finnish blueberry pie

A few years ago, I went to visit a dear friend in Finnland - on of the first things she made me was a finnish blueberry pie. I loved it so much that she gave the recipe. She told me she used all kind of berries for this pie and I when I make it, I just use whatever I have in my fridge: raspberries, blueberries, rhubarb and sometimes a mix of those things. It´s not a typical pie - and some people might even call it a cheese-cake - but the most important thing is how delicious (and easy to make) it is! Yummi!

Here you have this wonderful recipe in english below - enjoy!

pie dough/crust

100g soft butter
3/4 dl sugar (I use brown sugar - demerasykur)
1 egg
1,5 dl flour
1 dl whole wheat (heilhveiti eða spelt)
1 tsp baking powder

Mix those things in your stand mixer (hrærivél) and put it in a pie dish (I use my fingers to spread it).

filling

200g blueberries (I never weigh them - I just put as much as I want to... most of the time a lot more) 
200g Greek yogurt
0,5 dl sugar (I use brown sugar - demerasykur)
1 egg
1 tsp  vanilla extract/vanilla sugar (venjulegir vanilludropar eða vanillusykur)

Spread your berries on the dough, mix the rest of the ingredients together and pour over the berries.

Bake for 30 minutes (200 degrees on Celsius)

a cozy weekend

Last weekend we went to my parents cottage near Skálholt - it was wonderful... 

Our amazing view

my parents interesting stone-collection

another self-portrait :-) 

pictures of my mother art-work

I couldn´t believe it when I found some growing green kale, at the end of january - but I really did and made myself some yummi "kale-chips" in the oven

What a cozy weekend - can´t wait to go again...

Rhubarb-love

I told you last year and I´ll tell you again today: I love rhubarb! You can cook it, bake it, dye with the leaves or use the stems as a dye-mordant! Yesterday I got some really nice and cheap strawberries and decided to make some strawberry-jam... and since I found a lot of "wild" rhubarb the other day, I wanted it to be a strawberry-rhubarb-jam. I tell you: it was so worth the effort!!

How I did it:

1 kg strawberries
500 g rhubarb
600 g sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar 
enough red melatin to make the jam thick enough (Bónus)



I cut the fruit into small pieces and let them soak in sugar, vanilla sugar and melatin over night. The morning after I cooked the jam until the fruit got really soft and used my hand blender to make the blend smooth. Pour the jam into pretty maison jars and enjoy!

 

 I also wanted to show that flowers don´t always have to be storebought to be pretty and decorative! 

 

Forget-me-not, picked on my daily walk yesterday... got the pretty little vase in a thriftstore and I love it... 

 

wonderful colours, love the pretty the blue. yellow and white togehter...  

got this perfect little vase in a thrifstore too - perfect colourcombo: purple and turquoise... 

I picked those on my daily walk too... you can eat the flowers in the back - looks really pretty on a salad!

My older one, Bidenam picked those on his own, yesterday... isn´t this the most perfect bouquet??

wonderful Lupina...

 

Homemade pesto

There is nothing like homemade pesto... once you´ve tried it, there is no more turning back - promise! The best thing about pesto is, that it´s really simple, quick and it´s almost impossible to do something wrong. It´s also very versatile: try using some walnuts or pistachios instead of pine nuts and you have a totally different tasting pesto.

I´ve never used a recipe and just been trying out my own combinations. But yesterday I wrote down a recipe for my pesto for the first time ever... just for lucky you!

How to use it:
Of course, pesto is perfect with pasta, on fresh bread (f.eks.. bruschetta), on your sandwich together with some veggies, marinated chicken (I really recommend it for grilled chicken-breast - what a perfect combination!), marinated and grilled feta-cheese (wrap it in alufoil and grill it - yummi!!) , mix it with yogurt and you have a really tasty cold sauce or do it like my husband and older son: just eat it with a spoon if you love it like they do!! :-) (they call it "frog-sauce"/froskasósa because it´s so very green)

You get a lot of pesto (at least I think it is a lot) using my recipe, but if I make this sauce, I really like to make a lot of it at once and use it for different things...

Ruccola-basil-pesto:

75 g ruccola (1 bónus-ruccola-poki)
100 g basil (2 pakkar)
50 g pine nuts (1 poki)
200 ml olive oil
80 g fresh parmesan (rúmlega hálft stykki)
8 garlic cloves (more or less depending on your taste)
salt and pepper

Put those ingredients in a blender (or food processor) and mix them up until the blend looks smooth and yummi...

Of course you can just use only basil and leave the ruccola out. The reason why I started using ruccola for my pesto is simple: in Iceland, basil is really expensive. Ruccola has a very special and strong taste... just perfect for pesto... I´ve even tried using only ruccola and left the basil out - it really tasted good too and not bitter at all.

Please tell me if you try my recipe out and how you liked it!!! :-)

my knitting-project at the moment:

Cinnamon rolls

Don´t you just love cinnamon rolls? I think this is a perfect baking-project for parents to do with their kids - at least my boys love to make those... and eat them!

I got this recipe for cinnamon-rolls with apples, many years ago and I love it just the way it is - there are only 2 things I have changed... the first thing is the way I make the dough, since I have a breadmaker now which makes the whole process even more easy! The second thing is the topping... the original recipe doesen´t have any topping, but I often use a delicious toffee-topping-recipe a friend of mine gave me...

I have to admit, that I don´t know where I got this recipe... but I have it written down by hand in my recipe-book where I keep my favorites all together...

Cinnamon rolls - the dough:
3 dl milk (lukewarm)
3 tsk dry yeast
50 g butter
25 g sugar
1 tsk salt
1 tsk grounded cardamom
400 g flour

Filling:
1 grated apple
1 tsk cinnamon
25 g sugar
25 g melted butter

Toffee-topping:
50 g butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tbsp corn syrup
1 tbsp water

What to do: (if you don´t have a breadmaker)
1. Mix the yeast and the milk together. After that: add sugar, salt and cardamom.

2. Melt the butter, and add it together with 2/3 of the flour to the milk-mixture. Mix well and let this very wet mixture rest for about 40-50 minutes.

3. Add the remaining flour to the mixture and knead the dough until it feels manageable, soft and doesn´t stick to your hands anymore.

4. Roll out to a size of approximately 60x30 sm:


5. Filling: mix everything together and spread on the dough you just rolled out...


6. Cut the dough-roll into pieces and place them on your baking-pan. Let them rest for at least 30 more minutes under a dishcloth... then they should look like something this:



7. Topping: I sometimes just spread a stirred egg over the cinnamon-rolls before I put them in the oven. Or you can use the toffee-topping-recipe above... you just mix all the ingredients together in a pot and stir for a few minutes until it is thick, sticky and looks yummi like this:



You spread the topping on the cinnamon-rolls after they have been in the oven for about 5 minutes (take the rolls out of the oven - spread the toffee-topping - put them back in and bake until ready)..

8. Bake for for about 15 minutes (180-200°C) ... and enjoy!!!

Something new and something from Finnland

I made something for myself this weekend... guess what?


Last fall, I went to Finnland to be at a very, very dear friends wedding. We had some wonderful, perfect days together and this really was one of the highlights for me so far. One of the many things I love about Finnland are the berries. I love berries... I always have... and because of that, Finnland is something like a berry-heaven for a person like me. I ate berries every single day in many different versions. One of the things I tried out was a cake my friend baked for me. The other day she sent me the recipe so I could try it out with my freshly picked wild, blueberries. I turned out just perfect - the recipe is very simple, the cake is not too heavy, not too fat, not filled with sugar and made out of 50%/50% whole-wheat and flour... and the best thing is: it reminded me of my wonderful days in Finnland and my dear friends there.



to

I love rhubarb...

I love rhubarb... everything about it, the taste, the colour... you can eat it, cook it, bake it and the best thing is: you can dye with every single part of it - from root to top! :-) This week I´ve been very busy cooking and dyeing with the rhubarb, my friend gave me the other day. I made jam, a cake and of course: I did some yarn-dyeing with it!!!

When you are dyeing with plants, it´s always fascinating to see, how different 2 skeins yarn can turn out, coming from the same pot. I dyed about 7 skeins of yarn, and almost none of them is exactly the same. Some of them have some brownish-red spots (skellur), some of them are much darker and others a bit lighter in colour. But exactly that´s the fascinating part of the yarndyeing, you never know what you´re going to get! And most of the time, you don´t get what you expect!

Again I must say, the pictures don´t really show the beauty of the colours - but if you click on the pictures you can see them in full size:

the wool

on my balcony, preparing for the winter:

Rhubarb-jam
cake with rhubarb (hjónabandssæla), recipe from my grandmother

CafeSigrun

CafeSigrun.com is a blog full of healthy and great recipes. Ever since I read this post from Barbietec I´ve been wanting to make "orkuhnullungar". For those of you, who can´t read icelandic, this is not interesting, since the recipe is in icelandic :-( Sorry about that! I didn´t have all those healthy organic things you are supposed to use, and instead I just used what I had at home. But I´m sure those cookies would taste even better if you only use everything super-healthy and organic... I only used dates (döðlur) and no raisins - but I´ll probably use both next time. I didn´t have enough sesame-seeds, so I added a bit of sunflower seeds (I roasted the seeds together with the nuts in a pan) . I also used the double amount of cinnamon. I really like the result - they have a strong, special taste of the roasted seeds and nuts, a mild taste of chocolate and the spices... I´m sure those are going to become a favorite of mine and I´m going to keep on experimenting with the recipe.

Birthdaycakes

Þór (Thor) Bidenam Balemasson, 5 years old

Yesterday we celebrated my older sons 5th birthday. One of the most important things on your birthday when you are 5 years old - at least for my boys - is the birthdaycake. At first, he wanted a mumin-cake, then Spiderman and at last he wanted a car-race-cake. And what my birthdayboy wants, he gets! :-)
I made a chocolate-cake (from mommur.is) with fluffy-buttercream-frosting (Martha Stewart) and fondant:


And here some birthday-cakes I´ve made in the past:

Bidenam 2 years old:

Bidenam 3 years old

Bidenam 4 years old

Freyr 2 years old: Freyr 3 years old

Many things

I´ve been doing so many different things lately that I just don´t know where to start! :-) So let´s begin...

1. I´ve been knitting my lace-shawl "Hálfskák" - I´m almost done... only about 5 rounds to knit and I´m finished. Can´t believe I did it and can´t wait to start "Kyrrð" (knitting my day away).

2. I baked my own birthdaycake with Dagbjört (or should I say: she baked it, I watched). She showed me how to decorate cakes with fondant. It was so much fun - I just loved it and you can do almost anything with it! Thank you so much Dagbjört! We made a very girly, pink mumin-cake. My son told me, he want´s a mumin-cake for his birthday in july too, which made me really happy since I love the mumins too! :-)

3. I made a hat and a scarf for a cousin of mine, who was graduating - out of one of my favorite yarns, the icelandic "kambgarn". The hat-pattern: "Bleik og bjúdíful" from the book "fleiri prjónaperlur. The scarf: my own design.


4. I LOVE garlic, you can´t believe how much! :-D That´s why I made some persian, pickled garlic yesterday. You heat up some vinegar with black peppercorns, put some garlic-cloves in a jar (without the skin) and then you mix the two things together. Then you have to wait as long as possible- the longer, the better. A persian friend of mine told me, her mother waits 7 years - I tasted this 7 years old, pickled garlic at her home and I can´t describe how good it was - the best thing ever. It was black, sweet, mild and sour. I don´t think I have the patience to wait so long...



5. I´ve been preparing and buying everything I need to finally start dyeing yarn with plants: flowers, trees and other things from nature. I´ll start with onion peel because that´s what I have at home - and einband because that´s what I need for "Kyrrð".

Proper apple pie

My older son is sick again - now he has the chicken pox! :-S For 2 whole days he asked me to bake him an apple pie, after seeing someone eating one in TV. I´ve often baked an applecake - but that´s not what he wanted at all... he really was craving for a PIE. Of course I had to fulfil my poor sick son this wish and went online to search for a recipe, since I´ve never baked a "real apple pie" like the one he wanted. I ended up baking this one since it looked quite simple and I had all the ingredients at home: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/maryhenryproperappl_67463 (the picture above is from that page)

We ate it with vanilla-ice cream and it was sooooooo good! And it looked almost as perfect as it does on the picture above! :-D It´s really simple and quick to make... maby I´ll show you some pictures of my first, real apple pie later...

Útskriftar-múffur / Graduation-muffins

Ég ákvað að bjóða uppá allskonar múffur í útskriftarveislunni minni um helgina. Við mamma bökum sitt samtals ca 7 sortir og alls um 240 múffur! Mjög skemmtileg klikkun. Ég mæli eindregið með að kíkja á múffuuppskriftir á heimasíðu Mörtu Stewart - þar eru margar virkilega girnilegar kökur.

I decided to have a muffin-graduation-party this weekend. We (me and my mum) baked about 7 different kind of muffins/cupcakes - in the end we had baked about 240 muffins! Totaly crazy and so much fun! I recommend the muffin-recipes on Martha Stewart homepage - there are many really nice and appetizing recipes there.