Love conquers all...

There are times in life when love is frustrating. There are times in life when love is exhilarating. There are times in life when you wonder why and yet there are times in life when you would never let go. The longer I live, the more I realise that love is a choice and it takes a lot of hard work. There are times when love comes easy, and there are times when it doesn't come so easy. But I have learnt that sometimes it's ok to put my expectations aside and just accept and when I do that it usually turns out better than I would have expected in the first place. I have learnt that sometimes I don't need to pick on the small things, but can just let things go and it will be okay anyway. I have learnt that my way isn't the only way. I have learnt that sometimes saying a little prayer is enough and I have learnt that love is never worth giving up on!

"The fire of love stops at nothing. Flood waters cannot drown love and rain cannot put it out. Love cannot be bought and it cannot be sold. Love is invincible."

 

Valentine's Day is a fantastic time to show those around you that you love how much you appreciate them. Celebrating love doesn't need to be limited to one day a year, but there is something special with the celebration that Valentine's Day has become. 

To my one sweet love - I am grateful got who you are and who you have made me to be. The best is yet to come!

Let love be victorious! Happy Valentine's Day!

 

Love,

Heidi

 

 

30 wonderful years and the world's best family!

This Christmas was the first Christmas that I have spent at home in South Africa since I got married and it was such a special time with the family. It was also the first time that I have flown home in two years, which is definately the longest I've been away for...it was great to come home...and great to see many of my family and friends that I haven't seen for a long time!

 

While we were home, my older sister, Laura, turned 30, so we threw a big party for her. Seen as though she was born in the 80's we decided to have an 80's pool party theme...except when the day came around it was pouring. So the pool party turned into a not-so pool party but whenever my family puts together a party, it is always a blast!

 

To my precious Lauli! I love you and want you to know that I am proud of you, both as a person and a sister. I am grateful for all the years we have had together and look forward to the many more memories that are to be made! You are priceless!

 

Now to the food...we had a buffé of minis: small bacon and cheese rolls, quiche bites, mini sausages, fruit kebabs, cocktail sticks...

The cake was made with chocolate and vanilla cupcakes and the topper was also layered with chocolate and vanilla cake. The cake has a story...

Two of my wonderful sisters helped to bake the cake and cupcakes as my husband and I were celebrating our 5 year anniversary. When we came back home from celebrating, somehow someone had brought out a coaster that lit up in different colours when a glass was put on it. There was only one in the house but I knew that we had to have it for the cake tiers as it would really enhance the 80's feel. The thing is, no-one knew where to get them from, but instead of giving up my dad and little sister go on a search, calling around to find where we could get more. They even called the manufacturers to ask where they sell them, and they were told that these lights are no longer produced. Yet, someone, within a couple of hours my dad found a place that had a few left. That is one of the things I love the most about my fam, nothing is impossible and they go the extra mile! I love you guys!

 

 

 

 

Enjoy the beginning of a new week! Take the opportunity this Valentine's Day on Tuesday to show those that you love how much you appreciate them!

 

Love, Heidi

 

 

Friday, 25 November 2011

Another South African classic!

Good morning everyone!

This autumn in Sweden has heen beautiful! This time last year we had already had snow for over a month here in Jönköping, but this year we have had really mild, pleasant weather. Which makes it seem crazy that Christmas is only 1 month away today! YAY! 

But before this blog becomes to Christmassy I thought I would put up another South African classic...Milktart! This is for you, Sara. Thank you for requesting the recipe! Feel free to request away!

Milktart is one of my absolute favourite South African recipes! There is just something about the creamy, vanilla flavour that I love! And the memories that come flooding in when I think about milktart...there's too many to think of!

Here comes the recipe:

(to see the recipe in Swedish click here)

1 packet Tennis biscuits (or if you're in Sweden then 1 pack Brago original biscuits and 1 dl coconut will do the job)

100 g butter or marg, melted

Filling:

2 eggs
50 ml water
1 tbsp maizena
1 tbsp flour
1 salt salt
2 tbsp sugar
2 cups (5 dl) milk (3 %)
½ tin condensed milk
30 g butter

Cinnamon

1. Crush the biscuits finely. Add the melted butter and mix around. Press themixture into a pie form and put it into the fridge.
2. Filling: separate the yolks and the whites. Mix the yolks, maizena, flour and salt together. Add the water and mix a little bit more. 
3. Beat the egg whites until they are stiff peaks. Add the sugar and beat for 2 more minutes. 
4. Put the milk, condensed milk and butter in a pot and bring to the boil. Add the yolk mixture and bring to the boil again, stirring constantly. Remove the pot from the stove and fold in the egg whites. 
5. Pour the mixture over the base and then into the fridge for at least 3 hours. Before serving sprinkle lots of cinnamon on top. 

Happy baking!

Love,

Heidi

Christmas is nearly here!

Christmas in Sweden is one of my absolute favourite times of the year! Partly because of the build-up towards the big day. The four Sunday's before Christmas the Swedes celebrate "advent" with lots of candles and good food! This Sunday is going to be "the First Advent" which means that here in sweden we are finally allowed to put up Christmas decorations. So now you know what I will be doing this week-end!

Today Jnytt Extra's Christmas issue came out, together with an article where I made some typical Swedish Christmas sweets but with my own twist.

Click on this link to check it out!
http://issuu.com/jnytt/docs/december_2011/35



Photo by Cathrine Levan

 Do you want to get into the Christmas mood? Here come some of the recipes: (to see these recipes in Swedish, click here: http://jnytt.se/nyhet/43934/heidis-julgodis)

Chocolate snowballs:

Photo by Cathrine Levan

150 g butter, room temperature
200 ml sugar
1 tbsp vanilla sugar
5 tbsp cocoa
350 ml oats
100 ml coconut
4 tbsp espresso
100g Daim, roughly chopped (Daim is a typical Swedish chocolate, can be substituted by using normal milk chocolate)

200g white chocolate
200 ml coconut

1. Mix the butter and sugar together. Add the rest of the ingredients (except the white chocolate and 200 ml coconut) and mix them together well. Roll the mixture into small balls (about 3 cm in diameter). Put them into the freezer for at least 30 minutes so that they get firm.
2. Melt the white chocolate carefully. Dip the chocolate balls in the white chocolate and then in the coconut.
A TIP: Once you have dipped the balls in the chocolate, drop them into a deep bowl with coconut and shake it around...it's much less messy that way ;-)

Photo by Cathrine Levan

Mini red velvet cupcakes with gingerbread icing:

60 g butter
150 ml sugar
1 egg
100ml buttermilk
1 tsp red food colouring
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp white vinegar
250 ml (1 cup) flour
50 ml cocoa
1 pinch salt

Icing:
50 g butter
100 ml cream cheese
1 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 tsp of gingerbread spices (like cinnamon, cloves and ginger)
200 ml icing sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
2. Beat the butter and sugar until creamy. Mix in the egg, buttermilk, food colouring, vanilla, bicarb and vinegar.
3. In a separate bowl, mix the flour, cocoa and salt together. Add them to the wet ingredients and stir until they are just mixed.
4. Fill mini cupcake cases until just over half full.
5. Bake in the oven for about 8-10 minutes. Cool completely.

Icing:
1. Make sure all the ingredients are at room temperature. Beat all the ingredients together with an electric beater for a few minutes until the icing is creamy and smooth. Pipe the icing onto the cupcakes and decorate with some sprinkles.

Watch this space for some more recipes!


Have a great day!

Love,
Heidi

Monday, 21 November 2011

A real "braai"

Being in Sweden one of the things that I miss most from South Africa (excluding my family of course...and the warm weather...and the beach...) is a REAL braai. Now, don't get me wrong, people have plenty of "grill parties" here in Sweden and some of them produce some pretty good food...BUT!!!

They just don't compare to a REAL South African braai. And I think that one of the main reasons for this is the fact that there is nothing...NOTHING even close, to South African boerewors. For those of who who are underprivileged and have never tasted boerewors, or worse yet, don't even know what it is...let me explain.

Boerewors is a LONG sausage filled with minced meat and a delicious combination of spices. The fun thing with boerewors is that you braai the whole long sausage in one pieces (quite an art!), which keeps the wors nice and juicy and flavoursome.

Luckily I am blessed with lovely friends here in Jönköping. So during the summer, Lisa and I decided to have a go at having a real South African braai, boerewors and all!

So we bought in the necessary ingredients and got going and we had loads of fun along the way! Somehow we ended up without a working machine to stuff the sausages with so we had to do it by hand! Ha ha! It took a LONG time, but in the end it worked out so well!

What is a sausage without the sausage "skin"?

The mince mixture, ready to be stuffed

I was also lucky enough to have my mom here in Sweden so she made her DELICIOUS "pap en sous". Pap is also typically South African and is a type of maize/corn porridge which is eaten together with a sauce made from tomatoes and onions that has simmered together for many hours. Together with good friends and more good food, all in all, the braai was a success!!!

This is what a REAL braai looks like!

Delicious!!!

Boerewors recipe:

1 kg minced meat (50% pork, 50% beef)
25 ml whole coriander seeds, grounded
2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black peppar
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 pinch ground nutmeg
1 tbsp brown sugar
100 ml (1 dl) red wine vinegar

Sausage casings, soaked in water

1. Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl.

2. Drain the sausage casings and put one end over a filling horn. Carefully pull the whole casing onto the horn, leaving about 5 cm off. Tie a knot in this end.

3. Having 2 pairs of hands at this stage is really helpful. Feed the filling into the filing horn while your assistant guides the casing on the other side, moulding the sausage by hand to make it uniformly thick.

4. Once all the meat has been stuffed, remove the casing and tie a knot on the end.

5. Braai over medium hot coals until the skin has a nice grilled, brown colour and the inside is still juicy.

Happy braaing!

Love,
Heidi

Firetruck fun!

So my little boy is not so little any more...over the week-end we celebrated his 3rd birthday party. It was so much fun. In the midst of the craziness of writing my thesis and extra jobs, somehow we managed to find the time to throw together a lovely party for Elias. 

He has really been into firetrucks lately, so he wanted to have a firetruck party. I got inspired to build a firetruck from boxes so that the kids could play with it at the party. So one night I came up from the basement with a bunch of boxes and put my dear man into work. This year, I must give him the credit with coming up with many ideas that made the party a success...like paper machèing the firetruck. It would not have looked nearly as nice without the paper machè. So after several nights work in the basement the firetuck was ready to go!

We sent out firetruck invites to a few of Elias' friends and prepared snacks for about 20 people. I also made cute little firetruck badges for the kids and organised fireman helmets. The kids got to eat and play around together and then it was time for the cake. 

The cake was vanilla sponge with chocolate ganache and cream filling. One of the layers also had daim balls (daim is a swedish chocolate with a crunchy caramel filling). I'm always trying to find ways to get around covering a cake with fondant as I think fondant is so sweet. So this time I coloured cream a light blue and covered the cake so that the background would look like the sky. It didn't look as nice as fondant but it definately tasted better. I then made trees and buildings from fondant covered with flames around the whole side of the cake. On top was fireman "Elias" with a hose. The cake made its grand entrance into the party on top of the firetruck with small firework candles on top. It was so much fun to see the expressions on the children's faces...priceless and definately worth a week of short nights. Unfortunately I forgot to take a good picture of the cake during daylight. Oh well...better something than nothing.

All in all it was a party with many fun memories! And I am so grateful to have the most precious son in the world and the most loving and helpful hubby in the world!

Stay tuned for some fun, home-made Chritmas present ideas and other goodies to get you into the Christmas spirit!

Love,
Heidi

Tuesday, 6 September 2011

Weddings are fun!

Okay! It's finally time to show off the wedding cake that I made for a friend's wedding in August! It was a beautiful wedding for a sweet couple. The theme for the wedding was simple, silver, white and lime green. The cake was a 4 tiered square cake that rotated slightly. It's definately the biggest cake that I've made to date, and there are many things I learnt along the way. Here are some of those lessons:

1. Big cakes need LOTS of space...both when working with them and in the fridge. Luckily I have a pretty large fridge, so even the base of the cake fitted in the fridge...well, I actually measured the fridge first to make sure the cake would fit, because as you know, it was the middle of summer...and creamy cakes NEED to live in a fridge! The cupcakes I kept in the freezer so it all worked out pretty well.

2. Rolling out HUGE pieces of fondant by hand is not easy! Whenever you roll fondant to cover a cake it has to quite a bit bigger then the actual cake so that you don't end up with wrinkled sides. That means that the fondant for the bottom tier had to be almost 1 meter(about 0.8m to be exact). Now that's pretty easy when you watch the Cake Boss and all those shows where they have machines to roll the fondant perfectly smooth...not so easy doing it at home. But with a little bit of patience it turned out ok as well.

3. Dress warmly! Well, not when you are baking the cake, but I had to transport the cake about 3 hours to Malmö, in an air-conditioned car. I have never transported cakes so far, so I wasn't sure how it would turn out, but, thankfully nothing happened along the way. It's a pity I forgot my socks though...my toes were pretty blue when I got there!

All in all...agreeing to do a wedding cake takes a lot of planning and precision...but it's definately worth it when you see the happy couple!
 

Cheers to you, Håkan and Emma! We wish you many happy years together and many blessings over your lives!

Love,
Heidi

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