Granola

I hate eating bread for breakfast... Well I hate eating bread early in the morning...

So I'm always looking for other breakfast options, instead of just not eating...

I love muesli / cruesli / granola, but the store bought variations have all these additives in them I don't want to eat.

So I made my own. I tried it once before, and it was kinda okay, but not exactly what I wanted...

I searched a little more on Pinterest and found this recipe. It uses coconut oil, which I love!

I made my own granola inspired on this recipe, with the ingredients I had in my cupboard.

This is what I did:

In a bowl I mixed 1/4 cup sesame seeds, 1/4 cup pumpkinseeds, 1/2 cup crushed hazelnuts, 3 cups rolled oats, 1/2 cup honey, 1/2 cup coconut oil, 1/2 cup brown sugar (optional), 1tsp vanilla extract, a pinch of salt.

When it's thoroughly mixed, spread the mixture on a lined baking tray and bake it for about 35 minutes in a pre-heated oven (175C). Turn/mix after about 20 minutes.

The granola will be loose when you take it out of the oven, but will clump a bit when it cools.

I hope you like it as much as I do. I'm currently on my third batch...

Love, Caroline

Pepernotencake

Saw this on Pinterest and made my own version of it...
(Loaded with sugar and butter... :-S
And the name is actually wrong, it should be "kruidnotencake")


















Preheat oven to 175C.
Butter a baking tin, or line it with bakingpaper.

Mix 200g butter with 200g sugar.
When creamy, mix in 4 eggs, one by one.
Then mix in 200g sifted selfraising flower.
Add a couple of tablespoons milk, to make the batter nice and moist.
Add one heaped tablespoon cookiespices
(Or of you don't have that (like I did, I ran out), mix the following ground spices:
1/10 white pepper
1/10 aniseed
1/10 cardamon
1/10 cloves
1/10 ginger
5/10 cinnamon
I did have these, since I use them when I bake spekkoek (Indonesian layered cake))

Mix in 125g "kruidnoten".

Pour the cakebatter in the bakingtin, put in in the middle of the oven and bake for 60-70 minutes.

Love, Caroline

PS: You could probably use any cakerecipe that makes a moist cake and add the "kruidnoten".
If you have a recipe for a moist cake with less of no sugar and less of no butter, PLEASE share it with me...

ScrubSalts

I'm in love with Rituals products... But they're soooooo expensive.... And not organic... I also love scrubsalt and my Rituals jar was empty... :-(((

So I googled a bit, and found out, you can easily make you own scrubsalt.

I recycled the jar and made my own.
I bought a kilogram rocksalt (about €0,70) at our organic supermarket and mixd it with some almond bodyoil I had laying around. It was too fatty and the salt was too coarse, but it worked...

This week, my jar was empty again, so I made another batch of scrubsalt and it turned out soooooo much better this time....

Here's my "recipe":
- Pour your rocksalt in the blender and pulse it a couple of times.
Leave it alone, so the cloud of salt can settle down.
(You could probably use Celtic-rocksalt, which seems a little flakey-er. I'm trying that, when this bag af salt is empty.)

- Put two 100ml scoops in a jar or bowl and mix it with 60ml Natusan Babyoil, to get the right consistancy and "fattiness".

It turned out great this time! Blending it made the salt a little less rough on my skin, and since the grains are smaller, they dissolve a bit more in the water.

On the internet it said you could use Olive-oil of Sunflower-oil and a couple of drops essential oil, but since I had the Natusan (which I don't really use for Joshua), I used that (And it smells reaaaaally good!)


You should really try it!

This is all for now..

Love,

Caroline

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I have all these cravings and sometimes I just give in to them.

But I don't want all the store bought crap, I love to bake myself and I use as much Organic ingrediënts as I can. So today I decided to bake some Chocolate Chip Cookies...

This is what you need for 12, quite large, cookies:

150 gr plain flour

100 gr dark caster sugar

55 gr "normal" sugar
125 gr soft butter

2 sachets vanilla sugar (about 15 grams) or

2 tablespoons vanilla essence

1 egg

1/2 tablespoon salt

1/2 tablespoon bakingpowder

100 gr dark chocolate

Pre-heat your oven to 180 °C (my oven does 175 or 200, so I picked 175 and added 2 extra minutes bakingtime).

Stir the butter and sugar to a soft mix, add the egg and stirr again.

Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt, stir again.

This is what you should get.

 

Bash the chocolate to pieces and add to your dough.

Line a bakingtray with bakingpaper and spoon spoonfulls of dough on the bakingtray.

I made 12 big lumps, but when they went in the oven, they flattened and stuck together.
I guess you could bake two batches with 24 smaller ones, or freeze half of the dough and bake 12 smaller ones...
It's all up to you...
If you bake the big ones, bake for 20 minutes, the smaller ones should be done in about 15 minutes.

Let them cool on the bakingtray for about 5 minutes, then transfer to a cake rack to cool further.

 

I have yet to taste them, but they smell amazing..!

Love, Caroline