Wednesday Waffles

Waffles slathered in homemade apple sauce with dots of raspberry jam...yum!

Wednesday Morning

Wednesdays this semester are wonderful. It's the only day in the week that the alarm doesn't go off at some ungodly hour...we don't have class till the afternoon, and boy, do we love it!  This morning, Karl and I woke up and stumbled out of bed to the intoxicating smell of: waffles! My roommate Sophie had woken up earlier and there she was, all sleepy and pajama-clad, spooning batter into our trusty old waffle iron and producing these disks of bliss (okay, I may be exaggerating now, when when they're piling up and you're hungry, boy, do those puppies look good!) 
  

Homemade Apple Sauce

She and Pete (her BF, Hong Kong born, Florida raised) had even decked the table, including the homemade apple sauce and her mom's delicious homemade jams. Something about a lit candle at breakfast makes the occasion feel so festive! 

Needless to say, everything was delicious. We had just made some apple sauce the day before out of some no-longer-perfect apples we had lying around. There's no recipe for this: just peel and core and cover in some water. Boil until they're soft and mash mash mash. We don't add sugar (or cinnamon, or cloves, or anything) and it tastes perfect just the way it is!

This is our recipe for waffles:

Ingredients
100 g butter, softened (a little less than half a cup)
60g sugar (that's 1/3 cup or 4 Tablespoons)
300g flour (2 1/2 cups)
3 eggs
375ml milk (1 1/2 cup)
1 teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt
a dash of vanilla

Instructions
Beat the butter with sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time. Combine flour, baking soda, and salt and alternate adding milk and flour mixture to the batter, mix until smoothly combined.  Easy peasy!

Spoon a ladle-ful of batter into a pre-greased waffle iron and wait impatiently until each waffle turns golden brown. Yum!

Leftover "ich liebe dich" (I love you) cupcake!

And for dessert, the last of the valentine's day cupcakes (they froze surprisingly well!) Thank you, Karl, for dreaming up such a cute and long-lasting surprise.

Look up at the Sky!

-Zanna

PS. The last time we had waffles 

PPS. Who's who? The Boyfriend/Roommate situation explained.

Five Favorites: Procrastination

birthday flowers, brightening up my room!

Well, it's exam time again here at our friendly neighborhood medical school, and as always, I am finding time to do everything besides study. That's because I am one of the world's best procrastinators. I eventually sit down and get to it, obviously, because long hours in the library with a textbook are the only path through medical school. But before I pull myself together, I'm fabulous at doing just about anything else.  

Here are some of my favorite ways to push off studying.  I highly recommend them for anyone looking to create an inefficient and frustrating exam-prep experience!

1. Clean room, organize shelves, rearrange desk ect. This is particularity great if you want the feeling of being productive while actually avoiding the task at hand.

2. Spend time researching some rare pediatric mutation in glorious detail instead of focusing on the relevant material. If it's a topic I find interesting, an hour flies by. If it's boring, I look up after an eternity and twelve minutes have passed.

3. Do laundry.  Fold each piece in lovingly instead of just shoving them in the closet like I usually do.  Pinking off lint is also time consuming.

4. Discuss the pros and cons of health care reform in excruciating detail. Always great if you have med school friends who are attempting to avoid studying with as much dedication as you are.

5. Bake cookies! I tried these ones, recommended by Naomi from Love Taza. We brought a bunch to the library with us and an empty tupperware back. Way too delicious!
 

chocolate chip cookies: keeping blood sugar and spirits up since 1938!

Other common pastimes for when I should really be studying include writing thank you notes for birthday gifts, bickering unnecessarily with Karl, spending a lot of time deciding what to make for dinner, leafing through recipe books, wondering why the fridge is empty, and using exam stress as an excuse not to go grocery shopping. I'm a procrastination champ!

Look up at the Sky!

-Zanna

PS. Five Favorite Birthday Things, Ways to Save, Romantic Movies, Parlour Games, and Vacation Destinations! 

PPS. Last semester's exam week here!

Super Quick and Easy (Microwaveable) Brownies

Ladies and Gentlemen, a confession. 

I am an absolute and unabashed chocoholic. The darker, the better, and I can never get enough. Today I'm sharing with you one of my favorite last-minute-must-get-out-the-door recipes. Its for those days you arrive home sweaty and frantic twenty minutes before a dinner you've been invited to...thirty minutes away. This is great for potlucks, hostess gifts, spontaneous gatherings and late night meltdowns.  I first got this recipe from my best friend Clara, a prodigious baker, who used it as a bakesale contribution in high school whenever she overslept.  Its incredibly easy to put together (in one bowl), uses ingredients we always have around the house, and best of all, it's practically fool-proof. Seriously. Even Karl made it (while I yelled instructions from the shower while simultaneously brushing my teeth and writing a card).

 
And did I mention you can bake it in an oven or a microwave? And that the later takes all of six minutes? Yeah. It's awesome. They also happen to taste pretty darn good.

Here's Clara's recipe for Super Quick and Easy
(Microwaveable) Brownies:

Ingredients

115 grams butter (1/2) cup
1 cup sugar 
2 eggs
200 gram dark chocolate, chopped
1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup cocoa
1 /2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda


Instructions

If you have a pan or pot that is oven/microwave proof, great.  You'll be able to mix and bake this all in one go. If not, grab any old pan/pot and transfer your batter before you bake.

Melt butter on the stove. Turn heat to low and add sugar. MIX WELL about three or four minutes with a fork until mixture is fully emulsified. This is the only really important step. The batter will become thicker and paler and the sugar grains should all disappear. If you proceed too quickly, the brownies won't turn solid and will taste fatty.
 

1. Melt butter, 2. Add sugar, 3. Mix extensively until thick and pale, 4. Add eggs

Emulsified butter and sugar? Good. Now take off the heat and add half the chocolate, mixing until melted and integrated. Remember, the better the quality of the chocolate used, the better the brownies taste! A dash of coffee powder will sometimes help compensate for lower quality chocolate. When mixture is brown, add  eggs and and mix till combined. Add all the rest of the ingredients in one go.

For microwave:

Microwave your batter on high for one minute. Then, add the rest of the chopped chocolate and mix with a fork. Return to microwave for five minutes. If the brownies are unfinished, keep microwaving in 1 minute intervals till they are done. My microwave usually needs six minutes total to finish the job.

For oven:

Add the rest of the chopped chocolate and bake brownies in oven at 190°C (375°F) for twenty minutes. Voila!


Let brownies cool and enjoy! They're even better the next day....

Look up at the Sky!

-Zanna

PS. Tragically, no pictures of the finished product...it got eaten too fast!

PPS. Try adding some chopped nuts sprinkled on top, its even more delicious.

Coconut and Dark Chocolate Mockaroons

Today, an indulgence. A recipe that is simple and decadent and just plain friggin' awesome. We tend to make these cookies around Christmastime, when the cookie-baking-spirit really abounds, but also about three or four times during the rest of the year just for the hell of it (see above, re: awesome).  Warning-- if you're not a coconut fan, these are not for you. If you're not a chocolate fan, go jump in a lake.  Okay, well, that may just be my personal opinion. I have actually been told by several self-professed non-chocaholics  (incomprehensible members of the human race) that they quite like these cookies because they're not that chocolate-y and have an interesting mix of tastes.  

Coconut "Mockaroons" Dipped in Dark Chocolate
adapted from German baking magazine Plätzchen a long long time ago

Makes ca. 30

Ingredients
150g shredded coconut
200g sugar
the zest of half a lemon, must be fresh, recommend organic
4 egg whites
30g flour
dark chocolate, melted, for dunking
optional but helpful: edible wafers (german: backoblaten) 

Instructions
Preheat oven to 160°C (320°F). Combine shredded coconut, sugar, and fresh lemon zest in a bowl suspended over boiling water for ten minutes, mixing gently with a spoon.  Remove from heat and let cool. Add flour and mix until just combined. Scoop the dough with two small spoons to create mounds about 3 cm (1 inch) in diameter. If you have edible wafers, use them as a substrate for the dough; if not, you may need to add a little flour to help them hold, but only a little. Bake for 15 minutes until barely brown. Melt chocolate (I like to use really dark chocolate, ie. 75-85% if that's not to your taste, anything above 60% does fine too). When 'Mockaroons' have cooled, dunk each about half way into the chocolate. Let the coating cool and harden on a baking tray.Voila, enjoy!

I have kept these in cookie cans and Tupperware outside the fridge for up to a month and they still tasted great! Unfortunately I have no experience trying to freeze either the finished product or the dough, so no advice there.

Look up at the Sky!

--Zanna