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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.

Due to some personal problems which are having me under some stress i haven´t felt like writing much, nor writing nor reading which i enjoy a lot, just troubles on my mind. But i found the time to make ginger cookies, some good ginger cookies!!! Even mini cookies for our hamsters as they also love them. Someone in the comments said she´d never tried ginger cookies, and of course i told her to give it a try as they are worth it. Of course it can depend on the ingredients you use, the recipe you have… it can change so much from one to another………………………………………………………………………..———————–

i remember i wanted to try a gingercookie which was soft, ( the cookies i make are crusty ) and i choose one with molasses. Well, the thing is that the time i was mixing the cookie i already realised the dough smelt bad bad arghhhh…. how was that possibly??? Normally the mixing of the ingredients smell so delicious! Especially when they include spices such as ginger, cinnamon mmm. I had a look and i saw the guilty thing::: molasses!!! Here in Spain is difficult to find molasses, so when i saw these ones at the supermarket i thought; ohhhh here they are!!! and bought them.. to my surprise they didn´t smell very good but nothing to imagine it would alter the result of the cookies… it did.

I wonder which are the famous molasses they use in America. Please let me know. This one i bought is made from brown sugar, of course it wears a kind of acid additive which i think might be what causes the not so good smell. I bought at the natural food parsley molasses and they taste much better. Haven´t tried them with cookies yet. I would really appreciate if someone could get me informed about the molasses stuff.

Okay enough of that, here i am gonna post the recipe for the ginger cookies, give it a try and let me know if you like them, don´t taste them when still hot, i think they taste better when they´ve already cooled,or the day after they´re done.

Ginger cookies: 500 grams flour, 200 gr sugar, ½ teasp. Salt, ½ baking soda, 2 teasp. Cinnamon, 1 teasp. Ginger, a pinch clove, 1 tablesp and half honey, 2 eggs, 150 gr butter.

Mix dry ingredients, add the wet ingredients in the order they appear and let them rest for 2 hours in the fridge.

Bake them about 10-15 minuts about 200 ºC.

I used half of the ingredients and i got about 35 cookies…. + many mini cookies for our hamsters!!!! Oh and i don´t include the 2 gingergirls that got burnt :(!

Please take care so that the cookies do not get burnt, as they should be pretty thin, since taste is much better. i always make the first bunch of cookies wider ( i don´t realise they should be thinner ) and then correct it, you will appreciate the difference in the pictures. I use a rolling pan for getting the thin texture.

This time the cookies weren´t as delicious and addictive as other times!!! i got so surprised! but come to think about it, and i know why is that. we went to one of those big supermarkets and i bought a big ginger package, since i use a lot of ginger. i saw the color was a bit different, but i never thought it would change so much the final result!! again… with these things i realise how important it is to use good quality products. The ginger i bought is supposed to be ginger, but though i added an extra teaspoon since we love the flavour, you can´t hardly appreciate it!. I don´t know what the hell they´re doing with food. I will use this for fish or meat dishes, but not for cookies!!

The truth is that since here in Spain it is impossible to get gingerbread molds, i decided to make some with ceramic stuff, and we went to the shop to look for the materials to do it. How are we gonna make the ceramic cookie cutters??? No idea, but i asked my bf to go with me to the shop and see if i could get any idea. At the same time, I was also looking on ebay. I saw a cute gingerbread family set. Wow! It was really cool, a green plastic set of 4 gingerbread molds. So i bid on it and went to sleep, ( there were 2 hours left for the auction to end ). It was about 1 am and i was pretty sure the molds would be mine… But the following morning… surprise!!! Someone outbid me! I was so dissapointed… and more …. so annoyed!!! The thing is that I lost the gingerbread molds, i was looking for more but the other ones i liked didn´t ship to my country. .. L… ……

And 2 or 3 days later… surprise!!!The same molds with the only difference that they were metallic, so i bought them and… they´re already here! Something as usual in other countries here it is impossible to find, so i´m so glad J … In the end i don´t have a gingerbread mold but 4!!! The whole family. ¡!!. I got them the same day i got the new hk stamps, and they´re still unopened in the package.AT LAST I HAVE GINGERBREAD MOLDS YEAHHH WOOOOOHOOO SO SO GLAD…now what!!!???? Now they´re asking for my fave cookies GINGER COOKIES!!!

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Fresh from the mail I´ve got new stamps!!! Let´s celebrate the HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Oh my God look what they´re selling in a shop next to my house!!! A ‘happy toaster’. J. I don´t have any toaster so ….. it´s the perfect excuse for one! ( i wonder what´s gonna think my boyfriend about it )… but see the cute paintings on the toasts!!!

        I have the HK Sandwich Maker, the only bad thing is that i can´t use it since the american electric system is not the same that here, so… i must say it´s a very important decorating element in my kitchen, It gives a cheerful atmosphere. As i say, she´s the queen of my kitchen!!!

And look who´s next to the toaster in the catalog!!! Mr. Sponge Bob Squarepants!!

 Yes! I love the cartoons!! Their sense of humour is pretty hard to find. Some episodes are more childish, but others are Laugh out Loud!  And, as a matter of fact, he´s also in my house! He´s decorating our living-room. I have a Bob ‘plush’ who talks, he says things like ‘ i love to sing!!!’, ‘ you´re my best friend’, he makes strange noises, he even sneezes J!! My sister loves it, and my bf´s sister loved it too when she saw it ( she said we could have bought her one hee hee ), and none of them are kids