My Heart is Overflowing

This is a thing I rarely admit to anyone: I love people. Just like that, people in my everyday life or even people I read about. I so love people who are nice to others and to the world in general, who made a discovery benefiting to the humanity or who just help an old women cross the street, those who make us laugh I love dearly and those, men AND women, who are able to give an uplifting compliment to every women they know, hence to every human being they know - we all need it. I have this thing, this moment when I feel my heart overflowing with love and joy and in some of this situations I have to restrain myself from hugging people around me.

Now don't get me wrong, I've been hurt by people and I suffered but I forget easily and I simply am not able to hate - I'm so happy about it!

I too love doing nice things for people around me. Just last week I made some "faux" cupcakes for the birthday of a young girl I work with. I bought brownies but I decorated them with cheese frosting and colorful sugar sprinkles. Everybody loved them, but there was a young girl who is allergic to peanuts and she couldn't eat them, didn't want to take a chance with bought brownies. So I decided to make it up to her and I baked  cupcakes myself, decorated them exactly like those brownies before and brought them to her in the beginning of this week. She was flabbergasted! She couldn't believe I've made those especially for her. I got a big hug and she was so happy, she even called her mom and her friends to tell them about it.

But to tell you the truth, I'm the one who has gotten the most from it: one of those priceless moments that fill your hearth with joy...

My Heart is Overflowing

Quick & Simple Heart-Shaped Dessert Recipe For Valentine’s Day

Scratching your head in search of last minute idea for something simple and very quick to make for your loved ones? Me too! So it happened that I remembered a simple recipe for a very versatile dough I used to make long time ago. Added an apple, some brown sugar and cinnamon and here is the result:

I think it looks lovely and certainly handmade but it took me less than 1 hour, with baking time, to finish it. As for the dough recipe, you'll need the same amount in weight of cottage cheese, margarine and flour. Nothing else, no eggs, no salt, no sugar...

I made the dough with 250 g of each. If your cottage cheese is to grainy you'll need to make it smoother with a hand blender or in the food processor. Add the margarine and mix well - mixing thoroughly with a fork is OK. Add the flour and continue to blend the ingredients with a fork or with the wooden spoon. If your dough feels to wet add a bit of flour.

Roll  the dough out  on the floured surface approximately 0,5 cm thick (1/5 of an inch), cut the hearths with a cookie cutter and place them on the baking sheet. Sprinkle each heart with some brown sugar and cinnamon if you like. Cut a small apple into thin slices and place 2 of them on each heart. Bake them in the oven on 380° F/180° C for 25-30 minutes. I wanted to color some apple slices in red but didn't have any red  food coloring left so I mixed some strawberry jelly powder with water and brushed the apple slices. Let them cool a bit and dust with icing sugar. If you want to make something more fancy here is my Valentine's blog post from last year. Bon appetit!

Quick & Simple Heart-Shaped Dessert Recipe For Valentine’s Day

Back to Comfort Food

It was an incredibly beautiful sunny day today in Quebec. We've been in Canada for almost twelve years now and we never ever had such a nice winter. As we took a walk  today on Plaines d'Abraham, snow was melting and water was running downhill... Normally, in February we would have one snow storm after another, temperatures between -30 and -40 grade Celzius, the hardest part of  the winter. I'm so grateful for this winter. But it's still winter, right? And you newer know when it's going to turn ugly so you must be prepared. One of my favorite weapons against harsh winter is comfort food. I'm not going to start to elaborate on this as I believe that everyone  knows what a bowl of homemade soup can do for the poor winter plagued soul, right? I have a long list of comfort food worthy meals but I make very often one simple thing I've learned from my mother. Remember my first and my second post on my homemade bread? It's my mother who taught me how to make bread and how to make this little sweet "by-product" from the bread dough. Very simple and very yummy!

 All you need is a bit of  a bread dough, oil, icing sugar and vanilla sugar. You can also eat them with sour cream or other things you like if you don't like or don't eat sugar Watch the pictures bellow for instructions and if you have questions don't be shy. Bon appetit!

 

 

Go ahead, make them, you'll become an addict!

Back to Comfort Food

Wonderful Cinnamon Swirl Cake Recipe

Can you believe it's February already? Well I can because I had today my first exam in a series of eight. It went smoothly, it wasn't to difficult and I think I did more than ok. We'll see soon...more about it later.
We finally have back our winter temperatures in Quebec - minus 30 or so (me jumping for joy). Today I want to share with you a recipe that I've made a dozen times lately and it always turns out very yummy...

I found the recipe on the Web, it was published in the Craft magazine, volume 10, by Élena Nazzaro, aka frenchtoastgirl.com. Click on the recipe to see the details. The only change I make every time is that I add 3/4 cup of milk to make it fluffier. It really is worth a try, bon appetit!

p.s. Don't forget to prepare a cup of coffee or hot chocolate while baking the cake!

Wonderful Cinnamon Swirl Cake Recipe

Heart-Shaped Dessert Recipes For Valentine’s Day

It's that time of year again, everybody is talking flowers, chocolate and love. I must admit I'm not so much into it as I prefer to celebrate love every day of my life with small gestures than to party once a year in this commercial(ized) way. But ok, yeah, I admit it - I kinda love all this red and pink kitsch, can't help it, it's a little girl in me. This year I wanted to make something at home for my Hubby and me so I decided to make a heart-shaped cake or dessert. As I was searching for an easy cheesy recipe I stumbled upon 20 recipes for heart-shaped desserts on Woman's Day Web page. Aren't they just delightful?

  Don't panic right away please! They might seem complicated to make but there is a recipe for every level of cooking expertise. It starts with a 2 minutes Valentine Dessert For Two (can you really make a dessert in 2 minutes?! Incredible!) and it gets  to more complicated and time consuming cakes. There are also incredibly beautiful  No-Bake Mini Heart Cakes. You can find all of the 20 recipes here. I find it more caring and thoughtful to make something for someone you love than just to buy any commercial product. I'd say: go and make some of this beauties and share them with your loved ones!

Heart-Shaped Dessert Recipes For Valentine’s Day

Homemade Bread - Step by Step

Remember the post from the last week about my homemade bread? I've promised to prepare more photos and more detailed instructions. And as I was about to make my bread again and taking a ton of pictures, I decided to make a step by step illustrated and detailed instructions. Hope it works! If not, I'll have to think of something else...

The whole thing should be clickable like a presentation and you should be able to download it as a PDF file, to print it or to view it on full screen. Let me know what you think about it...

Update1: I think it's working but it's huge! I'm looking for solution...
Update2: I didn't find the way to do it better for the moment. Click on the picture above, I added the link to the file hosted on Scribd and you can do all the above with it...thanks!

Homemade Bread - Step by Step

Murphy's law it is!

I'm still shaking, since yesterday evening... Remember my secret baking mission? And Murphy's law that I mentioned? Well, I shouldn't have! Cause everything went wrong. I think this mysterious mister Murphy decided to take up a challenge and to spend the evening with me just to see if he's able to do something mentionable. Well, he was. Yesterday afternoon, I spent quite some time writing the recipe down for the contest I was to enter. It had to be in French, the contest is taking place in Quebec/Canada. So I wanted to be sure to use all the appropriate words and to write clear instructions. Finally, towards 6 pm, i finished writing  my recipe and frankly, I was a bit exhausted. So I decided I was going to rest a bit with a cup of coffee before sending my recipe along with the photo via the web site form. What’s the rush, I had 6 hours before the closing of the contest. And I was pretty proud of myself and of my creation for this contest, that I so pretentiously named 'Choco Abricot Volcano':

Now tell me honestly, wouldn't you be proud and excited about it? I certainly was. It was arround 8h30 when I decided that it was time to take action toward winning the first prize. So I opened the webpage of the context and pushed the button that should open the inscription form. The page opened quite rapidly, but in place of  the inscription form a message of error was displayed. Can happen, nothing there... So I refreshed the page with a strange feeling in my gut. It didn't work again. That was only the beginning of the horrible evening that ended after midnight. I tried everything and with every browser possible - nada! Arround 11 o'clock I started to panic realising that Mr. Murphy was comfortably installed on my shoulder and I was only amusing him with my stubbornness. Than I taught of something: I saw the 'Contact us' link and I sent the message explaining the situation. Nothing happened, no one was there.

Shortly before midnight, I decided to take action and opened the 'Contact us' section again, I explained the situation and asked them to consider my application then I pasted the text of my recipe in the box and added the link to the picture of the cake in my Picassa web album and I sent it. At this point, Mr M. must have been tired and already in bed. I went to bed too. I was crushed...

Then this morning, as I opened my mail, I saw the message from the communication person of the company saying that she got my message and they're going to add my application to the contest!!! I was so happy and relieved at the same time. Not so Mr. Murphy. I suppose he was still around as I got the good news. He didn't like the fact that all his effort didn't work out in the end. So he started planning his revenge.

And here is how he did it: As I was about  to rearange the things arround my computer earlier this afternoon,  I kicked a cable accidentally and my brand new 7.0 mp camera fell in my huge cup full of hot coffee! I was speechless... I took it out allmost immediatly, but it was already completely soaked and coffee dripped slowly out of it as I held it in the air. I'll spare you all the other details, you can imagine how I felt. Nothing works anymore. Even my 4 G memory card that I took immediately out doesn't give a sign of life. And I had so many pictures of my projects for this blog on it...
I promise, I'll never mention Mr. M. on any of my posts again.

Murphy's law it is!