Hubby and I visited the market for a third and final time two weeks ago. The weather was much more cooperative compared to our second visit. We decided to have lunch from Chef Ismail's Turkish Gourmet, a new stall at the market this year. We shared the pide cheese bread, a Turkish flatbread topped with mozzarella and Turkish pepperoni. We also bought a box of their Turkish delight (raspberry flavor, covered in dark chocolate), one of hubby's favorite sweets. The vendor offered us Turkish tea on the house while we waited for our pide. The tea was quite nice, especially being outside in the cold. The tea had very subtle spices, just enough to make it different from our everyday morning tea. We opened the Turkish delight at home, and it is probably the best Turkish delight that I've tried. The raspberry flavor really comes through and the lokum is perfectly chewy. Hubby is already going on about picking up another box when we visit later this week!
After about 15 min, our pide was ready. It looks like pizza, but the taste is a little different. The dough is a chewier dough, slightly sweeter than your standard pizza dough as well. The pide was delish! The Turkish pepperoni was quite yummy; the spices were just a little different to what I'm used to with regular pepperoni, but not too spicy at the same time. The vendor was telling us it is their most popular dish, and I completely understand why!
We then wandered over to the Gingerbread Haus. I'm not a big fan of ginger itself (ugh, the horror of thinking something is a piece of potato or other vegetable, and then biting into ginger), but I do like certain things that are ginger flavored! The very first time we went to the market, I had bought gingerbread from them, and it wasn't your typical gingerbread man cookie recipe (very dry and hard). It was delectably soft and chewy on the inside with a thin chocolate coating on the outside. I decided that I wanted to buy some again this year, and selected one of the larger packages of chocolate coated gingerbread. This recipe had the addition of mixed chopped nuts, which gave a whole new dimension of flavor to the cookie itself. Yum!
We then headed Becker's Bakery for some black forest cake. They were at the market last year, but we just didn't manage to get food from them. They offer German cheesecakes, cookies and strudel (another favorite of mine) as well. The cake was DIVINE. The sponge is a little denser than normal, but I'm used to that particular quality of German cakes. The whipped cream and cherries were perfectly balanced throughout, and the cake overall wasn't too sweet.
I started my Christmas baking last Saturday with two new recipes: cornflake-chocolate pralines and chocolate chip shortbread. I started with the pralines, which to me, seemed like the easier recipe to begin with. Well, I've always had struggles with making caramel on the stove. The first time that I was making a simple sugar caramel for leche flan...I burned it. Ended up having to start all over again. No different with the caramel for this recipe! It's amazing how quickly sugar can go from a lovely brown to an ugly black. From then on, I was fine. I ended up sticking the trays in the freezer overnight because they were just not solidifying at room temperature. The pralines were quite tasty, but get messy quite quickly when at room temperature. They seem to taste best when they are fresh from the freezer or fridge, but that's something that won't necessarily happen when being served.
The shortbread recipe was super easy (I really should've started with it instead of the pralines, but I forgot to take the butter out for the shortbread). It uses powdered sugar instead of granulated sugar, so I suspect it will be a bit sweeter than normal. I was quite skeptical about being able to cut the cookies into sticks after scoring them, but it worked just fine. The one thing that I would change is the amount of chocolate needed for the drizzle. I ended up with WAY too much chocolate, and though hubby offered to eat it all, I decided to add peppermint extract to it and spread it out on foil for some bark. The cookie itself was very tasty; different consistency from your usual shortbread, but still had that shortbread taste.
I continued my baking on Sunday with chai latte bars. This recipe was probably one of the easier ones, as it was done in my stand mixer, and that alone makes things go much faster for me. I didn't have ground cloves, so I replaced it with allspice instead. As for the white chocolate topping, I used slightly over half what the recipe called for. Good thing too, because the white chocolate is what gives the sweetness to the bar itself, and I've always found white chocolate WAY too sweet for my liking. Out of all the recipes, I was surprised at how much I liked it. It definitely tastes like chai, but it's not too spicy.
The next recipe I tackled was the red velvet cookies. Those of you who regularly follow my blog know that I LOVE red velvet, and I have tackled many different red velvet recipes. This recipe was pretty easy to put together. The one change that I made was to use red gel coloring instead of food coloring. I usually use food coloring, but always end up using more than the recipe calls for, just to make it the right color of red. It definitely worked out much nicer with the gel! The dough is quite sticky to work with, even after being refrigerated, but it didn't bother me too much. They also spread out quite a bit once baked, something that I was surprised to find when I took them out of the oven. The cookie itself? My fav of all the cookies I made! The cookie is chewy on the inside, not too sweet (even with all that icing sugar on the outside), and definitely tastes like red velvet (minus the signature cream cheese icing).
The final recipe that I made was pistachio-cherry sandwiches. Hubby told me that if I needed to cut out any recipes (which I did end up doing), this one was one NOT to cut. One thing that I did not realize (or had forgotten, take your pick) about this recipe was that it uses the food processor to mix the dough. Thus making this recipe the fastest to prepare out of all of them! :) Once kneaded and shaped into logs, it called for them to be placed in the freezer. I opted to put them in the fridge overnight, and that worked just fine. I finished preparing the cookies on Christmas Eve morning. I've had some misses with sliced cookies in the past, but the dough was easy to slice and didn't stick to the knife or immediately fall apart. I did try to round the cookies once on the baking sheet, as they all ended up looking a little more square than circular. Once the cookies had cooled, I made them into sandwiches. This was probably the big hit of all the cookies that I made, as they disappeared pretty quickly when we put them out for dessert with the rest of the cookies and bars.
Christmas dinner was fantastic! We had a very juicy bird once again, and all the new dishes that we made were a big hit. I tried a new stuffing recipe (cranberry-apple), which was very yummy and was the one dish that had the least amount of leftovers remaining. I also tried two new recipes from my Christmas Table book: roasted carrots and parsnips with dill and sauteed Brussels sprouts with garlic and Parmesan. I've actually never cooked parsnips before, but I have heard how they are sweet and a very good vegetable to roast. They were DELISH with the carrots, especially the ones that got a little more browned and caramelized. The dill was more subtle than I was expecting it to be, but it still gave a nice flavor overall. The sprouts was a nice change from the gratin that I've made for Thanksgiving dinners. It still had that cheesy flavor, but without the creaminess of the gratin. Yum!
We slowly making a dent in all the leftovers that we've acquired from dinner. I'll be making my favorite soup with some of the turkey in a couple of days. As my next post likely will not be until the New Year, HAPPY NEW YEAR to all, and happy cooking!