CROISSANT VS DONUT

If I had grown up eating croissants and donuts they sell at the shops/ supermarkets/bakeries today, I would not like neither of them definitely.
I remember when we were kids, my mother brought us delicious croissants every saturday while we watched the cartoons on tv. I still remember the texture inside, the delicious taste, how you could grab all the ‘belly’ inside and what it looked like. I´ve never forgotten even though many years have passed.
Today eating a croissant ( here ) is nothing great. If you buy it at the supermarket, it´s just the consistence of a bun with an artificial/extra sweet/not nice at all flavour. And if you get it at the bakeries/pastisseries you get something kinda messy, the only movement of grabbing it and most of the crust starts to fall in a million pieces, and well, if you decide to bite it (( well you should, you bought it to eat it didn´t you???!!! )) you´ll leave the floor with all those pieces , cause I don´t know what they add/do/put to get those ‘uncomfortable to teat’ consistence. A million crusts falling over, and a poor flavour and no texture inside.
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The thing is that they don´t realise it´s a mistake. We´re not …. ‘robbots’… or whatever you call it, can´t find the word. For me that´s what´s junk food. And the bad thing is that we, humans, seem to get used to every or almost everything. Luckily things are changing and people is being more concerned about food and things related.
And luckily there are some places which seem to keep authenticity. I´ve found a couple of bakeries in Barcelona that sell good quality ‘non-breakable’ croissants. I hope that in other countries you still can get a real CROISSANT.
Anyway I´m still looking for the perfect or ‘almost perfect’ croissant. And as I can´t find it anywhere at the moment, I planned to make it by myself.It´s quite a laborious thing, you know, all that laminating stuff and so on… I tried to make croissants three times. The two first times it was a total failure, so disapointed!! But the second time while I was throwing the pastry I just felt so bad for throwing it, I thought I would try to see if I could make something kinda ‘eatable’… So I took some of the pastry left and I put it in a muffin sylicon mold… 6 little ‘muffins’… Well my boyfriend tasted it and said it was delicious, one of the best things he ever tried. He said that if shops sold that they wouldn´t stop selling it. He almost killed me when I told him I had thrown the rest of the dough!!!
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He´s always telling me to do it again, but I don´t remember how I did it, you see that was an attempt of making a croissant, I don´t remember when the ‘ margarine, lard ‘ I used for laminating the dough went out of the dough. I had to play with that. And I don´t remember if I used lard or margarine.

A few months ago I tried again, but this time it was with butter, real butter. After my efford I succeeded!!! It was pretty good for being a beginner I must admit!!
Here is the result I had:

By chance, some days ago I found some advices on shaping them, advices which would have helped me to improve the result a lot, I think.OH I was so glad!! When you don´t have someone teaching you, being your own teacher takes some effort and many attempts, failures and when you finally succeed such a big big happiness . So now I´m willing to do them again. Wish me luck!!!

( more to come later with this post ……………… )

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For those of you who are on a diet, or simply if you want a healthy food, here it is a delicious carrot ‘cake’, or better a carrot snack. It keeps well in the fridge many days.This recipe admits many variations, for example you can substitute water for apple juice, you can ommit ginger if you´re not a big fan of it, you can add some currants, cut the amount of almonts to 1/3 cup instead of ½ cup etc. It´s a good choice to take away to the job if you eat outside, and it combines very well in a meal with wholemeal rice for example, very healthy!!!

Ingredients for the carrot snack: 1 cup and ½ water, ½ cup almonds, ½ cup oats, ½ cup couscous, 2 tbsp. corn oil or some light oil, a pinch of salt, some cinnamon and some ginger.

Grate the carrots very thin manually, add the oats + couscous. Mix well. Add the water+ 2 tbsp. oil. Finally add the chopped almonds ( not too thin ), ginger+cinnamon+salt and mix again. Transfer the dough to a greased pan and bake in the oven at 200ºC for about 1 hour. ( My oven is very slow, so keep an eye maybe you have enough with a bit lower temperature ). And that´s it!!! Let it cool and enjoy!

It wasn´t easy to make the heart shaped carrots, as the dough doesn´t wear any flour and it seemed hard to cut. Finally I managed to do it and I turned them so I had the bottom part above and the result was a better presentation. I added a base of white chocolate as some lucky ones don´t have to look after their weight.

I Think these icons were available at sanriotown some time ago. Now they aren´t. Is there any sanrio fan who has them on the computer??? I would really appreciate if some of you can send me the adorable Purin icons. Thanx!

Since I´m not working at the moment, I have time to prepare the sandwiches that my boyfriend takes for lunch at work. We used to buy sandwich bread, but the quality of the bread is not very good, and it even made me not to enjoy much when preparing them. But after some time ‘playing’ with flour + water + some other few ingredients, at last I´m getting to make decent bread. And one day he commented the muffins would be great for a sandwich, so I found a good combination. From now on we´ll have quality handmade bread, and I can assure you it gives a satisfaction when, after some failures, you can cook bread finally !! At least for me it´s been a pretty enjoyful experience. I still have a lot to learn though, for instance how to make a decent ‘sandwich bread loaf’, meanwhile the ‘sandwiches’ my boyfriend is taking at work will be a tender scot bap, and a soft sourdough muffin. Wanna try a bit??

Today i´m very sad :(. 1st i am sad cause yesterday i didn´t realise it was Kuririn´s birthday…. and 2nd i´m very sad cause i missed a set of wonderful kero kero stamps. Definitely for me Kero Kero is a star!!! Keroppi is the star. He´s so sweet to me. Some years ago my sister brought home a wonderful 5 months old dog. He was a brittish bulldog. He´s the best dog i´ve ever had. Stubborn, but not as stubborn as other bulldogs we had later. Well, one day we got his pedigree, where it says the name of his parents ( we named him Goku ) , etc., and the name his breeders gave him. It made me laugh to see his ‘real’ name: Kenobi. It was a nice surprise, inmediately it reminded me of ‘ Keroppi ‘. Our adored bulldog passed away two years ago causing a lot of pain, but i will never never never forget him. Sometimes I still cry when i think of him. He was so special. We love you Goku wherever you are!

Red

Pitabread is one of those recipes I think everybody should know how to do. They´re pretty easy to make, and compared to many other breads, fast. Since we prefer sourdough muffins, , i´ve been a lot of time without making the pitas. But i don´t want to forget the way to make them, and sometimes you just feel like eating a pita sandwhich which can go with so many combinations of food!. So the other day i made them again. Without wanting i made a funny pita heart shaped bread i thought i should post here… here it goes!

For eight pitas: 350 gr. Flour (about 2 cups white flour+ 1cup wholewheat flour ), 200ml water, 1teasp+ half salt, 1 teasp. Sugar, 8 grams yeast ( it´s enough, in fact i think smaller amounts of yeast sometimes are better ). Put them in a pretty hot oven and you´ll see how they puff, some of the pitas don´t puff, sometimes it´s because the oven is not hot enough, at least in my experience, i have them about 5 min. to 240 ªC and then some few minutes at 200º C.