Sweet Saturday

Yesterday was my birthday and I baked myself this nice cake in a special cake-tin which I had given to myself a few weeks ago. With it came this lovely recipe for a chocolate and raspberry cake.

Chocolate & Raspberry Cake

• 250 gr of dark chocolate
• 250 gr of butter 
• 4 large eggs
• 1 sachet of vanilla sugar 
• 350 gr of white sugar
• 350 gr of flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 100 gr of ground almonds
• 150 gr of raspberries fresh or frozen

Melt the butter and the chocolate in a pot, once melted leave to cool. 

Meanwhile preheat the oven to 180°C. 

Mix the eggs, sugar, vanilla sugar and a pinch of salt (unless the butter is salted than leave salt out).

Mix the flour, baking powder and the ground almonds and add this to the egg mix.

Spoon the now lukewarm chocolate/butter mix through it carefully, followed by the raspberries.

Spoon into the baking tin (buttered!) and bake for about 45 minutes.

Leave to cool in the tin and than transfer to a plate.

I will decorate it later with icing sugar, raspberries and cream, just before serving it.

Monday Mood

It's been a while since I made a Monday Moodboard. It's just been so busy and I just did not feel like it. Blogging should be fun and not compulsory! But here I am with lots of gold-leaf. I'm not a gold person at all, but I was asked to make an award and there is gold in there. Today I hope to be able to pick up some gold leaf scraps from a  friend to test with it, before I buy a whole booklet to find it does work with porcelain. So gold-leaf on my mind:

Goldleaf and Hydrangea Soap by Amelias

Goldleaf Earrings by Lizzy B Designs

Green Gold Bead by Bead Impressions

Gold Point Vessel by Up in the Air Somewhere

Sweet Saturday

Something nice for breakfast or afternoon tea: scones. I started by following the recipe as described in the AVOCA cookbook, but than made an error when I was too enthusiastic pouring in the cream. The dough was too moist and instead of more flour I thought it might be nice to add ground almonds.

Scones à la Annemiek (makes about 6-10 scones)

• 225 gr of self raising flour
• pinch of baking powder
• 25 gr of sugar
• 55 gr of salted butter, cubed(or if unsalted add a pinch of salt)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 100 ml cream
• 40 gr of ground almonds

Mix the flour, baking powder and sugar into a bowl. Add the butter and rub it in until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add the beaten egg, the cream and the ground almonds, mix until it has a soft doughy texture.

Gather the dough into a ball and roll it out on a floured surface to a thickness of 2,5 cm. stamp round shapes from it and place these on a baking tray (greased or covered with baking parchment). Brush the tops with some egg mixed with water (I just used the bit of egg which was left in the cup I had beaten it in) and bake for 15-20 minutes in a preheated oven of 180°C.

Enjoy!

My Creative Space

Busy, busy, busy as everyone these days I guess. 

My MOO minicards arrived which I had made for my ear studs, it says on the front surgical steel & porcelain, on the back my website and my logo. Much neater I think than using my business cards for this purpose.

Also busy making new bowls in porcelain, with flying pigs amongst others: 

And I was commissioned to make an award. 

I will share pictures of this project once it is finished.

Sweet Saturday

Nearly no Sweet Saturday, as I missed some ingredients for the recipe I wanted to make, than thought of something else, but same problem. I really need to go grocery shopping with desserts and cookies in mind again :-)
But I still had all the ingredients for ShortBread, well more or less, I adjusted the amounts to suit the amount of flour I had left, but still have 3 baking trays of cookies, so plenty. I also used salted butter, well some as I did not have enough unsalted butter and added some vanilla scented/flavoured sugar too.

ShortBread

• 400 gr of plain flour
• 200 gr of corn flour
• 200 gr of icing sugar
• 400 gr of butter (I used 225 unsalted and 175 salted)
• 1 sachet of vanilla sugar

Mix or sift the flours and the sugar into a bowl. Rub in the butter until you have a soft ball. Roll this  out to a thickness of about 1cm on a lightly floured worktop, preferable a cool stone top. Cut out in whatever shape you want; since all my cookie cutter have ended up in my atelier they are not really suitable for food any more, so I used a small cup ;-)

Place them on a baking tray lined with baking parchment and leave to cool for at least 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 180°C (160°C for a fan oven, as I have one and the cookies have gone to soft and than cooked too quick to look like shortbread). Bake them for about 1 hour, leave in a rack to cool. So here they are a bit flatter than usual for shortbread and not so long in the oven either, but they taste fine :-)

Ai Weiwei: Sunflower seeds

Last week I somewhere picked up something about an exhibition of/with millions of sunflower seeds in porcelain by
Ai WeiWei, which got my attention straight away. I found this great video on you-tube about the project.



I not only learned about the project and it's background, how sunflowers are part of China, but also saw a bit of how porcelain is found and made. It does not start live as mud or clay, but more something rock-like. And something I would never do is open the oven while red-hot because the temperature shock can make the fired pieces crack. I guess the seeds being so small and made of solid porcelain they can withstand this temperature change.

Anyway if you got 15 minutes to spare it's well worth viewing.

Happy Stats

Still tired from a long, but great, night out with friends as I write these happy stats:

• great trip to Ireland, good to see my friends there and catch up
• starting a collaboration with my friend Shauna and writing guest post for Artminds blog together
• job hunting and getting a more clear idea on what I want to do beside my crafting
• short visit to Middelburg, were I spend all my time in this award winning bookshop 
• buying an baking tin inspired by a 'Zeeuwse Knop', so fun to see how this element from my Dutch heritage is picked up by different people, dusted off and transformed into something new
• great night out with friends enjoying good food in Bruges
• Visiting my parents and bringing back a fresh supply of apples and pears, the car smelled gorgeous driving home