Foolproof, satisfying brownies.

Club Mate. No Sleep. Coffee. Lots of sweets. Feeling fat, but no time for workout.

It’s exam period once again. And like every semester, I’m totally behind schedule with studying, so my current home is called library. I’m here nearly every day from morning ’til evening, eat most of my meals at the canteen and I miss cooking so much!

Studying nutrition is really interesting, especially now that I have left all the basic subjects like chemistry, biology and stuff behind and finally get to learn something about metabolic processes, health and nutritional behavior. Still, it’s a lot to learn, a lot of work and thereby pretty exhausting.

But apart from that, there’s other things. Life goes on outside the library.

For example, Valentine’s Day is coming up, so I decided to repost my very first ever blogpost: Valentine’s Day brownies.

A few days ago I treated myself with some baking after having finished the first of my exams this semester – and yep, I made brownies. They’re probably not the best solution concerning my feeling fat-problem but still – baking makes me happy and my friends and flatmates helped me with the eating part.

Brownies are a good thing to bake when you’re totally exhausted, because they can be made so quickly, the recipe is foolproof and they’re always satisfying. I’ve made those brownies (with and without filling) again and again and again over the past years, sometimes leaving out, substituting or adding new ingredients – but the best version still is the original recipe, just as I posted it nearly two years ago. For one exception: the only thing that makes those cuties even better is adding melted chocolate to the batter – the result will be some chewy, satisfying, ultimately chocolatey and perfect-for-valentine’s-day brownies.

For a seasonal valentine’s day look, I decorated the brownies with edible glitter hearts (found at Loft in Tokyo), but you could also enjoy them plain or fill them with chocolate ganache like I did in my previous post.

Brownies

Ingredients: 340g cane sugar 140g butter (cut into small pieces) 4 eggs 1 tbsp. vanilla 120g wheat flour 80g cocoa powder 80g bittersweet chocolate (for melting) 80g chocolate chips (I use 40g bittersweet and 40g milk chocolate, but you can combine as desired)

Preheat the oven to 335°F/170°C . Line a rectangular cake mould with baking. Chop the bittersweet chocolate for melting roughly (or use chocolate chips) and carefully melt in a bain-marie. Put sugar, butter, eggs and vanilla into a large bowl and mix together until well combined. Add flour, cocoa powder and chocolate chips and stir in carefully (I recommend doing that by hand – otherwise you might end up with half of the flour dusted over your kitchen!). Add the melted chocolate (make sure it’s not too hot!) and mix until well combined. Scrape the batter into the cake mould and bake for 25 minutes. Take the brownies out of the oven and let cool completely. (While waiting, you could make the filling, if desired) Remove the cake from the mould and cut off the edges if neccessary, so you have an even rectangle. Next, cut into pieces as desired (small cubes, slices or whatever you prefer) OR If you want to fill them, cut into not too small rectangles (mine were about 6cm x 7cm, I got 12 brownies with this size). Halve them horizontally and cut out small hearts from the upper half. Put some ganache on the bottom parts, top with the upper halves and enjoy!

 

Sunday’s Seven

A belated happy new year to you guys, hope you had a great start into 2013! I started my new year having champagne with my family at 12 and then went to Roppongi, where I had a fabulous new year’s eve with friends. Roppongi – that’s right, I’m in Japan again and of course, I also took a loooot of pictures during the past week and I want to share a few with you in another Sunday’s Seven post today!

There’s something about starbucks seasonal drinks that always makes me want to try all of them – a while ago I had apple crumble latte and I’m still eager to try pumpkin spice as soon as I get the opportunity. Today, I had this Chocolate Brownie Mocha here in Tokyo. It was a cafe mocha with whipped cream, caramel sauce and brownie crumbles on top – yum! 

Due to new-year-celebration-related family-meetings I had the chance to meet my japanese step-grandmother (from who I got the recipe for pumpkin pudding, remember? ) for the first time. This time, she let me try some of her home made kuri kinton (a kind of sweet chestnuts paste, on the left) and mame kinton (a sweet paste consisting of beans, on the right) – both really delicious. She also told me how to make these – hope I can find some time to try it out soon!

The obligatory sushi. On another new-year-related family gathering I got to eat at Momotaro in Komazawa, Tokyo once again. The photo shows Anago sushi but I also had Amaebi, Negitoro, Hirame and a few others and everything was delicious, as always.

Ryukyu – an Oita specialty (Oita is a prefecture on one of the southern japanese islands). It’s sashimi (=raw fish) marinated in a sauce of soy sauce, sake, mirin, chopped leeks (or chives?) and sesame. My dad made this for me a few days ago, he chose buri (japanese amberjack), which is in season at the moment, as sashimi and it tasted just great!

A snapshot of the bakery showcase of Dean & Deluca in Shinjuku. Love the way how muffins, scones and cakes are presented – it looks so beautiful & yummy!

Matcha Cruller Donut at Krispy Kreme in Shibuya. It tasted good, I liked that this was not overly sweet although glazed with white chocolate, but “the original” donut (a simple, sugar-glazed Krispy Kreme donut) is still better! 

I love the small details of japanese patisserie, like this tiny wooden Tour d’Eiffel (or Tokyo tower?) which is meant to help taking the cookies out of their small separate sections in the cookie box. 

Christmas baking: cinnamon star cookies

Christmas approached too quickly this year. During the past few weeks, people around me went to Christmas markets, drank hot mulled wine, bought christmas presents and meanwhile, I was at home or at the library spending most of my time on studying or working. But what annoyed me most was that I didn’t get to bake – I wanted to bake a loooot of christmas cookies this year, for my boyfriend, my friends, my family and of course my flat mates! All I managed to bake until last week were two kinds of quickly-made cookies, baked sometime in the middle of the night or between classes during the last month and all already eaten since too long ago (you can’t imagine how quickly three batches of cookies can dissolve if you tell your three flat mates to help themselves – I baked, went to a class, and came home after about three hours. The result was worth an iPhone-quality before-and-after photoshoot:  You see, I had a serious baking problem this year.

So after having finished an important presentation last week, I decided to treat myself with some baking – I made cinnamon star cupcakes. Cinnamon stars are a traditional kind of christmas cookies around here. These star-shaped cookies consist of a cinnamon-spiced dough containing almond and/or hazelnut meal and they are typically sugar-glazed. The cupcakes I made also contained different nuts & cinnamon. I frosted them with a white chocolate butter cream, sprinkled some shredded coconut on top of them (to make the frosting look winter-ish, like snow) and added a cinnamon star cookie for decoration on top of each cupcake. The result was satisfying, they didn’t only look adorable but also tasted pretty good!

When writing down the recipe, I realized that a vegan version of these cupcakes would take only one or two ingredient substitutions. And although my previous attempts at vegan baking mostly failed (or at least didn’t turn out as yummy as I wished they would have), I want to give it a try before sharing the cupcake recipe with you. Until then, I have another recipe for you: cinnamon star cookies. They’re also vegan and I made them for decorating the vegan version of the cupcakes

Cinnamon star cookies makes about three batches of cookies

Ingredients: 50g ground hazelnuts 200g flour 200g marzipan 40-50g powdered sugar + about 120g for the icing 125g margarine or other vegetable fat 2 tsps. ground cinnamon

Combine ground hazelnuts, flour, 40g powdered sugar, marzipan, margarine and cinnamon and knead until you have an even dough. Taste and if necessary add the remaining 10g powdered sugar. Form dough to a ball, cover with foil and let rest in the refridgerator for at least 2 hours. Roll out a part of the dough, cut out small star-shaped cookies and bake at about 160 degrees C for 5-10 minutes, just until they start getting brown on the edges. Take out of the oven, let cool completely. Meanwhile, prepare the icing: Put 120g icing sugar into a bowl, add a little water, teaspoon by teaspoon and mix – add just enough water to get a thick icing, you don’t want it to get too liquid! Glaze the cookies with the sugar icing, let dry and enjoy

Kü Ché – a creative space & living room café

A new café, run by students, opened up in my town. It’s not just a café, rather supposed to be a place for hanging out, being creative, meeting people, and having some coffee and cake. About two weeks ago, a friend of mine posted about the opening of this café called Kü-Ché (“küche” means kitchen in german) on facebook, that he was in his way to get there, so I decided to grab my camera and join him last minute.

And this was one of these wonderful spontaneous decisions, of which you are really glad afterwards that you came to them, and of which you think that you would’ve missed a lot otherwise. I had a really great time at the Kü-Ché talking to a lot of interesting people and having cake and cappuccino with soy milk. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to try every cake, but the ones I had a piece of – the pumpkin cheese cake and lebkuchen (chocolate-covered gingerbread cake) – were definitely yummy!

The café itself is a pretty cosy place, a dimly lit room with several sofas and rustical-style interior. The furniture seems to be mostly vintage and maybe a little cobbled together, which underlines the comfortable ambience. It’s a place I had been missing in my town until now, a living room-style café for getting to know different people while indulging in some home-baked treats. They offer a different choice of vegan and non-vegan cakes & snacks on monday, tuesday, thursday and friday afternoons. You can even bring your own baked goods – a thing I’ll definitely do sometime in near future

Pumpkin Pudding with cinnamon whipped cream

Fall is here. The time for snuggling up in cozy woolen pullovers, enjoying the last few warm days of the year with golden sunlight, time for cooking hot stews and of course for lots of pumpkin!

Semester has started, but fortunately I’m not that busy with studying yet so I still have time for cooking and baking with that lot of pumpkin. My new flat is fine, I have a lot of space in my room, much light because of the big windows, and a great kitchen. I share the flat with three guys, all really friendly and of which one loves cooking as well! In fact, it was him who said that he wasn’t such a huge fan of pumpkin dishes, and ended up telling me about how surprisingly good this pumpkin pudding I recently made tasted.

Pumpkin pudding was my first choice of seasonal pumpkin dishes to make this year. It’s a recipe my japanese step-grandmother send me a few months ago, and I just had to try it out. As I didn’t have a pan inset for steaming the pumpkin on hand, I simply baked the pumpkin (cut it in halves, remove the seeds, put cut side down into a baking pan, cover with aluminium foil and bake for about 1h or until soft at 180 degrees C/350 degrees F), but you could also use canned pumpkin.

Pumpkin pudding with cinnamon whipped cream makes 2 18cm/7-inch puddings

Ingredients: 500g steamed/baked pumkin, peeled and mashed (or 500g canned pumpkin, see note above!) 4 eggs 80g + 5 tbsps granulated sugar 200ml cream 100ml milk 1 tsp vanilla 2-3 pinches ground cinnamon a little butter for the cinnamon whipped cream: 3 tsps ground cinnamon 3 tsps granulated sugar 125ml cream optionally: a few basil leaves

Grease the pudding pans with butter. Preheat oven to 150 degrees C/300 degrees F. In a small saucepan, cook a syrup of 5 tbsps granulated sugar with a little water (I added one shot glass full). When it starts getting a thick consistency, pour into the pudding pans. Put mashed pumpkin, eggs, 80g sugar, 200ml cream, milk, vanilla and cinnamon into a bowl and mix until all combined and smooth. Divide in equal parts and fill into the two pudding pans, on top of the syrup. Set the two pudding pans onto a baking tray, fill the tray with water (make sure not to flood the baking pans!) and then put the whole thing carefully into the preheated oven. Let steam for about 40 minutes. Remove the pudding pans from the water baths, let cool a little and then store in the refridgerator until serving. For the cinnamon cream, put cream, sugar and cinnamon into a bowl and beat until stiff. Carefully turn out the pudding, cut into pieces (I cut it into eighths) and serve with the cream. If you want to, decorate with basil – their taste complements the pumpkin spices wonderfully.

Hazelnut nutella macarons (recipe review)

Nope, I’m not dead. And neither is kawaii kitchen! I had never planned to abandon my blog for sooo long, but there were so many things going on in the past few months that somehow time for baking and blogging lacked. For those of you who wanna know – “so many things” refers to exams in June, the fact that I moved into a new flat in July, then left for 4 weeks of traveling around because of a summer job. After that, I stayed at my boyfriend’s, visited him for a few weeks before semester starts again, and I finally found some time for baking again. This time, I decided to try a recipe from a different blog.

My boyfriend loves nutella, and he loves macarons. Three weeks ago was our 5th anniversary, so what did I do? Yep – I baked these adorable hazelnut nutella macarons for him.

These macarons contain not only almond meal but also ground hazelnuts. I used whole ones, roasted them for about 10-15minutes at 170 degrees C to bring out their whole flavour, ground them finely in a food processor and then sifted the hazelnut meal before measuring the weight. For the pretty looks, I decided to make a few heart-shaped macarons and decorated some of the shells with leftover hazelnut pieces.

The result was satisfying, my boyfriend loved those little fluffy heart-shaped treats. For my taste, the nutella filling was a little bit over the top, made the macarons slightly too sweet, so next time I’ll probably substitute it with a semisweet chocolate ganache. But all in all, these macarons tasted good, had the perfect texture – crispy on the outside, fluffy in the middle with a creamy filling, and they looked cute. So thanks a lot for the recipe, Gourmantine!

Strawberry x Oreo Cupcakes

A few weeks ago, I had planned to bake some cupcakes for my best friend. He wanted either some REALLY fruity cupcakes or Oreo cupcakes. So I started to try baking some really fruity cupcakes with fruity frosting, but the results didn’t satisfy me, which made me decide to stay with the good old and foolproof (at least so I thought at that time) Oreo cupcakes. But then, I somehow managed to truly mess up the frosting. It was too sweet and didn’t have the right consistency – kind of flaky instead of creamy, not really tasty as frosting.

So I had to improvise and make another frosting quickly. When realizing I didn’t have enough ingredients for making the oreo frosting once again and shops were already closed, I slightly started to panic … but then, I found these lovely strawberries in the refridgerator. Remembering that should also be some white chocolate somewhere in the cupboard, I started to make a new frosting – a fruity one this time. Luckily, this one turned 0ut to be just the way I had imagined – creamy, refreshing and not overly sweet. The taste of the strawberries fits wonderfully with the white chocolate and because the whole frosting is rather light, it complements the rich chocolate muffin underneath very well.

Part 1: Oreo Cupcakes (adapted from A Cup Full of Cake) makes about 15 cupcakes

Ingredients: 60g (= about 2 ounces) bittersweet chocolate, roughly chopped (or chocolate chips) 12 Oreo cookies (plus some more, in case you break a few while trying to twist off the bottoms!) 1 large egg (at room temperature) 1/2 cup whole milk 3/8 cup vegetable oil 1/2 tbsp vanilla 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1 cup granulated sugar 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder 1 tsp baking powder 1 good pinch of salt 1/3 cup water, heated to boiling

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C/350 degrees F. Melt the chocolate in a water bath (bain marie). When melted completely, set the chocolate aside and let cool a little. Line a cupcake tin with paper liners. Carefully twist of the tops of the oreo cookies and place the half with the filling in the cupcake liners. The remaining cookie tops aren’t needed in this recipe, you could just eat them while baking In a large bowl, whisk eggs until light and foamy. Add milk, oil and vanilla and mix well. Next, add the melted and slightly cooled chocolate and whisk together. In another bowl, combine flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt. Then put these dry ingredients into the bowl with the egg mixture and whisk until well combined. Add the boiling water and mix again until combined. Fill the dough into the cupcake liners (about 2/3 full, do not overfill!) and bake them about 15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let the cupcakes cool completely before frosting.

Part 2: Strawberry frosting makes more than enough for about 15 cupcakes

Ingredients: 200g white chocolate, chopped about 300g strawberries + some more for decorating 100g butter

Melt the white chocolate in a water bath. Meanwhile, clean the strawberries and cut a few into 1-2mm thin slices. Put these aside for decorating. Blend the rest of the strawberries in a food processor until completely pureed. When the chocolate is molten, add about 8 tbsps of the strawberry puree, one spoonful at a time. Add pieces of the butter also one piece at a time, alternating with the strawberry purree. Mix with a handmixer until the frosting is all smooth. It should be creamy but not too liquid. If it’s too liquid, add a little more butter, if it doesn’t taste strawberry-ish enough, add a little more strawberry puree and another piece of butter. When the frosting is ready, fill into a piping bag with star-shaped tip and frost the cupcakes immediately. Put a mini oreo cookie and a strawberry slice on top of each cupcake for decorating (or simply decorate them in some other way ) I usually do this by frosting a cupcake, storing the piping bag with the frosting in the refridgerator while adding the decoration, then put the finished cupcake into the refridgerator, take out the frosting and frost the next cupcake. This way, the frosting doesn’t get too liquid!