Russian Season

Rogaliki are small crescent rollls filled with jam, marmalade, Tvorog or even raisins. I think the most common filling for Rogaliki however, is jam/marmalade. I’m not sure we ever had them at home when I was a kid, but some of my friends’ mothers and grandmothers used to bake these very often. Rogaliki are very good with tea or coffee, and they are budget-friendly. It’s been my dream to have warm Rogaliki for breakfast for many years now, and today this dream came true.
I made the dough ahead and refrigerated it overnight. Chilled dough was very comfortable to roll and cut. The unsweetened dough made with sour cream and a pinch of baking soda is flaky and soft, even though my Rogaliki were tiny. I was in the mood for something petite and delicate, so these crescent rolls came out more like soft filled cookies. Of course this means you have less filling in the centre - just for flavour - and it takes you longer to make them. Classical Rogaliki should be larger in size, with more filling inside; the original recipe yields 3 times fewer rolls than I made.
At first I was thinking of filling them with dark, rich apricot jam made by Stano’s Mom, but then I remembered about three little jars of a wonderful chocolate applesauce she gave to us, and used it instead. I must ask Stano’s Mom for the recipe when we are in Slovakia in summer; chocolate applesauce is something amazing! First you taste the chocolate, then the juicy tartness of apples comes through; there’s a lot of surprise in it! It’s great on crepes, pancakes, ice-cream, whatever. As a filling for Rogaliki too. It smelt like a chocolate factory when the rolls were baking!

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Ivanka has turned 6 months old! It feels like it was a week ago that we brought her home from the hospital, and yet it feels like she’s been here always. The first two and the most exhausting months have simply disappeared from my memory. I know there have been sleepless nights and tears and exhaustion, but I don’t really remember all that.  As we all know, that’s how a woman’s brain is designed. It erases all negative memories connected to giving birth and raising a child.

Ivanka has changed so much from a tiny orange-skinned creature to a lively baby interested in everything. She wants to touch our books, drink our tea, taste our food, and of course her biggest dream is to play with the notebooks, mobile phones, and electric cords. The sports programme is prevailing at the moment: she is more interested in learning to crawl and trying to stand up than to learn pronouncing new sounds… what she does love though is to spit with a loud bubbling “ppp” sound - she can do that for hours… *sigh* hope she will make us happy with some more advanced sounds soon!

To celebrate Ivanka’s little anniversary, I made some cupcakes. Well, strictly speaking these were muffins topped with cream cheese and whipped cream and they were too large to be called cupcakes, but anyway. Cakes, mini cakes, large cupcakes, whatever - I am proud that I have managed to bake and decorate them:) They are not as neat and beautiful as what I’d like them to be, but I believe they’re quite okay for a busy Mom :) I’ve never been a perfectionist, after all.

I adapted the recipe for lemon muffins from here and topped them with cream cheese that I whipped with some maple syrup. I had baked these muffins before and I loved how well buttermilk and lemon paired, not to mention how fluffy the batter was thanks to the combination of acid and baking soda. For the other sort of cakes, I used the same proportions, incorporating some whole wheat flour, frozen sour cherries, cinnamon, and nutmeg. For some reason I love the combination of nutmeg and cherries. These muffins/cupcakes came out more moist and dense, with a pleasant homely flavour of whole wheat. I decorated them with cherry-flavoured whipped cream and coloured sugar hearts… I hope Ivanka liked them even though she couldn’t eat them! :)

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I came up with the idea of these muffins when I wanted to bake something as a little “Thank you” gift for a friend of ours who is helping us with choosing and buying a car. Of course the idea of banana chocolate swirls is not new, but I didn’t really follow any recipe except for using my Chocolate Marmalade Candy Muffin recipe as a reference for making chocolate batter. I generously complemented the banana batter with vanilla in order to enhance the contrast between the moist, sweet banana swirls and the dark, rich and dense chocolate swirls. The batter was very quick and easy to make, although of course adding mashed banana and melting the margarine involves some extra bowls. I haven’t actually tried to just cream margarine instead of melting it - I suppose the batter would be  plastic enough with creamed margarine, so if you don’t want to wash an extra saucepan, try using creamed margarine at room temperature.

I was very content with the result and was happy to give these muffins away as a gift. I also gave a couple of them to my parents and left two for me and Stano to sample. I am trying to follow a healthier diet these days - five months of breastfeeding are making themselves felt and my skin and hair are starting to suffer (although I’m still getting off lightly I believe!).  One of my latest hits is an easy salad made with arugula, baby spinach, canned cannellini beans, walnuts, and blue cheese (yes, blue cheese again!). I’ve also bought a pack of organic wheat, so soon I’ll be able to jazz up my salads with wheat sprouts.

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I think I should experiment more with traditional Russian/Eastern European ingredients, trying to create my own, new recipes inspired by these foods. Millet is one of the foods that are very characteristic of old Russian cuisine. You would hardly see any modern recipes using millet, but it’s still widely available in local supermarkets even here in Latvia. A bowl of millet flakes boiled in sweetened milk is a great alternative to oatmeal for breakfast. But even though millet flakes are much faster to make, I still prefer millet grains. The warming and healthful millet meal is one of my favourite comfort foods. Millet is rich in vitamins В1, В2, В5, PP, and protein, and it’s gluten-free. It’s also very versatile, as it can be made both in sweet or savoury variations, or milled into flour and then used for baking flatbreads, for example.

One of the traditional ways to cook sweet millet in Russian cuisine is to cook it in boiling milk with pumpkin and then let it sit in the oven for some 15 minutes. Another option is to add prunes or raisins. Millet is normally cooked untoasted. As a savoury dish, millet can be cooked with lard and, optionally, fried onions, potatoes, green herbs, etc. This thick soup called Kulesh, served as the main course, belongs to traditional cuisines of Ukraine and Southern Russia.

I have never tried making Kulesh myself - I think I would have to play with the traditional recipes a little bit before this dish could be adapted to modern taste - anyway, this time I just wanted to make something new and unconventional. And I thought of baked millet bars on a shortbread crumb base. This was a total improvisation - I added a pinch of this and a dash of that - which eventually worked out pretty good. I mixed the millet meal with beaten egg to make it fluffier and added a layer of pear apricot jam between the shortbread and the millet. This jam layer turned out to be the most problematic part for two reasons: 1) the jam didn’t want to spread over the crumbs, 2) its flavour didn’t really come through in ready millet bars. So, if you ever decide to try this recipe, feel free to experiment with fruit/jam in it and suggest your ideas. I felt like millet bars without any fruitiness in them would be too chewy and plain. Maybe I should have incorporated bits of dried fruit in them. This recipe is totally open for improvements, I am just posting my Beta version - this is just a humble blog of mine, after all.

Oh, and a few words on the bars: they were very filling and there were a lot of them. I believe it would be wise to reduce all ingredients twice unless you have an Italian family. The bars should be eaten warm, best served with sour cream or creme fraiche. They have a rustic look and a nice, expressed texture formed by tender, plump millet grains. The shortbread base adds a  more sophisticated and finished look to these simple, homely baked bars. Read the rest of this entry »

Men are strange.
I can spend hours in the kitchen, whisking, mixing, melting, decorating, and when I finally enter the living-room bearing a plate of delicious cookies or cakes, Stano will murmur something like “yes of course, thank you, I’ll try them later, I’m not hungry now” - all this barely raising his eyes from the laptop, by the way. Aaaargh. Seems like he doesn’t share my cake love at all. Then one day, I grab a few sheets of frozen puff pastry, top them with sliced persimmons, brush them with whisked egg and throw the pastry into oven for 10 minutes. And he loves that! He asks me to make persimmon tarts again and again. I agree, they are nice and they can really come to a rescue when you need to bake something very quickly. Slices of persimmon look great on a crispy golden puff pastry, and cinnamon and nutmeg add a spicy twist to the mild sweet flavour of persimmon. But… Stano… what about all the other cakes I’ve baked?!

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“No more expensive foods until the end of the month”, I said to myself after receiving my January bills. I just wasn’t prepared to pay TWICE as much for things like central heating and water; seems like someone’s prosperity is improving in the new year, huh. Then I sat down and started to ponder what those expensive foods of our daily menu could be. I couldn’t think of any luxury foods I had recently bought - dried dates sounded like the most decadent of my latest purchases. It’s just that in a country with 22% VAT, everything is freaking expensive. So I headed off to the supermarket and bought potatoes, cornmeal, oatmeal, some butter (certainly we will have to cut down on that next month, haha) and other staples like milk and flour. If they raise VAT to 23%, we’ll have to rename our blog to “Creative Cooking with Potatoes” or something like that.

Anyway. If you like cornmeal as much as me, and even if you don’t have to think of 10 next ways to cook polenta because your family budget is staggering, you MUST make these cookies. I found them on a blog called 6 Bittersweets - it’s so beautiful and inspiring and fresh, I just can’t take my eyes off those stunning food photos. Xiaolu adapted the recipe from Bon Appetit, and I adapted it from her blog, substituting finely diced dried apricots for cranberries just because that’s what I had at hand. I think I’ll bake polenta cookies again for my birthday, and make both cranberry and apricot versions. They’re so yellow, crumbly, homeopathically salty, and noticeably lemony even though there’s just one teaspoon of fresh lemon zest in the dough. The smell of baking polenta cookies will make your home a million times cozier than the most expensive furniture would do. And with remaining egg whites, I made a small batch of tiny raspberry jam meringues, so we had enough sweets for all weekend.

Oh and it’s snowing again today, all day. How sweet :-/ I decided that no matter what,  we have our own micro spring in our home. I’m terrible at growing flowers, but luckily I have a good relationship with bulbous plants, so I’m going to buy more hyacinths and, hopefully, crocuses.

Lemon Polenta Cranberry Cookie recipe at 6Bittersweets