#02 Ten random tips for baking and cooking..

01: Like I said in my first post, make sure that your hands are nice and cold when you plan to knead dough, otherwise it will stick to you hands like glue. By making your hands cold with some icecubes, it should stick less!

02: When baking minced meat (gehakt), you don't need to use any forms of butter or oil. It is actually already fat enough to bake itself. Less fattening too!

03: After you've cooked rice and you want to pour the water out, instead of using a strainer (vergiet) and getting rice all over your kitchen, just put a fork between the pot and the lid, just slide it in between and hold the lid as tightly to the pot with oven mitts and start pouring the water out! Less dishes to wash as well :D.

04: When you have french bread you have to heat up or finish baking (afbakbrood :D), then you should slightly wetten both sides with some water. It gives a better, less crunchy result.

05: Instead of peeling your potatoes, you can just clean them with a soft brush or sponge. Just rub the dirt off, and cook and bake them. It's said that eating potatoes with their skin on is healthier.

06: Talking about potatoes! When you cook them for 15-20 minutes (Depending on what potato you have), it will take less time for you to bake them afterwards.

07: By putting some salt or a small lump of butter in the water in which you are cooking you can prevent it from boiling over when it seems to be about to happen...

08: When cooking pasta, spaghetti, rice and etcetera, add some bouillon/broth to give it some extra flavour. Seriously, when you put enough of that **** in there, you will eat that spaghetti DRY.

09: Try to match the times you need to cook and bake things. For example, you need your rice to cook 10 to 12 minutes, but the meat you baught is done in 4 minutes, while the veggies need almost 20 minutes (like corn!). It doesn't need to be on the dot, just make sure that one thing isn't cooling down for 10 minutes, while the other is still hot but underdone.

10: Always read a new recipe through and through and through... so that you aren't overtaken by the fact that you have to prepare a meal for 4 other people within one hour and you overlooked the fact that it takes 3 hours to prepare 8D! Or that the cake you want to make is made for a 20cm spring cake tin, which you don't have. (That last one happened to me, but luckily I was prepared, as I started with the cake one day earlier!)

-- So anyone else got tips or hints for in the kitchen :D ?--

#01 Christmas Cookies

Okay so these were the cookies I made for christmas last year, 2010. I made them with my mother's recipe, and basically every ingredient I had for decoration!

I have two recipes, one for 'basic' cookies, and one for shortbread (zandkoekje for the dutch amongst you). For these I used the latter one. However, these recipes are interchangable; meaning that you can put an egg in the shortbread recipe if you want ;).


Shortbread (according to my mother):

Ingredients
200 gram flour
100 gram sugar
150 gram butter (margarine)
a pinch of salt

Preparation
♥ Preheat the oven to 160 degrees (C) and prepare a baking sheet by putting some baking paper on it.
♥ Put the butter in a large bowl, and cut it as small as possible.
♥ Sieve the flour and add it to the butter, followed by the rest of the ingredients.
♥ Now start mixing! Alas, not with your mixer, but with your hands. So make sure you have something like a fork in your vicinity with which you can pluck the pieces of your hands. One trick my mother taught me, was to rub an icecube along your hands, to make them as cold as possible. That way you hands match the temperature of the butter a bit better, and it should stick less.
♥ When it is one big hump of dough (be patient!) you put it on a surface that is smooth and covered with a thin layer of flour (against sticking).
♥ Roll it out and start attacking it with all your ideas and shapes.
♥ When you have put them on the baking paper, and your oven is preheated, you put them in, and bake them for 15 minutes at 160 degrees.

Now, I know that the cookies will differ in outcome due to the ridiculous differences between ovens, so when your oven says they are done, DON'T BELIEVE IT. You poke the cookies with a toothpick or cocktail stick, etcetera (satéprikker for the dutch...), and if it is not covered with either sticky dough, AND the cookie feels rather hard, they are done. Otherwise just add a few minutes, and stay with the cookies.

Keep in mind that these cookies will harden a bit more when they are put out to cool down!...

Additions
♥ You can put some cocoa powder in the dough, or even just half the dough, so you can experiment with the two colours of dough you have. This way you can make "chess-cookies".

♥ For the topping and decorations you need a LOT of powdered sugar, and only a little water (or milk). You can buy food colours at your local supermarket. (At the toko for the dutch.) Just like sprinkles.

♥ You can also experiment with jam and marmelade! Before actually baking, you make two equally sized round cookies, and cut a smaller circle out of one of them,in the middle. Then you put some jam on the round cookie without the cut-out, in the middle, and put the other circle -without the cut-out- ontop of it! Bake it!