CatPoet

Well the problem I had with freezing cloves fully was that it became weird in the middle, gritty and just weird. It could be due to my freezer but since then I grate and chop , if I know I cant get good garlic.

Whole cloves hasn't worked for me, but feel free to try it.

Grate it or chop in to fine bits and freeze in small ice cube trays.

I buy tomatoes in winter at a "second hand" store, they sell fruit and vegetable that the large changes cant sell due to being ripe , yes you heard right, they are perfectly ripe and so yummy. Yes you can get over ripe stuff to but most things are just ripe . I get perfect tomatoes while saving the environment.

I use Leca pebbles to avoid rot in my pots, it is like small balls of harden clay that goes in the bottom of the pot and then on top and that keeps the tomatoes happy.

I have the same problem with the ones I used to use. So now for cleaning surfaces and not dishes I use cheap terry cloth towels I found at IKEA and for dishes I did find natural sponges but for me they are too expensive so I been using a really good washing up brush,

Anna, nor do , if the cardamom is pre ground, people tend to add too much so you get hint of turpentine and that you never get from fresh ground. But yeah we swedes have a lot of cardamom in baked goods but this wasnt a Swedish recipe. Lingon bars? You can make them with cranberries and it is butter biscuit base with jam and frosting.

Norm, your food looks like out of Betty Crocker cookbook and that style and era, it is oddly comforting. Yesterday we made satay pork, very tasty and every one liked it.

Anna have you tried Cardamom shortbread? It is amazing if made with fresh milled cardamom and you dont need to make them into owls as I did.

My daughter is born of first of May, it is a bank holiday so she has the whole day with us and friends, so of course there was cakes, cookies and good food.

The "wild" strawberries didnt survive winter, not due to lack of care but due to birds adding seeds to the pot, trampling the plant and mating on top of them. How ever we have two tomatoes plants going out of 6 seeds and 1 plant of cayenne chili out 10 seeds. I hope my lettuce will do better and I might buy strawberry plants for my balcony unless the "wild" strawberry suddenly comes to life.

An owl cake. Make with chocolate and vanilla cake and orange curd and pipped with chocolate cream and marmalade cream. This is the only picture I right now have of them due to my hard drive crashing, They are a classic Swedish "cakepop" called Arrakboll, they are normally flavoured with arrak but we used almond extract, In Sweden we have a long tradition of waste not , want not and this extend to bakeries, there are pastries made with cookies crumbs, roll crumbs and cake crumbs, because not even a flawed cake is useless here. We were three who made them, I rolled and dipped them in chocolate, friend added the prickles and hubby added nose and eyes.

Try the owl cookie recipe, I posted in Daily sweet. If you just make them round and now owl they are lovely cookies and easy to make.

And we removed the snakes instead, because the owl cookies are so darn cute and we will have hedgehogs too.

I hope the hedgehogs are up to standard, I be making them tomorrow. Then it is only the cake left.

Owl cookies!! They were surprisingly easy to make and the dough smelled and tasted like the Swedish pastry Semla so I think they will be great, They are bit more golden in real life but my camera battery is sharing and I used my mobile which has a bit of a problem with the camera. But beggars cant be choosers and this smartphone is mine due to cake., I like this one, it looks like it about to giggle. They all got different faces and this one look calm. I did change the recipe slightly, I used less almond extract , the one we have only needs 1 to 2 drops to give a nice flavour and the cardamom I uses must be better quality then hers, because her amount would be nasty and also I only use fresh ground cardamom , I find that the ready milled on taste too much turpentine to be pleasant.

I made one batch of sweet dough and made cinnamon rolls and toffee rolls. They look the same but the taste is different . Oh and you can see what my husband named my rolls. He said they were floaty light and daughter said Oh nom nom nom nom...

Toffee rolls, lovely airy toffee rolls. The trick to airy sweet rolls is either cream of tartar or baking ammonia, just 1 teaspoon added to the mixture..

A really yummy wheat loaf, it made by first cooking part of the water, the fat and some of the flour to like a start of a petite chou dough, the bread comes from a weird French and Swedish booklet, front missing. The French guy does all the Wheat recipes and the Sweden all the rye ones. This called Mon Petite. It is still a normal size loaf but hey it is in French it must be posh!

Oh ! I love raspberry and almond cake, so I guess I would love those rolls.. I have to make them for my birthday, or at least try to get the flavours .

I would try too cook it slower, lower heat but not too low. That is the trick to get clear glass window or tainted ( using fruits syrup) at Christmas, slow and steady and trying to not burn it. And that sets hard.

Test baking polar bear cookies. Well they went perfect, except I forgot I was dealing with an American recipe and this means the cookies are big so big that I have to remove the owl cookies the child wanted or she will have a sore tummy. I changed the recipe a little, instead of blue food dye , I had unsweetened cocoa powder . So the idea now is snakes, hedgehogs, polar bears and a Owl cake.

Oh I manage to get onion sugar by mistake a few days ago.. but it was just browned onions and my daughter trying to help by adding 1 cup of brown sugar. It sett hard.. it tasted like onion, with onion bits and we came to the conclusion Onion candy is not good.

There is more to buns then the classical cinnamon roll.. What is your favourite non cinnamon filling for rolls? Please feel free to share memories, anecdotes and recipe for filling rolls, buns or what ever you call them. I have many favourites , I cant choose so every time I bake rolls I get to the spot of oh I want this , no I want that and oh what I want this one and then I end up doing just cinnamon because I cant decide, sad but true. So here are my favourite when I can decide or have made plan before starting baking. . I love to use marzipan and butter, equal parts with a little bit of vanilla or amaretto, this filling is perfect in saffron rolls Toffee buns are also a favourite, equal parts of brown sugar, icing sugar, butter and a dash of vanilla is mixed to a paste and then spread over the dough, it becomes like toffee , yum. Nutella, nutella rolls are heaven on a plate, well these days I have to use vegan milk free hazelnut chocolate spread but it still taste good, not as great nutella but yeah good. So what about you lot?

RWood, check out Ann rerdon and how to cook that, she has an avengers cake.