The Susanne

These brownies will put a smile on your face any day! (they cer­tainly made the thun­der­storm that set in an hour after I fin­ished work for the summer, much more bearable…)

I found the recipe that inspired these at A Matter of Taste.

You’ll need:

• 200 g milk cook­ing chocolate
• 200 g dark cook­ing chocolate
• 1 dl margarine
• 4 eggs
• 2 dl sugar
• 2,5 dl flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 dl chopped almonds
• 2 dl shred­ded coconut

Set your oven to 175 degrees C.

In a sauce­pan, melt 100 g of each chocol­ate on a low heat with the mar­gar­ine. Chop the rest of the chocol­ate into big, chunky chips and put them aside for later.

When the chocol­ate and mar­gar­ine is melted, stir them together and add the sugar. Stir until it’s well combined.

Remove from the heat and whisk in the eggs. Pour into a bowl.

Add the flour and baking powder and com­bine well.

Stir in the chocol­ate chips, almonds and coconut. Pour into a greased baking pan, and pop in the oven.

Let the brownies bake for about 20 minutes. I recom­mend check­ing them after 17 just in case. They’re done when whatever you stick into them comes out sticky but not covered in runny batter.

Enjoy! And may your rainy days be lovely :)

An hour after I got off work, the sun was gone. (It had to happen…) In its place was a thun­der­storm with strong wind and heavy rain:

Yeah. Good thing my brownies turned out won­der­fully per­fect! They’re moist and sticky on the inside, with lovely big chunks of almonds and dark and milk chocolate… Recipe will be posted under ‘drinks and snacks’!

Dad and I took a little trip to Sweden yes­ter­day. We got an early start and man­aged to get in a café trip and some shop­ping and were on our way home by 12.45! Yeah. Effectiv­ity is def­in­itely a talent of ours. The little café, (actu­ally a ‘konditori’ which trans­lates to con­fec­tion­ery but I’ve never heard that word in use) is in the small town of Char­lot­ten­berg which has a lovely little high street which used to be crowded with both Nor­we­gi­ans and Swedes on pretty much any day of the year. But then the evil shop­ping centre mogul Olav Thon built a huge shop­ping centre between the border and Char­lot­ten­berg and almost all local busi­nesses had no choice but to move from the lovely town and into the giant con­crete and glass prison. Con­sequently, Char­lot­ten­berg has become some­thing of a ghost town in com­par­ison. But Källmanns, the con­fec­tion­ery, is still open. It used to be so crowded you’d have to wait for a table, but these days the place is pretty damn empty and I worry they won’t be able to stay open very long. dad and I snagged us a table out­side in the sun and had a lovely lunch of smoked salmon with scrambled eggs (me) and a prawn sand­wich (him). And two cups of deli­cious coffee, of course. A little group of spar­rows were there, keep­ing their dis­tance but all the while watch­ing us in case we dropped some food. I ‘dropped’ one tiny little piece of my roll and the pret­ti­est one caught it. Yey!

The candy store, God­isfab­riken (the Candy Factory), is also open. I remem­ber coming there as a child, and seeing all the candy and belie­ve­ing I had gone to heaven. And let it be noted that I was never really one for the sweet stuff, I was always more about the pop­corn and other salty stuff. But this place… good­ness me! I took some snap­shots. I sup­pose it’s noth­ing spe­cial if you’re Amer­ican or native to another coun­try where gigantic candy stores are every-​day fare. But to a little girl from Norway, this is spectacular:

When we got home I threw myself at the veal we’d picked up across the border. I love going on the little trips to Sweden as food is so cheap and when we come home we get to eat loads of stuff that’s usu­ally too expens­ive to buy here. Like veal! Dad also bought me some kangaroo steaks and a deer roast which I’m going to keep in the freezer and cook this autumn when The Boy­friend returns to the civ­il­ised part of the coun­try. That gives me ample time to plan some­thing spec­tac­u­lar to do with them — I’ve made kangaroo sev­eral times before and I abso­lutely love it, because of its incred­ibly low fat con­tent as well as its amaz­ing fla­vour! Every time I eat it I try to figure out whet it is it reminds me of but I never quite hit ‘it’. It’s not beef, and it’s not lamb and it’s not moose or reindeer. But it’s def­in­itely familiar.

As to the veal, I made schnitzel of course! With the sesame seed crust and served them with a bean salad, some salsa verde and a pan sauce with some red wine in it. Dad said sev­eral times that it tasted amaz­ingly deli­cious, which I com­pletely agreed with him on but it’s such a treat to hear that from a parent! The two pieces of veal we bought were gigantic, about 40 or 50 cm long, so I ended up with four schnitzels…meaning there’s leftovers for today! Hooray! I’m cur­rently engaged in an inward debate on whether to heat them up in a skil­let or in the oven. If I placed a lid on the skil­let they’d heat up quite nicely I should ima­gine, plus I could throw in a smi­g­den of mar­gar­ine also and I would be sure of get­ting the crust back to its former, crispy glory. In the oven I could just place them in a covered or uncovered dish (yeah, not decided on that either) and they could heat themselves…but then I’d have less con­trol of the re-​heating pro­cess and as I have never re-​heated schnitzel before I don’t know if the crust will get crispy in the oven or even how long they take to heat or even if I should do it at all — what if they turn dry?!

Yeah, I’m scared. At least I have the great suc­cess of yes­ter­day fresh in my memory to cheer me up if today’s prob­ject is a big fiasco. Oh, and speak­ing of fias­cos, I’m going to have another go at baking brownies today. I’ve bough new cook­ing chocol­ate, and a whole bag of shred­ded cocnut (I LOVE chocol­ate and coconut together!) and some more mar­gar­ine and as soon as I get off work it’s straight to the kit­chen where I’ll not lose sight of the tem­per­at­ure dial once. And then, maybe I’ll return with some vic­tori­ous snap­shots of scrump­tious double-chocolate-and-coconut brownies? Time will tell, people!

Oh, just one more thing: I gave the bunny his first straw­berry! Oh you wouldn’t believe how incred­ibly, amaz­ingly ador­able he looked! Ima­gine frantic lick­ing, the whole tiny little bunny-​chin covered in red straw­berry juice, the look in his eyes that christ­mas and his birth­day and 17. may and easter and every other hol­i­day had come at once. So cute!

Here’s the recipe for the cook­ies I wrote about, the ones inspired by the art­icle from Cook & Eat on leftover-​cookies. They’re non-​dairy and incred­ibly sweet!

Makes about 24

• 100g margarine
• 2 1/2 dl sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 dl flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 dl shred­ded coconut
• 1 dl hun­dreds and thousands
• 1/2 dl dark chocol­ate (chopped)

Pre­heat the oven to 180 C.

Mix the egg, lemon juice and vanilla in a bowl.

Use your mixer to cream the mar­gar­ine and the sugar until it is really fluffy. Pour the egg mix over and beat until it’s all mixed and creamy.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, chocol­ate and the hun­dreds and thou­sands, and add to the egg/sugar/margarine mix whilst mixing, until it’s all combined.

Scoop spoon­fuls of cookie dough onto parch­ment lined baking sheets, and place in the oven, one sheet at a time.

Bake for about 10 minutes, but my advice is to keep a close eye on them from about 7 or 8 minutes as they turn brown really sud­denly. You want them just golden!

I am start­ing to see that today is a day of firsts. I have just suc­cess­fully made my very first batch of cook­ies! I got the idea and the ‘how-to’ from a blog I just dis­covered earlier tonight: Cook & Eat. The idea of making leftover-​cookies appealed to me immensely! Like the author of Cook & Eat, I have heaps and heaps of left over stuff taking up pre­cious cup­board space and seeing the photos of the light golden brown cook­ies lit­er­ally made my mouth water. And let me just say, for the record, that I am not a sweet-​tooth!

I made my cook­ies fol­low­ing the recipe from Cook & Eat up to the point of the oats, with only slight adjust­ments to fit my stom­ach and my pantry. I used non-​dairy mar­gar­ine as always, and I used 1 tsp of lemon juice instead of 2 tsp orange juice as I didn’t have any. Also, I didn’t have any brown sugar so just used 1 cup of the normal stuff. Now, when the time came for fla­vour­ing I had dug out all the yummy secrets hidden away in my cup­board and my candy shelf. Here’s what I decided to put into the cook­ies: Hundreds-and-Thousands, shred­ded coconut, chips of 70% cocoa dark chocol­ate and some Lindt chili 86% cocoa chocol­ate my mum gave me once.

I have to say, they didn’t look too appet­ising halfway through the cook­ing pro­cess (I decided against post­ing the photo of it). But My oh My, did they look lovely when they came out! (Oh yeah, I tried cook­ing them for 12 minutes the first time and they came out dark brown and not so yummy. The next two batches were cooked for under ten minutes, just until lightly golden at the edges.) Also, my cook­ies didn’t stay fluffy. They rose in the oven, but then sud­denly they all col­lapsed into flat­ness. They still taste divine, though. Incred­ibly sweet, but divine nonetheless.