Wicked Appetite

I finished the book yesterday and although I'm sorry to say it, Janet Evanovich being one of my favourite authors and all, but I was really disappointed. I didn't laugh out loud even once, like I usually do reading her books.
I liked the between-the-numbers quite well before. I also liked Diesel and Carl in Plum books, but this one...
Firstly, the main character.... Lizzie?... was really boring. If I should describe her, the only thing I remember, would be that she made good cupcakes. She was not funny, not especially smart.... too sensible and average to be the protagonist at least in a Evanovich book. Throughout the book I was not once worried that something might happen to her - just didn't care.
There was one character though that I really liked - The Cat. She (he?) was great - mysterious and with attitude. Great pet for unmentionable series. But I really didn't see why Carl was dragged into this book at all. He had no role to fulfill. He only ate, went "eep" and gave finger on every second page. It grew tedious quite quickly.
I also liked Diesel better before. Here in this book he was pretty much just an average cute guy. Almost nothing left of his quircky humour and cool attitude. The chemistry between Diesel and Lizzie seemed to be very bland too. Maybe I just liked Diesel more with Stephanie, them both being sarcastic and quick-witted. There wasn't that kind of spark present in Wicked appetite.

I borrowed this book from a friend and I'm sad to say that that's the first Evanovich book (except the early romances) that I don't feel that I need to buy for myself for occasional re-reading . But I guess I will read the sequels in the future though... If nothing more then for Cat's sake.
And let's be honest, even mediocre evanovich is better than most of other authors' best books.

Cookie time

I had this overwhelming urge to bake some cookies yesterday. The thing is I don't like to eat the cookies very much... strange isn't it.
So I baked two kinds of cookies.
Firstly I wanted to make something with merengue. As the plain merengue cookies are too sweet I made some with cookie base and very sour jam:
mix well 100 g butter (room temperature) + 80 ml sugar
beat in 2 egg yolks (save the egg whites for merengue, preferably put them into fridge - they'll form better foam when cold)
add 1 cup  flour, 1 tablespoon of almond extract (or almond liqueur), pinch of salt and some grated lemon peel.
form a nice ball and put it into fridge for an hour or some more.

afterwards form thin round cookies. I got 26 pieces out of this dough. Scoop 1/2 teaspoons of jam onto each cookie, the sourer the better. I used plum jam - made of the plums from my own garden, with minimal sugar.

add 1 tbsp of fresh lemon juice to the two egg whites and whip until a bit stiff. add slowly 80 g sugar, beating constantly. continue whipping until the foam does not fall out of the bowl when you tilt it almost upside down. I also added 2 tablespoons of coconut flakes - folded them in in the end, gently.
Divide the egg-white onto cookies.
Bake ~15 minutes in 175 C oven, until the tops are light beige. Let the cookies cool in the oven for a while. If you take them out too suddenly the merengue might fall down and it's not nice.

No pictures, sorry. My husband came home just when I took the cookies out of the oven and when I remembered that I might take some pictures the cookies were no more. But they really look nice and fluffy.

The other cookies were Madeleines. Very classical french butter cakes. Supposedly the favourites of Marcel Proust.  They were not so popular at my home though... Maybe because I don't have the special moulded baking pan and the cookies were too flat, not spongy as they supposed to be. But they were not bad either, the other ones were just better.
As you can find many-many madeleine recipes in internet (I used this one: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/French-Butter-Cakes-Madeleines/Detail.aspx) I will not repeat any of them.

Yay!

2,5 days of vacation left and so many books to read. "The Last Dragonslayer" arrived today!! What a beautiful cover it has. And I'm convinced that the inside is great too. After all, it's Fforde.
I have to establish a priority list apparently.... for reading:
1. finish Beneath These Stones
2. The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde
3. Wicked Appetite by Janet Evanovich
4. Finish Mrs. Fry's Diary
5. Beasts in My Bed by Jaquie Durrell
6. How to Shoot A Amateur Naturalist by Gerald Durrel
7. Two more books by Ann Granger

And I appear to have at least one unfinished book in all my recently weared purses.
...
Still  don't feel like reading the millennium triology.

On the demand of devoted readers...

Pumpkin pie is a pointless cake, I must say. Not good, not particulary bad. Just plain boring. Thank god I'm not american and don't have to have it every year!
Carving a pumpkin is fun though.Tristan made Mike Wazowzky. Not intentionally, but art has no rules, right.

Another day another cake

You might or might not be familiar with the Hummingbird cake. It's a great cake with really horrible frosting. The frosting is basically sugar and butter and as far as I have seen everybody scrapes it away from the cake. So yesterday I was home sick and as I found a bunch of bananas in my fridge I thought that I might try this cake with different filling.

Here's my recipe:
3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1/2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons vanilla powder
sift them all together. The original recipe also has 1 teaspoon cinnamon in it. But I'm not that big of fan so I just forgot it. Honestly.
Add 3 previously beaten eggs and 11/4 cups of vegetable oil. Stir.
Next:
Add 1 small can of crushed pineapples, drained
2 small or 1 big apple, chopped finely
4 chopped bananas (or 31/2 if your dog is also sitting beside you with pleading eyes. Mine loves bananas)
~1 cup some kind of chopped nuts or almonds. I had almonds at home but originally you are supposed to use the pecans.
Stir everything well together and spoon into 2 28 cm round cake pans. If you have only one pan this size you can bake them in the row too.
Bake in 180 degree C oven  for 25-35 minutes until a wooden pick comes out clean when you poke it into the cake. Cool in pans for 10 minutes then  take out onto a cooling rack.

The filling
This time I tried the custard cream filling. Tastes quite good. But I guess in the future I will try other possibilites too. Condensated milk comes to mind... Lemon cream... We'll see :)

Combine 200 ml coffee cream (10%) with 100 ml milk and cook over medium heat until bubbles are emerging around the edge of the pan.
Add 100 ml sugar and 1/4 teaspoons of salt and stir until fully dissolved.
Remove from the heat.

Separately combine 100 ml milk with 6 teaspoons of corn starch or potato starch. Whisk vigorously so that there remain no lumps. Whisk in 3 eggs.
Add the hot mixture into it in a thin stream, whisking all the time.
Return the mixture to the pan, bring to a boil and cook over low heat, constantly stirring until the cream thickens.
It takes about 6 minutes.
Remove from the stove and let cool.

When the cakes and the filling are both cooled down you spread the cream between the layers. I cut one layer in two horizontally, because they were quite uneven :) So I had 3 layers and I divided the custard between them.
On the top I melted some dark chockolate with coffee cream on low heat and spread it evenly. I also added some caramel sauce in nice swirls.

Now I had to name the cake... After all it's not the hummingbird cake anymore. Had to choose another bird. So, all the time I was baking there were several great tits peeking into my windows. Apparently they have good memory - we fed them during the last winter and although it yet not so cold outside they decided to warm up the relationship I guess. I'm not envious so I put a bird-feeding grease-seeds-ball outside and what's more - I decided to dedicate the cake to them.
So... enjoy the Great Tit Cake!

Yesterday I met the most compact dog I have ever seen. She was literally like an egg:  no nose to speak of and her tail was tightly twisted and placed against her backside. Marvellous. Not like our dog - all angular and with several salient parts. What a variety... Mother Nature is grand indeed!

I just sold a book on Ebay (my house is not big enough so I have to get rid of some books occasionally) and the buyer is from Philippines. That's a thing I never thought I'll do - sell a book to Philippines...
Isn't that amazing how connected and small the world is thanks to internet.

Homemade gourmet

I have this friend you see who is lately very-very fascinated with cooking - she has tons of tons cookbooks, all the seasonings, herbs, peppers etc you can imagine and lately she started to write a blog about her gastronomic triumphs. Which is quite interesting read now that she started to add her own comments, backstories and little funny remarks to the plain recipes. But to cut the long story short she kind of got me interested in cooking-writing too. The trouble is I hardly even follow any recipes. Usually I add garlic everywhere and pickles and lose some other ingredients and basically do all sorts of anarchistic things about the recipes given. Strangely most of the times the outcome is good, sometimes even great... so why not give it a try with some recipes.... I cannot call them actually recipes .. more like ideas, because everything tends to be approximate :)

Stuffed bell peppers.

Chop one medium onion, as finely as you like it. 4-10 gloves of garlic as well according to your taste and the strongness of the garlic (the difference between homegrown garlic and chinese garlic from the store is tremendous in my opinion). Fry them for a minute in a large frying pan in one tablespoon of oil (I like to use the leftover oil from canned sundried tomatos. It gives a nice taste). Add ~400 grams of minced meat (pork, beef, chicken - your choice) and ~ 100 gram finely cut ham. Bake, occasionally stirring, about 10 minutes on medium heat.
To this mixture you can add everything you like: capparis, chopped pickles, finely chopped carrots, chilly... let your fantasy fly.
I also added some tomato sauce, about half a cup and 4 tablespoons (~60 g) of cream cheese. Add some pepper, basil, salt, soy sauce, worchester sauce etc and heat everything for couple of more minutes.

Now take 3-5 bell peppers (3 if they are really big), cut them in half and clean out the seeds and membranes. Place them in a fitting baking pan. Fill the peppers with the mixture compressing with a spoon so that all the nooks are well filled. Cover the mixture with slice of cheese.
As the filling is already well cooked you can adjust the baking time depending how soft you like the peppers. I like when they are relatively crunchy so I keep them in 180 degree C oven about 20 minutes. If you like softer peppers you can cover the pan (with a aluminium foil if it does not have a lid) add some water to the base of the pan (2/3 cup will do) and bake them  ~40 minutes in 160 degree oven. In the end remove the cover so the cheese can turn a bit golden.
I know that usually the stuffing has some rice in it as well. I don't particulary like rice... so I excluded it. You can serve the peppers with rice on side. Or with potatoes. Or with salad. Or with some kind of gravy. No rules! Enjoy!

Reading "Death by Diamonds" by Annette Blair. Quite captivating read I have to say although I would get the general feeling better perhaps if I would have started from the book 1 in the series. Apparently it's the third book. Why cannot they write that kind of information clearly on the cover or at least on the title page? Anyhoo, I quite like the book. The characters are pleasant, there's some weird tension (I gather it would not be so weird if I had read the firts two books). Mysterious mystery is present as well. I'm halfway through and at the moment I think I wish to read the other books in the series as well. Let's see about it in the end though...

Later... Don't read if you are about to read this book! Spoilers!
I'm really disappointed. The story was a bit jumpy and the end was nothing I expected. The solution of the mystery was neither logical not smooth. 4 murderers?!? Isn't that a bit overkill? And two of them didn't have a motive, at all?
In my opinion in a good criminal story the ending should be like "of course, how didn't I see it, it's so logical and obvious"... Well this was more like "Whaaaat???" And althoug the characters were pleasant, in the end I didn't feel that I would like to know what happens to them next. Just don't care enough.

My family and other animals.

Yesterday evening our dog started yapping like a...erm... mad dog. Wary investigation outside revealed that the reason for this furious verbal abuse was a fox, a big one. Seeing that the dog is not able to protect our property (due mean human interference) our cat, our sweet cute little cat decided to do it herself. By chasing the fox. Thrice her size.... Apparently she still does not believe that she's just a cat, not a tiger.

Let's have cake

It appears that today is birthday of Stephanie Plum. As in Janet Evanovich books. And every proper fan should eat Boston cream pie. It's new to me... but I'll try. Searched the internet for recipes and baking there will be tonight. Let's find out if Stephanie has good taste in cakes.

The cake was made on saturday. Not very difficult to make, but to be honest I don't get why it's such a favourite. Quite boring actually. Just bisquit and plain custard. Oh well, at least pineapple-upside-down cake we have in common with Stephanie :)

Stephen Fry's "Mrs Fry's Diary" arrived yesterday from Bookdepository. What a marvellous internet-bookshop that is - the book is not even published (publishing date's supposed to be this friday, october 15th) but I already got it! From England! Almost a week earlier.
So I started reading in the car this morning on my way to work (I wasn't driving myself in case you're wondering) and discovered that the book is very much what I expected. Which is a good thing.
But I cannot help hearing this voice in my head... you know this quite healthy built woman, with a slightly bent nose from A Bit of Fry and Laurie. It's like she's telling the story... curious. Anyhoo, I'm still in january so I guess I'll have more to share later.