Uszka (Polish dumplings filled with mushrooms)

I hope that you have all spent a lovely christmas with your families, or if you don't celebrate christmas or celebrate something else, I hope that you have had a lovely week either way :) Fortunately, I got to spend christmas with my mum and my sister, we were supposed to drive to Poland to see my granddad but unfortunately our car broke down. This meant that I had the wonderful task of cooking 12 courses at home (it's a tradition that you have to have at least as many dishes as the number of apostles), and in my family, Barszcz (a beetroot soup, very well known in Central and Eastern Europe that I bought this year (I had nearly no time to prepare!) with "Uszka" are always the first dish. Uszka are small dumplings filled with mushrooms, kind of like Pierogi but smaller and in a different shape. They are incredibly tasty nevertheless :) I'm not sure how much more from the christmas recipes I will post on here since many of them are quite particular and I think ingredients could be quite hard to buy at some places but I'll definitely post Christmas Pierogi and 2 desserts from our meal.

 

Vanillekipferl

There are tons of different recipes for vanillekipferl, either using just a shortbread cookie dough and then covering the little moon shaped cookies in vanilla sugar once they've come out of the oven, or ones that also mix in some nuts, like this one :)

Coconut Macaroons

These lovely little treats are really easy to whip up and take no time at all in the oven, and best of all: they're really delicious :) Cover them in chocolate if you like or have them as they are, either way I am sure you'll enjoy them!

Shortbread Cookies

Sorry for the delay in uploading these, the past weeks have been pretty hectic and I also travelled back home for christmas :) Nevertheless, I hope you will still have some time to try these easy shortbread cookies out (or Butterplätzchen as Germans call them) :)
The ratio is always 3:2:1:1, flour, butter, sugar, eggs so just calculate the amount that you will need :) The batch that I did was enough for about 4 baking trays full of cookies.

Apple Pie

This is a lovely apple pie that is quite easy to make :) Unfortunately, when I did mine, I couldn't use the stove to soften up the apples for the filling but I can assure you it works both ways :) If you don't cook the apples it won't be as level, but who cares about presentation when it tastes amazing? :D Also, my tin was 20cm in diameter, the bigger your tin the lower the pie :)

Pesto Bread

Last Friday, Mika and Liz decided to host a little pre-Christmas party to get us all in the festive spirit :) (we have exams next week, or at least some of us, so this was an incredibly welcome break!) I decided that there wasn't going to be a better opportunity to cook and bake again, so I decided to contribute a pesto bread and a few other goodies to the meal. With the help of my amazing assistant Lucia, we managed to get everything done almost in time :)

As a side, I opted for a pesto bread that I found here. It looks pretty cool I find, and I can assure you it tastes great!

Nut-Banana-Chocolate Cake

... or in other words: Christina's birthday cake :) Please excuse the quality of the pictures, we celebrated in a small Irish pub and lighting wasn't exactly great and we had no plates either :) But hey, all that matters was the taste, and it seem to be the overwhelming opinion that it was indeed very tasty :) I found the recipe here :)