Nut Cake to go nuts for!

Pretty :3

For New Years Eve, my mum made a hazelnut cake! This is considered an all time classic in our household for being delicious, simple, and yeah just delicious. If you are allergic to nuts, then yes, this is definitely a recipe to avoid… You can also replace hazelnuts with walnuts (also yumz). Anyways, here is the recipe as my mum makes it!

Ingredients:

• 100g of butter
• 200g of sugar
• 3 eggs
• 100g of hazelnuts (crushed)
• 80g of flour

Preparation:

1. Pre-heat the oven at 200C. 
2. Butter the mold and add some flour so the cake won't stick. 
3. Melt the butter, and add the sugar. Mix well.
4. Add the eggs one by one while mixing, and add the crushed hazelnuts and the flour. Mix until smooth.
5. Add the mixture into the bowl and bake it for 30min.

When ready, you can add a think layer of nutella and other decorations (ie. chocolate sprinkles). You can also serve with creme anglaise like we did. For New Years, my mum also added some chocolate chips/sprinkles inside!

Enjoy! :)

Recette en Francais:

Ingredients:

• 100 g de beurre
• 200 g de sucre en poudre
• 3 oeufs
• 100g de noisettes broyes 
• 80 g de farine

Preparation:

1. Faire fondre le beurre, puis dans un saladier, le travailler avec le sucre.
2. Ajouter les oeufs un a un en brassant, puis verser les noisettes et enfin la farine. Le melange doit former une pate homogene.
3. Verser le tout dans un moule a manque beurre et farine. Enfourner a 200C (th. 6/7) pendant 30min. 

You can see the chocolate chips on the side ><

Receta en Español: Torta de avellanas

Ingredientes:

• 100g de manteca
• 100g de azúcar
• 3 huevos
• 100g de avellanas molidas
• 80g de harina

Preparación: 

1. Ablandar la manteca y agregar el azúcar. Mezclar bien. 
2. Agregar los huevos uno por uno mezclando. Después, agregar las avellanas y la harina. Batir todo hasta que la mezcla sea homogénea. 
3. Meter el todo en el molde (el molde tiene un poco de manteca y harina para que la torta no se pegue) y al horno durante 30min a 200C!

Se puede agregar chispas de chocolate y/o nutella! 

A French Christmas

I wanted to make a post on what is typically munched in a French Christmas. Despite being French-Japanese, for christmas my parents always tried to keep it European, if not French. This is probably because the ingredients are obviously easier to find and also because Christmas is more of a European tradition :P.

Anyways, so almost every year we start with…. FOIE GRAS. If you've never tried it then you definitely should. It's goose liver that is extra fat (foie gras literally means fatty liver). It has become illegal in some parts of the US but we won't go into the debate of whether this is right or not. Foie gras is part of the French culture and I am definitely not giving that up. Imagine it is like pate but a billion times more delicious. And expensive. Which is why you only eat it on special occasion. The best is to eat it with toast or toasted brioche (my fav *drool all over keyboard as I write this*). I know you can also make foie gras yourself but since I don't know how, I will only talk about the already prepared ones.

 You drink sweet wine called sauterne, it really goes perfectly with foie gras!

Christmas is also associated to sea food and French people eat a lot of oysters, langoustines (scampi in English), etc. We don't usually have this at home since we don't live in France. 

Next, poultry is served with some stuffing (a mash of turkey, raisins, chestnut and some spices).

Instead of poultry you can also have boudin blanc with truffles in it (alleged truffles, the black dots on the little sausage are supposed to be the infamous truffles. Could also be pepper. Who knows :P). I prefer this boudin more (It's not made of blood and milk and some bread is also added) as it feels lighter than the normal one. Here we have it accompanied with rosti (it is originally swiss and it consists of potato and it's super yummy :P)

Then you ALWAYS finish a french meal with a plate of CHEEEESE. This is my favorite part (not only am I a nomster but also a cheese addict T.T). So here are a few of the cheeses we had for Christmas… What to drink with cheese? Good red wine, of course. Usually, cheese comes accompanied with a nice refreshing salad.

Then you finish your dinner with a buche de noel, which is the typical desert you have for christmas. It looks like a log! Only have a picture from a few years ago… We don't always eat this since it's pretty heavy (lots of cream and what not) even if my mum's is the light version of it! How to end your night? Drink some champagne! Yey!

Hope you have a better idea of what French people eat for Christmas. What do you have in your country? :) 

Nutella Cake

For this year's Christmas cake we decided to make something new: Nutella cake. I think everyone is a big fan of nutella and most people would probably enjoy this recipe. As a baking noob, this recipe was still quite easy to make (even for me). I found the recipe on a French site and the link in French can be found at the end of this post! :)

Ingredients for 4 nomsters

• 6 spoons of Nutella
• 150g of flour
• 120g of sugar
• 1 yoghurt (plain yoghurt)
• 3 eggs
• Half a pack of baking soda

Preparation

1. Pre-heat your oven at 180C and butter your mold and cover it with flour so the cake doesn't stick. 
2. In a big bowl, mix the eggs with the sugar (you can use an electric mixer for this). Add the yoghurt, melted butter and mix well. Once it becomes smooth, add the flour and baking soda while mixing. 
3. Finally, add the Nutella. It didn't say in the recipe but we used the electric mixer (Nutella is quite thick so it was quite a hassle to mix. It was just faster!). 
4. Once the Nutella is incorporated, add it to mold and bake it for 30 min! 

Yeeey, so easy! Ok so this cake was pretty good. One minus point, it did not taste like Nutella as much as I thought... A little disappointed with this but it was very soft and spongy. It was also nice that it wasn't too sweet. If you add more Nutella it might be a little too intense... But yes, I think you should definitely try this out! We ate it with creme anglaise (vanilla flavoured *recipe coming soon*) and it was absolutely delicious! 

Nutella cake with creme anglaise

We made it Christmassy by adding powdered sugar (kind of like snow hehe) and some little decorations as you can see on the photo :)

Can you tell how spongy it is? :)

Recette en Francais --> http://gateau.com/gateau-au-nutella-facile.htm

Enjoy!

Xmas chocolate chip cookies!

Fresh out of the oven :3

Ok so this recipe is not reaaally a christmas recipe but more that christmas is a perfect reason to make some nice chocolate chip cookies :D
I found it on a french cooking site and it was super easy (although as a huge baking noob I did make a mistake the first time I baked them -____-) and fast to make... And it was delicious! What I liked about this recipe is that it was not too sweet or too greasy. I will definitely make them again!

So here is the translated recipe and the original one in French at the end :)

Ingredients:

• a bag of chocolate chips (I used dark chocolate ones)
• 100g of melted butter
• 1 bag of vanilla sugar
• 1/2 bag of baking soda
• 2 eggs
• 100g of brown sugar
• a pinch of salt
• 250g of flour

Preparation:

1. Pre-heat the oven at 200 C. Prepare a tray with some baking paper on it.
2. In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, brown sugar, vanilla sugar and a pinch of salt. 
3. In another bowl, mix the eggs and the butter. In the original recipe it said softened butter but I completely melted it in the microwave and it was totally fine (it didn't make the cookies greasier as I had read on other sites). When I mixed the room temperature butter and egg, my butter was actually not soft enough and it made nasty clumps and had to throw it away... Anyways, best to use completely melted butter to be safe and lightly mix with a electric mixer! 
4. When it's mixed, add the egg-butter mixture and the chocolate chips (I put an entire bag of them :P) to the flour one. Mix well. You will obtain a pretty thick dough.
5. Use 2 spoons to make little balls of more or less 5 cm of diameter and place them on the tray with baking paper. Once you place it, I would recommend flattening the dough a bit (the first time I made them, they were very yummy but maybe a little too thick. As you can see on the pictures they were FAT cookies. Not for amateur cookie nomsters). Make sure there's enough space between each cookie! 
6. Place them in the oven for 9 min (I actually left them in a little longer, around 12 min but it depends on your oven). When they are done, they will be super soft inside :3 Make sure to keep them in a Tupperware if you like soft spongy cookies (like me) or leave them in open air for drier ones! 

Overall, this recipe was super easy and the outcome was amazing! It's perfect for a little snack with your family during this time of the year or to leave them next to the xmas tree with a glass of milk for Santa! :D I also gave some to my dad as an afternoon snack at work as it can be easily be put into a box or even wrap it with aluminium foil. 

Recette en Francais ici! http://gateau.com/cookies-facile-et-rapide.htm