Apple Toscakaka

Happy Mother's Day!

I hope everyone is having a lovely day with their families. I had an early mother's day two weekends ago with mine where we hit up fabulous London.

Posting a recipe today that reminds me of my nanny, who makes a mean apple pie. I decided to take those flavours and play with them a little (because apart from nanny's apple pie - I don't really eat pie!).

Toscakaka is something I've made before, a classic Swedish almond caramel cake. I had some cooking apples hanging around and some slivered almonds, so I decided to experiment!

One thing I love about cooking is the endless substitutions and possibilities to change up, tweak, and play around with favourite recipes. I love that you can substitute something like butter for stewed apples (which is a delicious and dairy free alternative!).

This is the appropriate amount of custard

So here, I substituted the melted butter for stewed apple, which gives it this beautiful hint of fruity tart sweetness to cut through the rich caramel topping. And it works! It's gorgeous. I served it with custard and I'll dream about that combo for weeks.

Blueberry Crumble Muffins

What do you do when you find 500g of blueberries in your fridge? MAKE MUFFINS (and meal prep some fruit salad).

I always think muffins can be a bit cloying, so I try to lighten mine with some buttermilk, and I think topping them with a little spiced brown sugar crumble adds textural interest.

These are crazy easy to make (and eat!) and I am willing Spring weather to come out and stay out by trying out some fruity bakes.

Chocolate Hazelnut (Ferrero Rocher!) Birthday Cake

Ooooh this is SUCH A GOOD ONE.

Roll up, roll up for the best chocolate cake you'll ever eat. I have a particular love for chocolate and hazelnut, praline, Nutella, whatever you want to call it, I'll eat it.

It was a friend's birthday recently, and we have very similar taste in cakes (except I LOVE mint chocolate and he HATES it). I knew that this kind of cake would be right up both our alleys and I knew I wanted to whip up something which combined the nutty deliciousness of hazelnut with the sweet smoothness of chocolate. 

Good news - it's easy. Mix dry ingredients. Repeat with wet ingredients. Put them together and bake. So simple for so much deliciousness!

Chinese-Style Turkey Dumplings (Potstickers)

THESE ARE SO EASY. What a revelation. These are so great, simple, a little time consuming, but perfect for a weekend dinner when you have a little more time.

So, I won’t lie. I am not as fast at rolling and filling these as the people at my local dumpling joint. I could watch them make dumplings at lightning speed for hours. But I got it done. I watched a few videos for the rolling technique, but you really just have to get your hands on the dough and see what you can do.

Gorgeous little dumpling

A few things I learned - roll from the centre out, in one direction only, rotating the dough about a quarter turn after each (one) roll. This gets the most uniformly round dough circle.

Ta-da!

The good thing is, I’m going to let you into a secret.. They don’t need to be perfectly round! You can still fold them into a dumpling shape if you end up with a square, an oval, a rectangle, or something in between!  I rolled about 25, and hand on heart, I probably rolled 3 proper circles (the ones I photographed!)

For better photos of how to fold the dumplings (and bonus dipping sauce recipe!), see this previous post (where I used pre-madewrappers). The homemade ones are SO MUCH easier to fold, though.