alice’s posterous

Yesterday night was St Martin's day in Germany and I had to bring some food to my children's kindergarten (or nursery). I had a bar of chocolate in my cupboard so decided to bake an easy peasy chocolate cake! I found the recipe on this fantastic French website called Marmiton where people share their recipes. Each recipe comes with a rating and comments from other people who have tried it as well as a picture (but not for every recipe).

For the chocolate fondant, all you need to do is to melt 100g butter and 200g chocolate in the microwave. When melted, add 5 egg yolks.

Add 100g caster sugar and 4 tbsp of white flour and mix well. Then beat the 5 egg whites until stiff and incorporate them to the mixture. My son did this very carefully!

Pour the mixture in a butter greased cake pan and put it in the oven at 180 degres for about 20 minutes (depending if you want the cake to be firm or gooey!). My children loved eating the leftovers of the chocolate mixture ;)

Unfortunatly, I don't have any pictures of the final cake because I completely forgot to take one! But here is the picture from Marmiton:

http://www.marmiton.org/Recettes/Recette-Photo_fondant-au-chocolat_15025.aspx

And here is where we had the cake, around a nice fire :)

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In my previous post, I mentioned that pumpkins were in season (well, at least on the stalls on the market place next to where I live!). So I bought half of an enormous pumpkin and of course I had to carve it, cut it and peel it! I used part of it in small chunks for my creamy mushroomy chicken casserole. The easiest was for me to first scoop out the stringy insides and seeds, then cut the pumpkin into medium chunks and to peel each chunk. The outer skin is so though, I think it is too difficult to peel everything at once.

With the other part of half of my pumpkin (which results to a quarter of a pumpkin!), I decided to go for a pumpkin pie without the crust, so this basically became a pumpkin flan! It was a bit flat but still very tasty!

For the recipe, I more or less followed the guidelines from the video below, except I added a bit of ginger and vanilla essence and instead of the milk or cream, I added quark (cream cheese). You can find more details about the ingredients and how to carve a pumpkin here.

What about you? What is your favourite pumpkin recipe?

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I had a few ripe nectarines so I decided to bake this yummy cake for dessert.
I followed this recipe but took a shortcut: instead of melting the butter and the brown sugar in a pan, I greased a tin with the butter and sprinkled it with the brown sugar. I then layered the nectarines on top of it and finally added the batter. It was quicker and saved me on cleaning a pan!
My one year old son loved it and had a quarter of the cake! He loves his food so much!

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This dish is a typical Italian dish and is great to use aubergines
I found the recipe on the BBC Good Food website
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/10033/aubergine-tomato-and-parmesan-bake-melanzane-alla-

 The aubergine is in fact a fruit and is a good source of fibre and
folic acid. The colour of the skin is a result of the presence of
anthocyanins - compounds with antioxidant properties.
In Italy, aubergines are know as "la piccolo scarpetta" translated in
English as "the little shoe". They are also considered as the poor
man's meat because of their texture.
That is why I prepared this dish for my family as a main course and
everybody enjoyed it, including my 1 year old boy!
As they say in Italy, buon appetito tutti!

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