Saffron ice cream with a topping of Santa

As Christmas last year approached, the Xmas parties started following each other in rapid succession. For my church home group Christmas party, I was (as I expected) asked to provide the dessert. I wanted to make something good, but still something that wasn't too work intensive, and preferrably something with a Christmas feel to it. I might need to explain here to the non-Swedes out there that in Sweden, saffron is very strongly associated with Christmas as it's main use in the Swedish kitchen is for the "lussekatter" Lucia buns that are traditionally eaten on December 13 (but also throughout the rest of December). Given these parameters, I remembered a sort of saffron ice cream on a base of an almond meringue cake that Tomas Johansson, an old friend and colleague, had served us at work several years ago. Thus, I contacted him and he graciously obliged and provided me with the recipe.

I finished the cake without any problems, but still had a little bit of time and a bit too much creativity, so I wanted to do some decoration for the cake. Another Swedish Christmas tradition is to make marcipan pigs and Santas, so I decided I would make a marcipan Santa.
Of course I didn't have any marcipan, but I did have left-over almond paste from making the cake, and marcipan is basically the same as almond paste, just with higher suger percentage, so if you knead almond paste with icing sugar, you get a pretty good approximation of marcipan.
I divided the marcipan into smaller pieces and used food coloring to color one piece red. A smaller piece that was going to end up being the head of the Santa was kneaded together with a very small piece of red marcipan to get something that is close to skin color.
Now I could start modelling the Santa figure. A piece of skin colored marcipan was rolled into a ball and then slightly squished to give it a head shape. Using a knife and a match, I did some sculpting of this head to create facial features. The result ended up being better than I had expected (I tend to make things that taste good, but the artistic side of making cakes is usually not my biggest strength). The big red piece of marcipan was sculpted into the body - both the torso, arms, and legs were made from the same piece of marcipan.
I had made the decision that I wanted my little guy to be able to stand up, but the marcipan body (which was almost 10 cm tall) was not rigid enough, so I had to add some extra support by impaling the poor thing with a match (note: this means that you should be very careful if someone would get the idea to eat the creation). A toothpick would have been better, but I didn't have any toothpicks. Similarly, I also stuck matches up through the legs to give them stability (and left a piece sticking out to make it easier to attach the feet.
Next were the feet and the belt. One of the problems here was that I only had red food coloring and I had already used that to make the red suit and the "skin colored" head. The boots and belt should be rather dark. Fortunately I had some chocolate flakes (100% cocoa content) that are meant to be used for making drinking chocolate, but I'll take whatever I can get. I kneaded some of this into another piece of marcipan to create a brown marcipan and then formed small boots to attach to his legs and a long thin stretch to wrap around him as a belt. The combination of the chocolate flakes and the marcipan wasn't great as it caused the marcipan to become to fragile and easily wanting to fall apart. Next time I might try to just use some cocoa powder instead.
Gloves were made out of uncolored marcipan, and the same for the beard (which I dusted with icing sugar to make it a bit whiter). The head was stuck onto the body (once again using a match for support, and a hat was formed from more red marcipan together with some uncolored marcipan for the whiter details on it.
Almost done. There was still a problem though. He didn't have any eyes, just holes where they were supposed to be. This was obviously a problem as I (as mentioned before) only had red food coloring (and we don't want Santa to have red eyes). I figured I would use the chocolate for the eyes, when I came up with another idea.
I had a bag of "Vicks Blue" in a cupboard. Vicks Blue is a Swedish lozenge for sore throats and as the name suggests, it has a very bright blue color. So, take one Vicks Blue, take out your trusted mortar and pestle and crush it. You now have tiny pieces of blue "crystals", perfect for making eyes to your little marcipan Santa.

Below follows first the recipe for the saffron ice cream cake, and then photos of the cake, and finally photos of me decoration.

Saffron ice cream cake
(recipe courtesy of Tomas Johansson)
Crust:
300 g almond paste (commonly available in Swedish stores - if you can't find it, you can make your own by grinding almonds together with sugar (150g almonds/150g sugar) in a food processor)
3 egg whites
1-1 1/2 tbsp cocoa powder

Ice cream:
3 egg yolks
100 ml sugar
150 ml milk (3% fat content)
1 pack of saffron, 0.5 g
200 ml heavy cream

Preheat the oven to 200º C. Line the bottom of a 23cm (9inch) spring form pan with baking paper and grease it. Shred the almond paste thinly. Whip the egg whites until firm peaks form. Carefully fold the almond paste into the egg whites. Sift the cocoa powder into the egg white mixture and fold. Pour the mixture into the spring form pan and bake in the lower part of the over approximately 20 minutes. Let the cake cool in the pan.

Mix egg yolks, sugar, milk, and saffron in a sauce pan. Bring to a boil and simmer on low heat while constantly stirring until it reaches a creamy consistency. Let the mixture cool. Whip the cream and fold it into the saffron mixture.

Let the cake/crust remain in the spring form pan and pour the ice cream mixture over it. Freeze the cake for at least 4 hours. Remove from freezer approximately 30 minutes before serving.

Daring Baker

I have now joined the Daring Baker blogger challenge. This is a community of people with baking/food blogs, and every month, one of the participants hosts that month's challenge and gives everybody a recipe that they have to bake and write about on their blog. Thus, hopefully this should ensure that I produce some more content for this blog (at least one post per month).

I should find out what the first challenge by the beginning of next month (but you are not allowed to tell anyone what it is before the "reveal date" of the 27th in the month.

Pico de gallo and guacamole

It's been way too long since I wrote something here, so even though this doesn't deal with baking, but other food, I hope that's OK with you all. A few days ago I found the Pioneer Woman's cooking blog. I initially found another recipe on her site, but after a while I became quite intrigued by her recipe (and most importantly, the pictures) of pico de gallo and guacamole.

I started with this:
I couldn't find jalapeño in my grocery store, so had to go for another kind of chili. I don't have as many pictures as the pioneer woman of the work in progress, but this is the result:


Not a great picture, but the result was really really good. I'm normally not much of a guacamole enthusiast, but this one was really good. And since it's all vegetables, it should be fairly healthy as well (apart from the tortilla chips to eat with it).

Four Nut Brownies by Delia

Last night I made a first attempt at one of the recipes from the Delia Smith recipe book that I received for my birthday. I decided to start off with a brownie recipe. I don't really have a good brownie recipe, and this was something that is fairly easy to make and is likely to be good. The brownies turned out really well. A slight crust on top and very moist and chewy inside, just like brownies should be. Picture and recipe below.


Recipe:

100g mixed nuts (macadamia/brazil/pecan/hazelnuts)
50g dark chocolate
110g butter
2 large eggs, beaten
225g granulated sugar
50g flour
1tsp baking powder
1/2tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 180C.
Chop the nuts roughly and place on a baking sheet and toast them for 8 minutes in the oven.
Chop the chocolate and put it together with the butter in a heat-proof bowl over a saucepan with simmering water. Let the chocolate and butter melt and stir until well mixed.
Take off the heat and add all the other ingredients and mix well.

Pour the batter into a 15*25.5cm greased baking tin and bake for 30 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes before cutting into squares.

A final birthday cake

As this past Wednesday was my actual birthday, I did have to make some kind of cake for it.
I wasn't really in the mood to do something extremely complicated, so once again, I went back to my new go-to-cake. This was the fifth cake I made for this birthday. At least, this time I have a picture of a slice of the chocolate cake with ricotta cheesecake swirls in it:

The latest addition to my library

Here is my latest addition to my baking library.
A friend gave me "The Delia Collection - Chocolate" by Delia Smith as a birthday present. A very good gift indeed. I've only had time to browse through it quickly yet, but there certainly seem to be many recipes that I need to try out (and I will make sure to report the results here).

Another year, another birthday

In a couple of days it is time for another mid-life crisis as I turn 30. I have however already had some birthday celebrations as I spent Easter and last week back home in Sweden, so I took the opportunity to have an early birthday party for my friends back home (granted, before this I had already had two previous smaller birthday celebrations - one for friends who couldn't make it for this one to which I made the Cloud forest chocolate cake (no pictures) and one for family for which I made my old trusted favourite described in a previous post here).

Given that I had already done a fair amount of baking I wasn't really in the mood for anything overly complicated for this party. The photos below show the two cakes that I had. The one to the left is a traditional Swedish "gräddtårta" and consists of three layers of genoise with a mixture of mashed bananas and strawberrys between the layers, and coated with whipped cream. Very simple and very good. The decoration was made by my sister and is a portrait of me back in the days when I used to have a beard. :)
The other cake is a bittersweet chocolate charlotte. I've been looking at this recipe for a while, wanting to try it, so I figured this was a good occasion to give it a go. Once again, I received some help from my sister in stacking the ladyfingers in the bottom and around the sides of the pan. We didn't have enough ladyfingers to cover the top of the cake as well, so I just put some white chocolate shaving on it. I probably won't make this cake again. Everybody liked it and thought it was very good, but I was not thrilled. I didn't really like the texture of it, and given the amount of effort it after all required, I could probably do something better. The pictures also shows some cookies that my mother had made previously that I retrieved from the freezer.




Oh, I just remembered, that while not on the pictures, I also made a last minute batch of these chocolate and almond meringues from foodbeam that are very good.