Easter and Happiness

Hello all,
and Happy Easter!

It's been almost two months since my last post, and while I feel a bit bad for not having posted anything in this time I've honestly never felt better... Those of you who follow me on Instagram will know that I feel great health-wise. As I said in a post on IG, usually me not being active on here would mean that I'm not doing too good. Previously it has been during my rough times with bouts of strong depression or anxiety where I've not been around here. But I am very happy to say that my health hasn't been this good for years. I can barely remember the last time I was doing so well mentally, and I am also really happy to boot. I am however quite busy, with work and other things... Good things.

Again, if you've seen my IG lately you will know that I now have a boyfriend, and he is making me so happy it's ridiculous. I've never been the type of person to leave my happiness to someone else. I believe that you need to make yourself happy, and to be honest, I never understood what the big deal about a romantic relationship was. I still hold on to the fact that your happiness lies within you, but I'm definitely understanding the big whoop about a partner. It's like icing on a cake, it heightens my happiness, makes everything that much sweeter.

Anyway, so that's what's been going on in my life, work and boyfriend are keeping me busy, and blogging has taken a backseat. For Easter I had to bake though, so without further ado, here is my Easter bake.

As by tradition, I made cupcakes for Easter, with chocolate eggs from Lindt and they were delicious. Also, my sprinkles are from Sweetapolita.

I hope you all have a fantastic Easter with a bit of spring (in my city it's snowing...).
Much love,

Brownie cupcakes with White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

Hello all!
I hope you are having a majorly awesome week. I'm so busy at work I hardly have the time to breathe - but it's good. I love being busy with my research. Things are finally happening in my project and it is seriously exciting.

Having been so intensely busy my baking has taken a back seat. I don't find the energy to bake after the workday and during the weekends I'm so busy with other things. However, this weekend I finally had the time and energy to do some light baking. What better to reintroduce myself to baking with than cupcakes.

I know cupcakes are a bit "out", but I don't care. I love cupcakes! I love baking them! And I love eating them!

I used a brownie recipe and added a white chocolate cream cheese frosting to it. Find the recipe of both the brownie cupcakes and the frosting below.

Brownie Cupcakes

INGREDIENTS

• 150 grams dark chocolate, chopped
• 110 grams butter, cut into pieces
• 15 grams cocoa powder
• 150 grams sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 eggs
• 95 grams flour
• 100 grams walnuts, chopped

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 175°C.

Line a cupcake tin with 12 paper liners.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a bowl over a saucepan of heated water. Add the cocoa, sugar and vanilla, whisk. Whisk in the eggs, one at a time. Stir in the flour. Add the chopped walnuts.

Add about a half decilitre to each cupcake liner.

Bake for about 15-18 minutes.

Let cool before adding the frosting.

White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

INGREDIENTS

• 200 grams white chocolate, chopped
• 1,5 dl heavy cream
• 200 grams cream cheese
• Pink food colouring, optional

DIRECTIONS

Heat the heavy cream in a saucepan until just before it starts boiling. Pour over the white chocolate and stir until smooth. Place in fridge for a couple of hours to overnight, until it firms up.

With an electric mixer, whisk the ganache until a bit fluffy, then add the cream cheese and continue whisking until smooth and pipeable. Add some food colouring if desired.

Pipe onto the brownie cupcakes with an closed star tip.

I added beautiful sprinkles from Sweetapolita (here) to my cupcakes. I adore these sprinkles and find it hard to resist putting them on everything I bake!

I hope you all like this recipe. Let me know if you try it!

Wish you all an amazing rest of the week.

Much love,

Mona

Screaming for Ice cream

Hello all you beautiful people!
Hope you are all doing well, and I hope that spring has reached you where ever you are. I wish I could say that spring has reached me here in northern Sweden, but yesterday we had a snow storm, and it seems like spring will never come.

I wanted to write a post about this really easy-to-make ice cream, and I thought that the end of April would be a good time to share the recipe because the weather has warmed up then, but no Sir!

Petulantly I will share this post anyway, cold weather be damned!

So about this ice cream, it is a recipe that I saw on Manuela Kjeilen's (of Passion For Baking) tv show "Baka med Manuela" that aired here in Sweden. It's really easy, and doesn't require an ice cream making machine (which I don't have), so you can just about do it without any tools (although an electric mixer is good to have).

Easy Vanilla Ice Cream

Recipe adapted from Manuela Kjeilen.


INGREDIENTS

• 1 can (397 grams) sweetened condensed milk
• 4 dl whipping cream
• 0.5 teaspoons ground vanilla pod

DIRECTIONS

Place the condensed milk and the whipping cream in the freezer for 20 minutes before you start. Take out the condensed milk from the freezer and pour it into a bowl. Whip it with an electric mixer until it is a bit lighter and fluffier. Pour in the whipping cream and continue to beat until it becomes thicker. Add the vanilla and whip some more until it is fluffy and thick. Pour into boxes or bowls and place in freezer chilling it, preferably over night.

I served my vanilla ice cream with my chocolate brownies, and they were SO good together. To see my brownie recipe click here. I added a bit of colour with sprinkles from Sweetapolita (here).

It really is super simple to vary this recipe and create different flavours. In another post I will show you how you can create other yummy ice cream flavours.

For now though, I wish you the best of days!

Much love,

Chocolate Brownies

Hello all!
Hope you are having a great day and a wonderful weekend.
I recently went over to a friend's for afternoon tea or "fika" as we call it here in Sweden. I don't like going empty handed anywhere so I brought brownies with me.

The brownies were popular and I was asked for the recipe, at which point I very quickly wanted to say that it was on my blog. But guess what? Even though I've talked about brownies on the blog before, and have shared the recipe in a feature on Lindsey's blog Have Clothes, Will Travel, I have never actually shared the recipe for my favourite brownies on the blog. I am making amends to that now.

Chocolate Brownies

INGREDIENTS

• 120 grams dark chocolate, chopped in pieces
• 115 grams butter, chopped in pieces
• 200 grams sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 100 grams flour

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 165°C.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a bowl over a saucepan of heated water. Add the sugar and vanilla, whisk. Whisk in the eggs, on at a time. Stir in the flour. Pour into a 20x20 cm pan and bake for about 25 minutes.

I usually add chocolate ganache to the brownies once they've cooled for extra chocolatey-ness. Find the recipe for chocolate ganache here.

And lastly add sprinkles. These sprinkles that I used here are from Sweetapolita, and it's called Galaxy Twinkle Sprinkle Medley (on etsy: here). I just love Sweetapolita's sprinkles. They are so beautiful and really add to anything you put it on. These plain brownies looked so pretty with the sprinkles.

Now I can finally say that my famous brownies are up on the blog!

Have a beautiful rest of the week.

Much love,

Twenty thousand!

Hello you lovely people!
Happy Friday! I am so happy it's Friday, I am going to sleeeeeep this weekend. What are you doing this weekend?

On to some great news (which you might have guessed by the title of this post), this blog reached 20,000 page views yesterday!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who reads this blog. Without you this would not have been as much fun, so thank you for reading, commenting and talking to me! You are all golden!

Now I know there's been a lot of cake on the blog recently, but naturally 20,000 page views called for a celebration of some kind. And if you know me you know that celebration means cake.

I made these vanilla cupcakes based on a recipe by Manuela Kjeilen of passionforbaking.com and then topped them with my favourite frosting (that you can find here).

These vanilla cupcakes are super nice and soft, very spongy and moist, and it's probably because of the heavy cream used in them. Usually you would use milk in a recipe like this, but Manuela's brilliant idea of adding heavy cream really paid off.

Another thing I want to quickly mention before sharing the recipe are these cupcake liners. They are from Dr Oetker and the amazing thing about them - They're edible!

Yeah, I kid you not, you can eat the cupcake liners! They're made of rice, corn and potato, and taste almost like nothing (a friend said it tasted like communion bread). And you don't have to peel it off you can just bite straight through your cupcake now! How amazing is that!

If you're in Sweden, you can find more info about them here. I'm sure other countries in Europe also have these cupcake liners by Dr Oetker. Have any of my American readers ever seen these? Or something similar?

I was really very fascinated by them, and they are such a nice pale pink colour. The only difference in baking is that you have to increase the baking time a couple of minutes. And then you have an entirely edible cupcake - liner and all.

Vanilla Cupcake

Recipe adapted from Manuela Kjeilen's baking show Baka med Manuela, episode 2


INGREDIENTS

• 200 grams butter
• 325 grams sugar
• 4 eggs
• 400 grams flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 5 decilitre heavy cream
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 175°C.

Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time.

Sift the flour and the baking powder in a bowl, and then add some of it to the egg mixture, alternating with the heavy cream. Begin and end with the flour. Add the vanilla.

Pour batter into cupcake liners placed in a cupcake tray.

Bake for about 20-25 minutes, a skewer inserted into the cupcake should come out clean.

Let cool completely before piping on the frosting and adding sprinkles.

For my favourite chocolate frosting, click here.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Much love,

Frosting and Sprinkles

Hello all you lovely people!
I am currently feeling poorly, but it's been a while since I shared a recipe on the blog so I thought I'd share my go-to chocolate frosting.

I love chocolate cupcakes more than any other type of cupcakes, even more than vanilla cupcakes, and that is because with chocolate frosting you get such a great and rich texture and flavour. The consistency of this frosting is perfect for piping and it creates the most beautiful swirls of chocolatey heaven.

Chocolate Ganache Frosting

INGREDIENTS

• 200 grams dark chocolate, chopped
• 2 dl heavy cream
• 200 grams cream cheese

DIRECTIONS

Make a chocolate ganache by heating the heavy cream in a pan. Just before it starts to boil pour it over the chopped chocolate. Stir until you get a nice and even chocolate ganache. Then let it cool to room temperature.

In a bowl, whisk the cold cream cheese with a hand mixer, pour the ganache into the cream cheese and whip until just combined. You should have a frosting which is perfect and lovely for piping.

I made these lovely mini brownie cupcakes with the very same chocolate frosting for my Birthday last year. They were a real hit, and my mouth is watering just thinking about them.

You can find my favourite brownie recipe on the lovely Lindsey's blog Have Clothes, Will Travel. I shared the recipe for my brownies with her for a feature, so check it out: here.
And instead of baking the brownies in a pan, pour the batter into mini cupcake tins and bake for about 10 minutes at 165°C.

And lastly, add sprinkles! Because sprinkles are fun!

Much love!