Chocolate lime cake

A chocolate cake without flour is so easy to make and so easy to eat that you can make it whenever friends are coming over at the last moment. It is a light and fluffy but moist and a bit chewy cake that smells and tastes like heaven. The lime gives this dark chocolate flavour some freshness.

Autumn has started. The air is cold, the leaves are turning red and falling off and it is getting dark so soon. I love this time of the year. We are all together in a warm and cosy house, with candles and fireplaces. We're looking forward to autum food. The smell, the spices, the warm desserts.. mmm!

This is a cake that you put in your oven, and your house will smell incredible. It will be difficult to stay away from it for the 35 minutes it needs. The crust on the outside, the warm, moist and little bit gooey cake inside..


Chocolate Lime Cake

Ingredients:
150 gr pure chocolate
150 gr soft, unsalted butter
6 eggs
250 gr caster sugar
100 gr ground almonds
4 tsp good quality cocoa powder
1 lime (zest and juice)
icing sugar to decorate

Directions:
Preheat your oven to 180 C.
Line your cake tin with parchment paper and grease the sides with some butter.
Melt your chocolate and butter au bain-marie (in a heat proof bowl above a pan with boiling water) en let this cool down for a few minutes.
Whisk together your eggs and sugar until they have increased in their size three times. Your mixture should be pale and foamy. (We advise you to do this with a mixer, otherwise you will have to whisk for a very long time..)
Now combine your ground almonds and cocoa powder. Add this to your egg and sugar mixture and mix this in with a spatula. Now fold in the cooled, melted chocolate. And then the last ingredient can be added: your lime zest and the juice can go in.
Pour this mixture in your cake tin and bake it for 35 minutes. Start checking your cake after 30 minutes. You don't wat this cake to be cooked trhough but still a bit gooey on the bottom. So take a toothpick and take your cake out of the oven if it comes out with only a few pieces of batter on it.
Let the cake cool for a few minutes and sprinkle some icing sugar on top befor serving. Ready to enjoy!

Pasta salad with olives and sundried tomatoes

The first time we tasted this recipe was almost 10 years ago. The mother of a friend of us made this all the time for her sons because they liked it so much. When we came around to play with them, we could enjoy that delicious pasta salad at their home. Soon enough our mother had asked for the recipe we were so enthousiastic about, and since then it has become a family recipe for us as well.

This pasta salad is so easy to make and it won't cost you more than 15 minutes if you do the steps all together. Children love it, and if they don't like the sundried tomatoes or olives, these ingredients could easily be omitted or subsituted by something else.

It is a ultimate recipe for busy evenings when you have to make a delicious but easy and fast meal for the family. But it is also very easy to make this for a big group or as a side dish when you have an extensive dinner.

We keep enjoying this recipe every time and we're sure that the tradition will continue furthermore.

Pasta salad with olives and sundried tomatoes.

Yield: 20 persons (as a side dish)

Ingredients:

750 gr pasta

300 gr sundried tomatoes (with oil)

120 gr black olives

5 eggs

250 gr grated cheese

3 little red onions

Directions:

Bring your water for the pasta and your water for the eggs to a boil.

When the water boils, cook your pasta al dente and boil the eggs for about 6 minutes. You want them to be a bit undercooked so that your eggyolks will combine everything.

In the meantime, cut your onions into very small pieces, pitted your olives and cut these into small rings and slice up your sundried tomatoes into small strips.

Now combine into a big bowl your onions, olives, sundried tomatoes and the oil from your sundried tomatoes. Add to this your grated cheese and mix well. When your pasta is done, add those straight from the pan (when they are still very warm) into your bowl. Mix well so that everything combines and your cheese can melt. The last step is to slice your eggs and add these. By doing this as a last step, the eggyolks can still combine everything and give it a glaze but stay intact as well.

Enjoy!

Sweet strawberry vanilla jam

We know that the strawberry season actually is over by now, but we can not withhold you from this recipe. We made it a few months ago, when there were strawberries in abundance in our garden. Now that we have eaten our last jar, we were brought back to reality and realised that we still had this recipe to post! So here it is, our sweet strawberry vanilla jam!

There were so many bruised strawberries this year which we couldn't use on top of a cake or on our bread (what we like so much!) and got overripe after a while because we didn't use them. But the solution for these discarded strawberries is to make a lovely jam of them. The overripeness gives the jam something special: it will become a strong and rich flavour.

So remember that when you have some - a little bit overripe -  strawberries left over, it is the perfect time to make some jam!

Strawberry Vanilla Jam
yield: 3 jars

Ingredients:
1,5 kg little strawberries, chopped roughly
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 cups sugar
1 vanilla bean, scraped

Directions:
Cover your strawberries with the lemon juice and let this chill overnight.
The next day: Combine your strawberries with the sugar and vanilla seeds and bring this mixture to a boil over medium high heat, stirring frequently. Use a fork to smash the berries a bit. Now reduce the heat and let this mixture simmer for about 1 hour. Stir well a few times so that you will end up with an almost smooth liquid. Skim off your foam (on the top) and turn off the heat. Now add your lemon juice and stir gently. Your jam is ready!
If you don't know for sure if the jam is firm enough, you can test it by taking one drop of the mixture and put this on a glace plate. If it hardens after a few minutes, it is o.k., if it keeps running you could better let the mixture simmer for some extra minutes.

When you are canning your jam, use sterilized jars and boil these filled jars for 10 minutes. They will store up to one year at room temperature. If you'd like to store jam in the freezer it will keep for several months and in the fridge it will keep for several weeks.

On any kind of bread, on toast, in your yoghurt, on your pancakes and many more this jam is yummy!

Spicy thai tomato chicken soup

This is the ultimate soup recipe. 

-It is easy to make for many people. 

-It warms you up when it is cold, but also helps you to cool down when it is warm (pores open!)

-It is spicy and with lots of flavour!

-Many people like it because it is a (sort of) tomato soup.

We make it a lot for the people who come to our company, and all we hear are positive reactions. These pleople wanted to know how we make this soup, and that is one reason why we are posting this recipe now. But we are also posting this recipe because it is our most favorite soup! And it is for many years now. While other soups can become a bit boring after a while, this one won't! We can assure you that. So go on and try it!

Giant chocolate chunk cookies

We know we've already posted chocolate chip cookies here, but we just can't do without. We bake them all the time... 

We love chocolate.

We love cookies.

We love the smell they give us when they are in the oven.

We can't wait any longer when we've made them and they need another 20 minutes to bake.

We fall in love with them when they smell heavenly, look giant and delicious and feel warm in our hands.

We eat them straight away from the oven, while they actually need to cool a bit because they are too hot for our mouths.

And we eat them with a big smile on our face.

I think there are no more words necessary for you to understand? (:

  

So here is the recipe for some vanilla chocolate chunk cookies. We hope you will enjoy them as much as
we do!

Little bite: cherry tomato with fêta cheese and basil.

This is an ideal little bite for party's, large groups of people, friends who come over or just as a healthy snack. We're using this 'recipe' for ages in our family and we won't get rid of it soon, believe us.
It isn't really a recipe, but this composition of cherry tomatoes, fêta cheese and basil is just devine!

..and we're back!

Hello again! 

It's been a while, but we're finally back again. We've been baking and cooking a lot this summer, but we were gone and enjoying our vacation as well. From now on we are hopefully going to post a lot! Starting with a little bite in the next one.

The photo's show you our lovely raspberries from our garden. Not the well known raspberry (pink), but sweet golden yellow ones! We've picked them this morning. There are not enough raspberries to bake something with them, but straight to the mouth isn't that bad! ... delicious!