Junglefrog Cooking » egg

Sweet honey and pistachio cake

Simone (junglefrog) — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:26:22 +0000

Don’t you just sometimes feel you’re at the mercy of some stranger when it comes to hosting of your blog? Not too long ago I moved from my Dutch hosting guys to Hostgator and while I have to say everything went smoothly up until this morning, I now felt why it makes sense to have a host a little closer to home. This morning I had a spike in CPU usage on my blog. It could be a hack attempt or whatever else can happen these days being online, but I was immediately locked out of all my accounts to prevent the server crashing. And I get that. Believe me, I understand why they decide to close down your site at that particular point.

What I do NOT understand is why it then has to take the entire day to get me back online. I was working on location so I could not get behind the computer to use the live chat (one of the disadvantages of hostgator for me I think) so it was 4 pm before I could do anything. And even then it took me about 2 hours in the chat to get it fixed. I had to reply to emails so I could ‘fix’ the issue (hard to fix something if you don’t know what’s causing it) plus had to almost beg to get it done. So… I am very annoyed at all this. I’m totally fine moving to another service and pay more if that is what it takes, but I just need to be able to rely on my host to not lock me out at the first sign of something going wrong. Or just lock down the offending site and not the entire account, as they did in this case. Locking down all my 6 websites…! It turns out that a plugin by the name of W3 total cache was causing the issue apparently, so that has been replaced… but still….

I know there are many of you out there who have huge amounts of traffic and high volume blogs, mine is peanuts in comparison, but how does your host handle traffic spikes and who is your host? Any hints, tips or whatever to help this being prevented? At this moment I am very tempted to move back to my previous host. I left because there was a huge price difference, but now I can see why there is one…

Sorry to be venting a little bit here but I just had to get this of my chest… And to sweeten the mood a little bit I have prepared this gorgeous and succulent cake for you. The recipe comes from the book Jamie Does. . . where he lists this recipe in the Greece section. It’s delicious and pouring the honey syrup over the cake makes it moist and delicious. I’m sure you’re gonna love it too!

Honey and pistachio cake

Print recipe

Serves	10-12
Prep time	10 minutes
Cook time	35 minutes
Total time	45 minutes
Meal type	Dessert
From book	Jamie Does....

Ingredients

5 large eggs
225ml greek yogurt
225g caster sugar
75g ground almonds
1 piece lemon (zested)
1 orange (zested)
150g flour (plus extra for dusting)
200g semolina
2 teaspoons baking powder
200ml olive oil (mild and creamy)

serving

2 punnets strawberries (hulled and roughly chopped)
greek yogurt

Topping

150g pistachio (shelled)
150ml honey (good quality and runny)

Directions


Preheat the oven to 180 C. Mix all sponge ingredients together in a large bowl. Grease a cake tin of about 22 x 29 cm with a little olive, then dust with a sprinkling of flour and shake the tin about. Spoon in the sponge mixture from the bowl, scraping it all out and use a spatula to spread it evenly.

Put the cake into the hot oven to bake for about 25 to 30 minutes, until golden and cooked through. To check, remove from the oven and stick a skewer into the center of the cake. If it comes out clean it's done, so put it to one side to cool for about half an hour.

When you're just about ready to serve your cake, toast the, roughly chopped, pistachios in a dry pan over low to medium heat till they start to become golden brown and smell delicious. Add the honey to the pan and stir everything through. Squeeze the juice from both the orange and the lemon in the pan and then boil for 1 or 2 minutes until it becomes syrupy and thick.

Stab the cake all over with a small knife to create little holes for the syrup to sink in to. then pour the pistachios and syrup all over the top and use the back of a spoon to spread it out evenly. It will look a bit runny but if you leave it for about 15 minutes the syrup will be soaked up. While still slightly warm, slice your cake and serve it with some chopped strawberries and greek yogurton the side

Rhubarb souffle for April in Paris

Simone (junglefrog) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:42:33 +0000

Monthly mingle; April in Paris

Alors, j’taime Paris… My love affair with France dates back from when I was a little kid. My parents always went to France on holidays. When we were big enough to ‘survive’ the long trip from our home to Bretagne, we went there every year. I must have been 13 or 14 when I entered for the very first time. We went to places like St. Malo or Boules (it was called differently but can’t think of the actual name now!) as long as it was close to anything resembling water. My nickname in those days was ‘waterrat’; if there was water around, you would find me in it. So any camping we would go to would have to be by the seaside or a large lake (we went to the Dordogne a couple of times too)

In fact, I received my very first kiss in France. I was 15 years old, very tall and very slim (tall I still am, but not sure where the slimness went..lol) and very blond. We went on holiday that year with friends from my parents who had two kids (they had more kids, but only two came on that particular holiday) and both of them were boys. The youngest of the two was my little sisters age but the oldest of the two, R. was a little older then me and quite handsome too.

Rhubarb and blackberry souffle with crumble

I was already feeling those famous butterflies in my stomach every time he walked close to me. At some point we were visiting rather boring caves somewhere close to Paris and R. and I stayed a little bit behind. He suddenly grabbed my arm and pulled me close. “Have you ever kissed?” He asked me. I squeaked something that must have sounded like ‘no’. ‘Would you like me to show you how to kiss?’ He proceeded asking, at which I squeaked ‘yes’ and that’s how it happened. I received my very first French kiss in France. How fitting! I can’t say I totally enjoyed the experience but we got to practice that entire holiday so we did get quite good at it.

Of course we never wanted our parents to find out what was going on, so we had a lot of fun hiding our ‘activities’ from our folks. I’m pretty sure that they knew what we were doing behind the tents but at the time we were totally convinced we were being secretive and no one knew we ‘were in love’. It was fun while it lasted and it was really only a holiday fling, but fun non the less.

The theme of this months Monthly Mingle brought back all those memories from years past. Made me think about how I love Paris and France in general. Yes, the french can be obnoxious and arrogant at times, but quite honestly I’ve never had a lot of trouble with that. O I now remember a funny story about my Parisian boyfriend too! I’ll save that for another day!

This months mingle is hosted by my dear friend and fabulous writer Jamie from Lifes a Feast. She is an American but has been living in France for a rather long time, so this theme could have come from no other then her! Check out her post about the Mingle and her own entry here, which looks pretty amazing too. The Monthly Mingle is an invention from my other friend Meeta from What’s for Lunch Honey, where a new theme is picked every month. it’s been too long since I last participated as I love the mingle, but couldn’t skip this one, now could I?

Couldn't resist playing with the lensbaby ofcourse

To fit the theme I chose rhubarb and blackberry souffles with a crumble on top. I originally saw this recipe made during an episode of Masterchef Australia and was planning to make it. So when I saw this months theme I just knew it had to be these babies. What can I say? Totally delicious, fluffy and worth making! I was a little afraid the mixture might be too liquid but it worked brilliantly. I didn’t have icecream and whipping cream but that would be fantastic with this dessert.

Rhubarb and blackberry souffle with crumble

Print recipe

Serves	6
Meal type	Dessert
Misc	Serve Hot
Region	French
Website	Masterchef Australia

Ingredients

500g rhubarb (cut into 2 cm pieces)
140g sugar
150g black berries
4 egg whites
75g sugar

Crumble

75g flour
50g butter
50g brown sugar
pinch salt
50g rolled oats
50g hazelnuts (roughly chopped)

Directions


Preheat the oven to 200 C. Put the rhubarb with the 140 gr of sugar in a pan, add a splash of water, cover the pan and let it simmer on low heat for a while.
Crumble

Make a crumble by adding the ingredients together in a bowl and mix it with your fingers till it resembles a rough crumble. Put the crumble on a baking tray, spread it out and bake for about 5 minutes until light golden brown.

Butter your ramekins twice. Butter once and then put in the fridge for 5 minutes, butter again and put a tsp of sugar in the ramekin. Turn it around so the sugar coats all the sides of the ramekin well and tap out the excess sugar. Put aside until ready to use.

Once the rhubarb is cooked but still has some chunky bits in it, add the blackberries. You can use frozen blackberries if you cannot find fresh. Add a bit of lemon zest in the pan as well. Put some cornflour in a small bowl, add water and whisk until smooth. Add this bit by bit to your fruit mixture until it is thick enough. It should become a thick puree. Leave to boil for another 1,5 minute to cook the cornflour. Then put your fruit puree into another bowl and stir to cool it down for at least five minutes.

Take 4 eggwhites and add about 1 tbsp of sugar to it and start whisking until it becomes soft and glossy. Add 75 gr of sugar and whisk until it forms soft peaks. Don't overwhisk it.

Put 1/3 of your fruitpuree in a bowl and add about the same amount of eggwhites to it and carefully fold until combined. Repeat this until it's all incorporated. Take your ramekins and with spoon pointing downwards fill all your ramekins up till the rim. Smooth the top with a knife and run a finger along the side of the ramekin to make sure nothing sticks at the sides as that will prevent your souffle from rising.

Put the ramekins in the oven for 6-7 minutes, take them out (they should have risen about 1-2 cm at that stage) and add some crumble on top. Not too much as that will weigh it down but just eough to give it a bit extra. Bake for another 3 minutes and you're done.

Artichoke and feta tarts – DHSP challenge #7

Simone (junglefrog) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 07:00:40 +0000

My version

While I think some of the last couple of challenges where… well quite challenging… I think I may have picked a very easy one this time..:) So I would almost say that there is no reason not to participate this month!

For the new Donna Hay styling and photography challenge, number 7 already, I picked a recipe from the most recent Donna Hay magazine nr. 61. Photography is by William Meppem and Styling by Steve Pearce. For the past couple of months I have gone for dark and moody shots (to fit the season), rather then the signature Donna Hay style which is light and airy. I was in the mood for spring however and when I saw this gorgeous shot I could not resist.

The original by Wiliam Meppem ; the colors should be more like mine though. Blame it on the scan!

Smaller but better version of the original by William Meppem

So this is a fairly simple challenge, certainly compared to the ones we had previously but maybe it’s good to throw in an easy one for a change, to give you all some room to breath. It does not use a lot of props other then baking paper and a baking tray so in terms of prop shopping it’s easy too. I’ll show you a shot of my setup as well, so you have an idea on how I lighted the scene. Basically I had daylight coming from behind the subject and from the left with fill in with a large silver reflector from the right.

Setup for the shot

The light on this particular day was soft and cloudy so perfect really for a shadowless (more or less) photo. You could even go as far and place all the peas on the same spot but that was maybe a bit stretching it, so I left it the way I liked it. I also did have yellow tomatoes but for me that is not a huge difference so use whatever tomatoes you have.

Left mine, right the original

Now on to more pressing matters; we have a fantastic judging panel in place for the new challenge! I’m proudly presenting the following three awesome foodbloggers and awesome photographers/foodstylists.

Kay from the famous Kayotic Kitchen and a fellow Dutchie is a great photographer and has the amazing ability to do step by step shots for each and every single dish she makes. Hats of from me there!

Meeta from the equally famous What’s for Lunch Honey needs no further introduction if you come here more often. She’s not only a dear friend but also a very talented food photographer and foodstylist.

Then last but not least we have Jenn from Jenncuisine. Jenn has been participating regularly already from the first challenge and has won three times! So to avoid her winning anything else I thought I’d ask her to be on the judging panel..lol.. . She’s a great photographer and stylist as well.

So with that our judging panel is complete. The judges themselves are allowed to take part in the challenge as well, but they cannot win obviously. But it’s still fun to participate so didn’t want to take that away from anyone. Enter your links via the below Linky Tool!

Hungry yet?

You can find all the rules for the challenge on the special DHSPC page. As for the logo; I previously used the official Donna Hay logo but I was kindly notified that that is not allowed, so I changed it a bit. If you have the old logo, please use the new one from now on..

The Donna Hay team has kindly offered to share some wonderful prizes with us so the winner of the new challenge will receive a beautiful Donna Hay cookbook. it’s one of the two latest ones. I haven’t received them yet but will share that later as well.

Once the winner is decided upon by the judges I will ask the winner for his or her homeaddress to ship the book to.

So now all that leaves me is to share the recipe with you here and it’s a delicious recipe for sure, so if all else fails you still have these delicious tarts!

As usual; dietary changes are allowed!

Artichoke and feta tarts with tomato salad

Print recipe

Serves	4
Prep time	10 minutes
Cook time	15 minutes
Total time	25 minutes
Meal type	Appetizer, Lunch, Side Dish
From magazine	Donna Hay magazine

Ingredients

1 sheet store bought puff pastry (thawed)
250g feta (crumbled)
4 artichoke hearts (marinated and halved)
1 egg (lightly beaten)
100g mixed cherry tomatoes (halved)
120g frozen peas (thawed)
1/4 cup mint leaves
olive oil (for drizzling)
white balsamic vinegar (for drizzling)

Directions


Preheat oven to 200 C. Cut the pastry into 4 squares and score a 1 cm border around each square. Place the square on a baking tray lined with non stick baking paper and top with feta and artichoke. Brush the pastry borers with the egg and bake for 12-14 minutes or until golden

Place the tomato, peas and mint in a medium bowl, drizzle with olive oil and white balsamic and toss to combine. Top the tarts with the tomatoe salad to serve. Serves 4

Note

This is really simple and delicious recipes that - at least it does for me - gives me a spring feeling!

Pancakes – as it seems to be pancake day today

Simone (junglefrog) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:50:21 +0000

Stack of pancakes

Did you know that today is pancake day? I didn’t know up until two days ago that apparently today is THE day to bake pancakes. Obviously I do not need much excuses to start baking pancakes and it had been a while so I figured today would be as good a day as any. But then I started thinking; is this an American festivity and what is it all about?

I did a bit of googling around and according to most sites, this is by origin celebrated in English speaking countries and is traditionally the start of lent. Back in the day, eggs, butter and flour where considered to be luxury items and the idea was to have a bit of a splurge before the period of lent would start. Now, the funny thing is that we Dutch or at least the Christians are familiar with this as well and it is called pannenkoekendag. However, and I don’t know why, we decided that it would be a good idea to have a pancake day in March. March 30th to be exact. They even came up with their own website so go and check out all the details. it’s no longer anything to do with religion as far as I can tell, and it’s just all about eating pancakes.

One of the really cool things about it is that one of the highlights of the National Pancake day is that schools can enter and that means that the kids are baking for the elderly people. I just think that is a fun and cool concept of the pancake day. The schools can go and bake for the kids grandpa’s and grandma’s or for a home for the elderly. The price they can win (there has to be a price ofcourse) is a fun trip with the school to the Efteling. Nothing to do anymore with the original concept of pancake day but I still thought it was worth mentioning.

Does your country have any special traditions around pancake-day?

I’m sharing my pancake recipe below. I baked two batches, one with buttermilk, yogurt and a little bit of cocoa and the other plain. The plain ones I topped with caramelized apples in butter and honey… Delicious!

Some more pancake recipes you might want to try:

Pancakes with caramelized apples

Print recipe

Serves	15
Prep time	10 minutes
Cook time	30 minutes
Total time	40 minutes
Meal type	Dessert
Misc	Child Friendly, Serve Cold, Serve Hot
Website	BBC Good Food

Ingredients

200g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 pinch salt
1 egg
300ml milk
3 apples (peeled, cored and cut into slices)
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons butter

Directions


Start by making the caramelized apples. Once the apples are cleaned, put a pan on the stove and melt the butter. Add the apple slices to it and add 1 tbsp of honey. Leave to gently bake for about 5 minutes or until the apples are tender. Remove from the heat and add the cinnamon and 1 extra tbsp of honey to the apples. Leave to cool.

Put the selfraising flour, the baking powder and the salt in a large bowl. Put the milk and the egg together and whisk until combined. Make a well in the middle of the flour and slowly poor in the milk mixture until you have a thick smooth batter.

Heat a frying pan with a little bit of oil or butter and bake 1 tbsp of batter at the time until all your batter is gone. Leave to bake in the pan until bubbles begin to form on top of the surface, then flip the pancake and quickly bake the other side as well

Note

For the chocolate pancakes I used the same ingredients but added 1 tbsp of cocoa powder to it. I also replaced the 300 ml milk by 150 ml yogurt and 150 ml buttermilk. The rest of the recipe remains the same.

Creme Brulee – creamy perfection

Simone (junglefrog) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:05:49 +0000

Delicious creme brulle

“O that’s gonna be an easy one.” I thought when going through the recipe for the creme brulee in Donna Hay’s book Modern Classics. Cream and eggs, what can go wrong right? Wrong! Ofcourse we have a Dutch saying that goes something like ‘Hoogmoed komt voor de val” and it precisely point out what I am just saying… Think something is easy and you might be unpleasantly surprised!

I made the – probably classic – mistake of overheating the eggs. The recipe was not very clear in the sense that it didn’t mention you had to be careful with how hot the mixture got and so I just put it on the stove and it bubbled happily away. I kept stirring but obviously heating it above 100 C with eggs is always tricky. I should have really paid more attention but ok, I guess it was a good learning experience! I still moved forward with baking the creme brulee and I strained it before putting in the oven, hoping it would smooth out the texture a bit. And it did for the most part. It did not taste too eggy and was actually still surprisingly good.

Creme brulee

Making a perfect burnt layer on top was also more difficult then I thought it would be but once I got the hang of it, it was easy to do with my little burner. We had the things for years but never really used it until now. Make sure you do not make my mistakes to overheat the cream and you will have a cracker dessert for Christmas! I think this dessert will be even better if you add a bit of flavor into the cream. Think lemon or maybe even a bit of cinnamon. The choices are endless!

Creme brulee

Print recipe

Serves	6
Prep time	15 minutes
Cook time	20 minutes
Total time	35 minutes
Allergy	Egg
Meal type	Dessert
Misc	Serve Cold
From book	Modern Classics

Ingredients

1 litre double cream
1 vanilla pod (split and seeds taken out)
8 eggyolks
110g sugar (fine sugar )
60g sugar (for making the sugar coating)

Directions


Preheat the oven to 150 C. Put cream and vanillabean in a small saucepan and leave to simmer on low fire for about 3 minutes. Set aside for 20 minutes.

Whisk eggyolk and sugar together. Slowly pour the cream mixture on top and keep whisking. Put everything in the pan and reheat on low fire for about 6-8 minutes. This is where I am adding a note that you should not let the temperature get above 70 C here. Better is probably to reheat the mix au bain marie to be safe. Keep stirring until it is thick enough to coat a spoon.

Remove the vanillabean and strain the mixture above 6 ramekins of 175 ml each. Put them in a baking tray and pour hot water half way up to the ramekins. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until they are set. Remove the ramekins from the baking tray and leave them to cool in the fridge for at least an hour.

Put the ramekins on a baking tray, sprinkle with the extra sugar and leave for 2 minutes. Put icecubes around the ramekins and put them under a preheated gril and bake for 2-3 minutes until the sugar is melted and golden brown. You can also use a special creme brulee burner ofcourse.

Note

The key here is to not let the eggs become to hot or you will have some form of scrambled eggs instead of creme brulee!

creme brulee

Junglefrog Cooking » egg

Sweet honey and pistachio cake

Honey and pistachio cake

Ingredients

serving

Topping

Directions

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Rhubarb souffle for April in Paris

Rhubarb and blackberry souffle with crumble

Ingredients

Crumble

Directions

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Artichoke and feta tarts – DHSP challenge #7

Artichoke and feta tarts with tomato salad

Ingredients

Directions

Note

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Pancakes – as it seems to be pancake day today

Pancakes with caramelized apples

Ingredients

Directions

Note

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Creme Brulee – creamy perfection

Creme brulee

Ingredients

Directions

Note

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