Nutella Pear Tart

The other day, I made an apple tart... it was delicious but I had an extra pie crust to use.... After 20 minutes of arguing with Charles and Anne-Claire to see what they wanted, we decided on Pear and Nutella Tart. I ended up bringing it to Livia's brunch and tried it there. While it was not my favourite, others liked it a lot. It is quite light, and chocolatey.. with a bit of an almond flavour. I am not going to be doing this tart every week, but once in a while why not! Anyhow, you should try it as everyone has different tastes!

Ingredients: 

• 1 pie crust
• 3 pears sliced
• 4 tbsp of nutella
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp of liquid cream
• 30g soft butter
• 55g of icing sugar
• 55g of almond powder
• 1 tsp of flour
• 1 tbsp of rum

1. Preheat oven at 200 degrees Celsius.
2. On your pie crust, spread out 3 tbsp of nutella. Spread evenly.
3. Add the pear slices in a decorative patterns. 
4. In a bowl, mix the icing sugar, the almond powder, the butter, the egg, the rum, the flour, the liquid cream and the last tbsp of nutella. Mix well. 
5. Pour this almond-nutella cream over the pears in the pie crust. Do not overflow. 
6. Put in the oven for 40 minutes. 
7. Let cool. (it is imperative that you cool it down, otherwise the almond-nutella mix won't hold perfectly when you cut the tart). 
8. Sprinkle some icing sugar on top for decoration if you wish. 
9. Enjoy!

* Take nice photos.... We were rushed so we couldn't make it look nice! Oops!

Awesome McAwesome Brownies!

I love brownies... but I find it is really hard to find a good brownie. I like them soft, and chewy.... [insert awkward joke Amina]. These brownies were delicious, so much in fact that my piglet of a flatmate Anne-Claire ate three in a row!! They're easy to whip up and so so yummy! Try them out!

Ingredients: 

• An 18x18 pan
• 135g chocolate
• 80g butter
• 165g sugar
• 2 eggs
• 130g flour
• 1/3 tsp baking powder
• 1/3 tsp salt
• 100g walnuts

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
2. Break chocolate in pieces, add butter and put the bowl in the microwave for 1min 20sec. 
3. In a bowl mix the eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, salt and the melted choc/butter mix. 
4. Add the chopped walnuts (you can definitely break them with your hands). 
5. Butter your pan and put the brownie mix in the pan, smooth out evenly. 
6. Bake for 30 minutes. 
7. Enjoy! 

* You could add pecans or choc chips!

Gluten and Dairy Free Chocolate Cookies

Yesterday as it was snowing, I did a lot of snooping around on other blogs and found this recipe. I decided to try it since it seemed super easy! I was deliciously surprised by the result, I find these cookies really yummy, simple and quite 'cute'. Anne-Claire thought they were ugly, but I think they look like real cookies! They're soft in the inside, and crisp on the outside! Definitely a must try - super easy to make!

Ingredients: 

• 1 cup of walnuts
• 1/2 cup of chocolate chips
• 1/3 cup of cocoa powder
• 2 cups of icing sugar
• 2 egg whites
• 1 tbsp of vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven at 160 degrees Celsius. 
2. Combine all the ingredients together and mix. 
3. Scoop a tbsp of mix on a baking sheet. Leave space between the cookies. 
4. Bake for 12-15 minutes. 
5. Enjoy!

I definitely couldn't get my hands on enough!

* You could substitute the nuts for only chocolate chips. 

* You could use white, milk or dark chocolate chips. 

Armenian Baklava

Spring has sprung, have been spring cleaning big time... its very exciting! I can't wait for summer! The whole month of march has been extremely warm in Montreal, we've been having above average temperatures (16 degrees celsius) which has been truly amazing, we can see the grass and trees will be blooming anytime now hopefully... Today was very strange because I woke up to find -2 outside, and snow falling.... it has been like this all day long! It has been nice to stay in all day and cook whilst watching the snow fall... very romantic... except i'm sharing this moment with Anne-Claire...! Anyhow, I made these scrumptious baklavas and followed the recipe of my grandma Mady (yay she made it onto the blog!). They are very easy to make and just soooo yummy!

Ingredients:

• 500g walnuts (broken into pieces/powdered form)
• Phyllo pastry
• 1 1/2 stick of butter
• 400g sugar
• 2 cups of water
• lemon juice

1. Preheat oven at 200 degrees. 
2. On a baking tray, set on sheet of phyllo pastry and cover with melted butter using a brush. 
3. Put a second sheet, and cover with butter again. 
4. Same with the third sheet. 
5. On the fourth sheet, put the walnuts. Cover with a new sheet. 
6. With the new sheet, repeat steps 1-4. 
7. Finish your baklava with 6 phyllo sheets, buttered in between. 
8. Butter the last sheet on the top for it to get this golden brown aspect. 
9. Cut into triangles or squares before cooking. 
10. Put in the oven for about 45 minutes. 
11. In a pan, mix the water, sugar and a few drops of lemon to get sugar syrup. 
12. Once you have removed the baklava from the oven, pour the syrup all over. 
13. Let cool. 
14. Enjoy!

* You could try putting in pistachios, raisins or cinnamon. I have even tried maple syrup baklava! Up to you!

Lemon Upside Down Cake

OOOh boy was this a fun ride. I found this recipe as i was snooping around photograzing... I think the pictures are gorgeous and I want to ask the blogger how the hell did she managed to make it look so good? Mine turned out like a dead-diseased cake... albeit delicious it looks awful! It was fun to make, and I was happy to use lemon slices for once instead of using just the juice or zest! The girls definitely enjoyed it, hopefully you have better luck than me when you make it! In the pictures, my lemon slices look like tomatoes... weird.

Ingredients:

• 3 lemons
• 1 1/2 stick of butter
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 1/2 cup flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• pinch of salt
• vanilla sugar (1 pack =10g)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup of milk

1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celsius
2. Combine the flour, the salt and the baking powder and mix. 
3. In another bowl, beat half of the butter with the white sugar until you get a fluffy mix. Add some lemon zest. Beat in the eggs one at a time. 
4. Add half of the powder mix to the egg mix and beat. Add the milk and the rest of the flour. Beat until well blended. Set aside. 
5. Cut thin slices of lemon. 
6. In a pan bring to a boil half of the butter and the brown sugar. Once it starts bubbling, add the lemon slices (check that seeds are removed). 
7. Set the slices/sugar mixture at the bottom of a baking pan, in a decorative pattern and cover with the cake mix covering evenly. 
8. Bake for about 35 minutes or until golden. 
9. Remove from oven and invert the cake from the pan to a plate. 
10. Serve and Enjoy!

*Would be interesting to try with blood oranges, or grapefruit!

The Pick Me Up Tiramisu

I have not had a minute to myself to update this blog this week, and what a shame because all week I had the tiramisu recipe to show you! I made this scrumptious tiramisu last week for the Enfants du Mekong meeting, it was a huge success. It is very easy to make and totally worth it! Good luck!

Ingredients:

• 3 egg yolks
• 100g sugar
• 200g mascarpone
• 30cl cooking cream
• 50cl cold coffee
• 36 lady fingers
• 3 tbsp of cocoa powder

1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar to get a white-ish mixture. 
2. Add the mascarpone and the cooking cream and mix further. 
3. Prepare the coffee and put it in a bowl large enough so you can dip the lady fingers. 
4. Soak the lady fingers in the coffee, watch out they may break.
5. In a pan, put one layer of lady fingers, one layer of the mascarpone mix then add another one layer of lady fingers + mascarpone and powder the top with cocoa powder. 
6. Put in the fridge for about 4-5 hours. 
7. Enjoy!

* You can make small and big bowl to impress your guests. 

* You can add nutella to your mascarpone mix to have an all chocolate yummy tiramisu. 

* Don't soak the biscuits too much!

Churros Si Senor!

I made churros!! It feels like such an accomplishment, I never thought it would be possible to make churros! I mean its churros!! It's what you eat at the beach, so making it in my kitchen was quite ironic. They didn't turn out as easy to make as I had hoped! Making the dough was very straightforward but when came the actual frying... oh boy. I do not have a deep fryer so I used a pan and boiled the oil. To make the design on the churros I used a frosting kit and a piping bag - only problem was that the tip kept on falling off and i was so scared it would fall off in the boiling oil! Plastic and boiling oil together = my life is over. Anyhow you should definitely try them, they're yummy! They were gone so fast!! I used the recipe found here and changed it a bit.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup of water
• 1/2 cup of milk
• 110 g of butter
• 1 tbsp of sugar
• pinch of salt
• 150g of flour
• 3 eggs
• frying oil (the recipe calls for canola oil)
• sugar for coating

1. In a pan, bring to a boil the water, milk, butter, sugar and salt. Mix. Once boiling, take off heat.
2. Add the flour in one go and mix thoroughly until you get a nice dough consistency. 
3. Add the eggs one by one and mix. 
4. Put the mix in a piping bag. 
5. Boil your oil. 
6. Pipe out some churros and let boil for about 2-3 minutes or until golden brown. 
7. Remove from oil and coat with sugar.
8. Enjoy!

* If you had some leftover dough, put it in the freezer for another time. 

* This is the same dough as the pate a choux and you can thus make eclairs if you have leftover dough!

Late Epiphany Galette des Rois

Yes... I know I am like 2 months late. Epiphany was in january but I didn't find the dough I needed anywhere else than the Patisserie Belge on Avenue du Parc and they were out of dough for such a long time. Thankfully, Charles bought me some the other day and thus I decided to follow his mother's recipe and make a galette for our Enfants du Mekong meeting. I didn't make the puff pastry myself, simply because it is such a long process and patisserie bought puff pastry is just delicious! My galette turned out really good, the frangipane could have been a bit more consistent but overall it was a great galette!! The design kind of went a bit crazy whilst cooking so my galette turned out a bit wonky! A definite must try! Don't wait until next january!

Creme Patissiere Ingredients:

• 2 egg yolks
• 60g of sugar
• 30g flour
• 25cl of milk
• 1/2 tsp of vanilla essence

1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar. 
2. Add the flour until you get a nice texture.
3. Boil the milk and add the vanilla essence. 
4. Remove from heat and pour on the other mix. 
5. Mix thoroughly and put the entire thing back in a pan and boil. Never stop mixing! 
6. Remove from heat. 
7. Set aside to cool. 

Almond Creme Ingredients:

• 150g of soft butter
• 120g of sugar
• 150g of almond powder
• 2 eggs
• 2 tbsp of rum
• 1/2 tsp of lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp of vanilla essence
• 1/2 tsp of almond essence

1. Mix the butter with the sugar.
2. Add the almond powder, the eggs, the rum, the lemon, the vanilla extract and the almond extract and mix thoroughly. 
3. Now combine both the almond creme and the creme patissiere together and you get your frangipane which will fill the galette!

Galette Ingredients:

• Frangipane mix as shown above
• 2 discs of puff pastry (same size) 
• 1 egg

1. Put one disc on wax paper and fill with the frangipane. Do not fill too close to the sides (leave about 3cm space)
2. Wet the sides so the other disc can stick to the first one. 
3. Cover the first disc with the other disc and press firmly on the sides so no frangipane comes out!
4. With a fork, lightly score the top of the galette in a decorative manner. 
5. Cover with the egg wash (beat the egg). 
6. Put a small hole in the middle so the 'steam' can come out during cooking. 
7. Decorate your galette with a knife and make nice motifs. 
8. Let rest for an hour. 
9. Preheat oven to 180 degrees celsius. 
10. Bake for 25 minutes. 
11. Enjoy!

* Can be eaten warm or cold

Biscuits Roses de Reims A.K.A Pink Biscuits

I love these, so so so so much. It was such a treat at home getting these after school... my mom now even makes a cake with them. Delicious. So naturally, when i stumbled upon the recipe online I HAD to make them. Surprisingly, these were good too, obviously not as good as the real thing, but they were somewhat of a treat :) They are so easy and straightforward to make its unbelievable, moreover their colour just makes you want to eat more!

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 100g of homemade vanilla sugar / 90g of caster sugar and 10g of store bought vanilla sugar
• 90g of flour
• 45g of cornstarch
• 10g of baking powder
• red colouring
• icing sugar for decoration

1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks and the sugar and beat for 5 minutes. 
2. Add one egg white and beat for another 2 minutes. 
3. Add the red food colouring and the other egg white and beat for 3 minutes. 
4. Sift the flour, cornstarch and the baking powder together and add to the mix. 
5. Beat slowly. 
6. Pipe the mix on wax paper and let crust for about 20 minutes. 
7. Preheat the oven in the mean time at 180 degrees celsius. 
8. Bake for 12 minutes. 
9. Take out from the oven and decorate with icing sugar.
10. Enjoy!

* You can make many shapes with these biscuits!

* You could always substitute red colouring for blue one!