Baking Love: Apple Speculaas Cake

Spring is supposed to start, but it still feels very wintery over here. So that is why I decided to share some wintery recipes with you this week for those last cold days. First there is a Dutch twist on an apple cake with speculaas. A spice mixture that we mostly use in winter time. If you can't find that, you can use a gingerbread mixture instead. We made this cake last week and it was a great success. The recipe for this easy and tasty cake come from Laura's Bakery.

Apple Speculaas Cake:
- 200 gr butter
- 200 gr sugar
- 8 gr vanilla sugar
- 4 eggs
- 200 gr self rising flour
- pinch of salt
- 2 large apples
- 4 tsp speculaas spices

Pre heat the oven to 175 degrees. Beat the butter, together with both sugars until they are creamy. Add the eggs 1 by 1 and beat until they are incorporated in the batter. Sift the flour, salt and speculaas spices into the bowl with the wet ingredients and mix until you have an airy batter. Peel and cube the apples, coat them with a bit of flour and scoop them into the batter. Stir well. Line a cake tin with baking paper. Pour the batter into the cake tin. Bake in the oven for about 1 hour. The cake is done when a toothpick comes out clean.

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Bento for week 9

This was a bit of a weird week. While we had it all planned bento wise, I got sick on Wednesday night and therefore Nick and I both slept badly. So in the morning he forget to make his soup bento. The thing with a thermos bento is, that you have to make it in the morning, but Nick totally forgot and ended up at work with no lunch at all, but with a cake that he baked that night before ;)
Tuesday's and Wednesday's bento were the same, so only one bento this week. But I will share a recipe to go with it.

Sorry for the bad quality picture. I wasn't able to make one and Nick's camera isn't so good as you can see. Anyway: In the bento are some leftover noodles from dinner. Cucumber and tomato fritters, which I will share below. In the lid there are 2 small Milka candy bars.

Tomato Fritters: (makes 8 fritters)
- 2 eggs
- 3 - 4 tomatoes (about 1.5 cup chopped)
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
- 0.25 cup feta, crumbled
- 4.5 tbsp flour
- dash of salt and pepper
- some other herbs that taste good with tomatoes, like basil or oregano
- olive oil

Whisk the eggs. Remove the seeds from the tomatoes and squeeze out the extra juices. Otherwise the batter will become too fluid. Chop them and add them to the eggs together with the tomato paste. Stir. Add the feta and stir again. Then add the flour and stir once more. You may need a bit more flour depending on how fluid your batter is at this point. It should be a little bit thicker than a cake batter. Lastly add in salt, pepper and herbs. Stir once more.

Heat some olive oil in a pan. Drop the batter with a spoon in the pan and fry until lightly golden brown (about 30-60 seconds), then flip and bake the other side. Let them cool a bit on paper towels to get rid of the extra oil. They taste great warm and cold.

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Slow Cooker: Fish Balls in Tomato Sauce

Preparing fish in the slow cooker can be a bit hard because it doesn't need that long. Luckily I found some delicious recipes that make it possible to prepare fish in your slow cooker. Like these fish balls in tomato sauce. We made the recipe twice. The first time it was okay, but the balls were a bit dry and because we served it with pasta there was too little sauce. So we adjusted the original recipe quite a bit and tried it again last weekend. Now we liked it a lot and we will be making it this way more often.

Fish Balls in Tomato Sauce: (serves 4, 3.5L Slow Cooker)
- 800 gr canned tomato cubes
- 250 gr mushrooms, sliced
- 450 gr white fish filets
- 15 gr bread crumbs
- some grated cheese
- 2 tbsp fresh chives
- dash of pepper
- spaghetti for serving

Pour the canned tomatoes in the slow cooker together with the mushrooms and a dash of pepper. Cook on high for 2 hours. Meanwhile cut the fish in large pieces and add this to a food processor. Pulse this. Add bread crumbs, some pepper, some grated cheese and the chives. Mix until the fish is fine, but not a mush.

Divide the mixture in 16 pieces and roll balls from them with wet hands. Save the balls on a plate in the fridge until they are needed. When there is about 30 minutes left from the 2 hours, get the fish out of the fridge so they can come to room temperature before adding them to the slow cooker. Otherwise the difference is too great between the cold balls and the hot sauce.

Add the balls to the sauce in a single layer and cook 1 more hours on high and 1 more on low until the fish is done. The whole recipe takes 4 hours to prepare. Cook the spaghetti about 20 minutes before the end in a pan. But you can also choose to serve with with baked potatoes for example.

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On a Budget: Greek Tomato Rice

This rice dish is so tasty that I am craving it while typing this post. We made it twice, once for dinner and last week for the bento. This is a dish that tastes good, warm or on room temperature. While for lunch this is for sure more expensive than just making a sandwich, it is a good budget option for your evening meal. The recipe I got from Flair at Home, but I adapted it to vegetarian.

Greek Tomato Rice: (serves 2, or 4 for lunch)

- 150 gr rice
- half a leek, in small pieces
- 330 ml tomato frito
- 250 ml vegetable broth
- 1 spring onion, in rings
- 2 bell peppers, in cubes
- feta
- 1 tsp paprika
- 1 tsp parsley
- pinch of pepper
- pinch of garlic powder

Heat some olive oil in a pan and bake the leek, spring onion and bell pepper for 3-4 minutes. Add rice, broth and frito, mix well. Let this simmer for about 20 minutes until the moist is vaporized. Stir occasionally. Add the spices about half way. Crumble some feta and stir through the dish before serving. 

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Bento for week 8

This was another school week for me, so this means I got a bento too. Nick got through his tgrial period and will be getting a half year contract at his new job. Both bento that are shown, are our Wednesday bento. Nick got 2 similar bento this week and on Thursday I just gave him a pre made salad to work, because I mostly am too tired to make him anything after I finish my school day.

In Nick's bento there is some leftover 3 cheese lasagne. I did mention before that Nick can microwave his food at work, so this makes my job really easy. In the tier there is also a spinach ricotta muffin from the freezer stash. In the other tier there is Greek tomato rice. We made this before but the recipe isn't blogged yet. I will do that next week. In the lid there is cookies and cream peppero.

In my bento there is Greek tomato rice too together with some cucumber slices. I also have low carb tuna burgers and the peppero sticks, but mine aren't on the picture. I always buy a cup of soup at school too. They are freshly made and the mushroom soup is one of my favorites.

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FoodBlogSwap: Turkish Spinach Cake

It is almost the end of the month and that means it is time for another FoodBlogSwap! This time I got to cook from Gewoon Lekker Koken. Or cook, I should say bake. Because Nick and I choose to make the Turkish Spinach cake. We love the Turkish kitchen and this is something that we never made before. It seemed interesting too. I figured it would be something like carrot cake. By that I mean that the carrots are in there but you can't taste them. It turned out I was right. Nick did most of the work on this cake. We changed it around a bit too, because Nick doesn't like the cherry pie topping, we left that out and we also put some cream cheese in the topping. I like that with carrot cake too and it seemed like a good idea. The cake did turn out great, so please don't be afraid to try it. Our cake looks a bit messy because we used the left over crumbles from cutting the cake on top and we always use parchment paper in our cake tin. It doesn't look that great, but it is very easy. You just lift the cake up with the paper and your cake tin stays clean.

Turkish Spinach Cake:
- 250 gr frozen spinach, defrosted
- 250 gr flour
- 200 gr sugar
- 150 gr sunflower oil
- 3 eggs
- 1 sachet (16 gr) baking powder
- 1 sachet (8 gr) vanilla sugar
- 1 tbsp lemon  juice
- pinch of salt

- 200 ml whipped cream
- about 50 gr cream cheese
- 1 sachet (8 gr) vanilla sugar
- 1 sachet (12 gr) klop-fix (makes your whipped cream more firm)

Pre heat the oven to 180 degrees. Line a sheet of parchment paper in a cake tin. Pout the oil with the spinach and puree this with a handheld blender. Mix eggs with both the sugars in a bowl until airy and creamy, about 10 minutes. Add the spinach with the lemon juice and mix through. Lastly sift the flour, baking powder and salt. Mix until the dry ingredients are incorporated. Bake in the oven for about 45 minutes. The cake is done when a toothpick comes out clean. Let the cake cool down.

For the filling we mix the whipped cream with vanilla sugar and the klop-fix. When the whipped cream is stiff, add the cream cheese and stir through. With a bread knife cut the top of the cake so it gets nice and even. Crumble those pieces and safe for later. Then cut the cake in half lengthwise. Spread the cake open and smear a layer of whipped cream on the cake with a big knife. Lay the top half back on the bottom half and spread the rest of the cream on top. Crumble the rest of the cake over it. Place the cake in the fridge to cool for at least 2 hours.

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Slow Cooker: Indian Dahl

Ever since I have my slow cooker I have been eating a lot of Indian dishes and curries. They are just so tasty to make in the slow cooker. I never made dahl before because I am not a huge fan of lentils, or so I thought, but it also seems that it is a bit of an acquired taste to me. In the slow cooker they turn out really soft. I still think they taste a bit boring on their own, so I try to mix them up with veggies and spices. This dish is based on a recipe from the book 500 slow cooker meals by Carol Beckerman. But I made some adjustments. btw, dahl isn't a curry but an Indian thick soup. The dish is very budget friendly, especially when you have the spices in your pantry already.

Indian Dahl: (serves 4-6, 3.5L Slow cooker)
- 2 tbsp sunflower oil
- 1 tbsp kerrie or curry powder
- 1 tbsp turmeric
- 1 tbsp paprika
- 1 tbsp comun
- 1 tsp chilli powder
- 1 tsp fresh ginger, chopped
- 4 cloves of garlic, chopped
- 400 gr dried red lentils, rinsed (other lentils work too, we used brown ones here)
- 1150 ml vegetable broth
- 350 ml coconut milk
- 1 potato, peeled and in small cubes
- 1 red bell pepper, cubed

Heat the oil in a skillet and bake garlic shortly together with the ginger, curry powder, turmeric, paprika, cumin and chilli powder until the scents from the herbs are freed. Then add this mixture together with all the other ingredients in the slow cooker. Put it on low for 6-7 hours. But start tasting it at about 5 hours. It depends on the kind of lentils that you use, how long it is taking.
You can serve the dahl with flatbread or chapatis but we served it with a dollop of Greek yoghurt. Omit the latter when vegan.

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