm, not hot). Pour mixture over the yeast and stir until the yeast is completely dissolved.
3. Add sugar, salt and about 2/3 of the flour. Combine well.
4. Add the chopped walnuts, mix well. Knead the dough for a few minutes, adding more flour as necessary until the dough is firm and doesn't stick to your fingers.
5. Cover the bowl with a tea towel and allow to rise for 45 minutes.
6. Pick up the dough and knead it lightly. Shape the dough - here you can choose either to make two larger loaves or about 15 individual buns. Or a combination if the two, like I did! For loaves, shape into two loaves and score the top lightly with a sharp knife. For buns, separate the dough into 15 balls and flatten each ball until roughly 2 cm thick. Use a fork to poke some holes in the top of each bun (this prevents large air bubbles from forming inside the bread).
7. Cover the bread with the tea towel again and allow to rise for another 20 minutes. If you are planning to brush the bread, crack your egg into a glass and stir with a fork until the yolk and egg white are combined.Set aside.
8. When the bread has risen, brush the egg over the top and sprinkle with sesame seeds.
9. Bake at 225 degrees Celsius (roughly 440 Fahrenheit). Loaves will take about 25 minutes, buns about 15. Allow to cool.

Enjoy!

Stockholm Chocolate Festival

What did you do this weekend? I visited the Stockholm Baking and Chocolate Festival  - an annual fair focused on all things sweet. There were chocolate tastings, baking competitions, trade talks and of course LOTS of stalls selling amazing treats.

Apologies for the poor photos, I was a bit too focused on what was going on in the stalls (free samples!) to pay attention to my camera. I could not resist buying one of these huge "artisan" chocolate bars either:

Yum! There was a house and home trade show going on at the same time as the chocolate festival, so I actually scored two fairs in one day. I didn't buy much though, mostly I just walked around and soaked up the inspiration.

Among other things I had the chance to chat with craft book writers and bloggers Sania Hedengren and Susanna Zacke who were busy promoting their latest craft book and showing off this amazing vintage caravan. Isn't it adorable?

The inside was equally sweet, decorated with vintage wallpaper, linens and crochet. It's always been my dream to ride off into the sunset in an old VW camper van (this article could totally have been written by me), but a caravan as sweet as this could do the trick as well!

Homemade Cinnamon Toffee

Hope you are all excited for the holidays to start! I am leaving for my mothers' today, and we will be celebrating Christmas in her cottage in the country. Before I leave, I wanted to share a recipe for some x-mas treats I made the other day - simple and tasty! The original recipe (in Swedish) can be found here, but I went ahead and translated for my non-Swedish readers! Here goes:


Cinnamon Toffee Recipe

Ingredients:
100 g (3,5 oz or roughly ½ cup) butter
2 dl (roughly 1 cup) granulated sugar
1 dl (roughly ½ cup) pale treacle
3 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
4 tbsp all purpose flour

Directions:
Combine all ingredients in a heavy bottomed saucepan.
Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Boil for about 5 minutes.
Pour the (very hot) toffee onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.
Allow to cool in the refrigerator, then cut into pieces using a sharp knife.
Store in the refrigerator, wrapped in parchment paper or cellophane.


These are my toffees before I wrapped them in parchment paper to give away. The recipe is supposed to make around 40 pieces, but of course that depends how large you make them. Beware, though - they are very sweet! Small pieces are best.

Chocolate OD - Oreo Brownies

Time for some baking! I found a marvelous recipe for Oreo brownies on Craftster the other day and I just knew I had to try it. I think they turned out quite well, and Keith loved them. They're extremely chocolate-y!

If you'd like to try them yourselves, the recipe can be found in this post. Since I couldn't find any Brownie mix (in Sweden we still like to bake from scratch!) I used this great brownie recipe. Go on, try it, you know you want to!

Also, there's a great giveaway going on over at Handmade Giveaways blog - check it out for a chance to win a cute little coin purse!

Sugary sweet

I've been doing a lot of baking lately. Keith's dad requested 200 (yes, 200) cinnamon rolls for an event that he was hosting, and I happily agreed... 200 cinnamon rolls takes a lot longer to make than you'd expect! :-)

In this pic you can see some of the rolls cooling off, and in the next one they are packaged up and ready to go. I'm happy to say that they were very well received by all the guests!

My recent adventures in baking has also included these pretty chocolate cakes, though I must say they were not quite chocolatey enough for my taste! They are pretty to look at though, I do love sprinkles!

Spring picnic!

I hope you all had a great Easter! I know I did, the weather has been wonderful all week. My friends and I arranged a spring picnic on Monday to celebrate the season.

I made these little Easter-themed cupcakes for the picnic. They are vanilla flavored, with raspberry filling and buttercream icing. Both the batter and the icing are completely vegan, but I added nougat eggs and some white chocolate shavings to some of the cupcakes for the non-vegans. The little nests were very popular! :-)

We had a great time at the picnic! Tons of food, sweets, egg painting, a nice blueberry hookah, some knitting, and excellent company! I also made some cascarones, mexican confetti eggs, and arranged a little egg hunt... They were so fun to make! There's a tutorial for making confetti eggs HERE.

Sorry about the blurry picture! I wish I could have gotten some better pictures of the eggs, but they soon ended up looking like this:

Needless to say, they were a hit! :-) Thank you friends for a lovely day!

Crafty 2008 (part 1)

I've been cleaning up the photo folders on our computer today. Guess what I found? Tons of "must-blog-about-this-soon" photos, all forgotten an un-blogged! Well, better late then never I suppose, so here are a couple of things I made last year that I really like:

Pink elephant cookies! This photo was taken back in October. I made pink sugar for the first time - super simple; just puree a couple of raspberries, mix them with regular sugar and dry in the oven on low heat. Pretty, tasty and a lot cheaper than sprinkles!

More pink! This is the baby quilt I made for little Stella this Christmas. It's very simple, but I like the colors a lot. I really need to learn proper binding though! What do you think?

I (heart) OREOs

Happy Valentines everyone! I hope you all had a great day! Keith and I didn't celebrate too much, but we did go see a movie (Seven Pounds, loved it!) on Friday night, as my mother and her hubby arrived to visit on Saturday afternoon.

The only other Valentine-y thing we did was inspired by this lovely Craftster post: OREO balls! Or more accurately, OREO hearts - perfect for the occasion! I used to love OREOs when I lived in the US, but I don't eat them much these days as they are super expensive over here. But these just sounded too yummy to pass up... And they look pretty, too!

Are you a fan of OREOs?

Chocolate pick-me-up

I haven't been feeling very creative lately - I'm having a tough time in school and when I get home I just want to throw myself down in front of the TV... Which is why I was so inspired and happy to find out about the Art Every Day Month project. I'm not officially a member, but I'm going to try and make November a creative month. I just entered another swap over at Craftster, and I'm going to try and make some more ATCs when I get the time.

I've also been doing a lot of baking, it is so very satisfying! I thought I'd share a classic swedish recipe (it's so simple I don't know if you can even call it that) which is great for when you're feeling a little down - Swedish chocolate balls!

This is a very traditional Swedish sweet/pastry, especially common at childrens' parties. And let me tell you, it is yummy! Rather than converting my recipe from the metric system, I thought I'd just share this link, from what I can tell it seems to be the same recipe I use. The measurements in that recipe make a huge batch though, so you might want to halve it. Also, I rolled my lovelies in sprinkles rather that sugar or coconut flakes, just to make them look more cheerful.

I'm looking forward to another thing this weekend that I'm sure will make me feel more creative: Going to Stockholm for a huge sewing fair! Yay! The trip will also give me another chance to spend some time with this lovely lady:

Lots of baking

Since I've been so busy with school for the past month, I haven't had much time over for one of my favorite pastimes - baking! Really, there's something deeply satisfying about baking. Kneading the dough, watching it rise... and of course sampling the final result! :-)

Today was a perfect day for baking, as it is the Swedish National Cinnamon Roll Day. I'm not sure whether you have similar silly food holidays in America, but this one is actually quite a big deal over here. Cinnamon Rolls are probably as close to a Swedish National Dish as it gets - we all love the things! Swedish cinnamon rolls are smaller and less sickly sweet than their American cousins (no icing) which only means you can eat even more of them! Here's a picture of some of the rolls I made this morning:

And while we're on the subject of baking, I thought I'd show you the cake I made for my friend Sara's birthday last week. She received it along with the moleskine notebook in my last post. I made it bright pink (with girly pink candles) as a bit of a joke, since both Sara and I are devoted feminists. We've had lots of discussions about kids and gender roles, so I thought she might get a kick out of this over-the-top girly cake:

Unfortunately I didn't get to snap a pic before the candles were blown out.

The cake is completely vegan. It's two layers of chocholate cake, the filling is fresh raspberries and jam, and it's covered with strawberry-flavored buttercream and sprinkles. It's probably the largest cake I've ever made, and it was a lot of work... I'm completely new to cakes, I mostly bake cookies and bread. But I will definitely have to try again soon - too bad there are no birthdays coming up in the near future!

Fresh fruit

Whew, it's hot! I've been enjoying our great weather by visiting two awesome organic and natural food stores (FRAM and ekostore, pay a visit next time you're in the area!) and buying lots of tasty and healthy food. My favorite cookbook of all time is Dr Gillian McKeith's You Are What You Eat Cookbook - I read it whenever I need inspiration. And since Dr Gillian goes on and on about how important it is to buy organic, I thought I'd follow her advice. Shopping at organic food stores is so much nicer than rushing around the supermarket anyway! These pictures show some of my purchases; lots of fruit and veg and some really nice extra dark cocoa powder.

Keith has been feeling a bit under the weather the past couple of days, so to cheer him up I thought I'd use some of the lovely fruit to make pie! I made six sorts of crumble, mixing rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries and apples. I used mini baking pans - the perfect size for two! Here they are before I added the crumble...

...and here they are all done!

We had the rhubarb and strawberry one for dessert today, and it was really tasty. Yum!