Mother Daughter Bake Off

So last week I was quite sick, and was home for the week. And since my daughter attends the same day care that I work at, it was just easier to keep her home than get dressed and go out of the house twice a day to both deliver and collect her. (My husband was working a split shift that week, and was unable to help with either of these, which would have made all the difference).

Towards the end of the week, I was starting to feel better. And my daughter was going nuts. She'd watched a lot of tv. She'd played every computer girl-game known to man. She'd painted and drawn so many pictures that the kitchen and living room walls were covered. She had pearled and beaded, built sculptures with Lego, played with her dolls and gone outside to take pictures with her camera (we'll chat about that later) until she just could not do these things any more.

Finally, she was bored.

So I asked her if she wanted to make cup cakes from scratch. Not from a package.

I didn't need to ask her twice.

Before going further, do realize that this is NOT a food blog. You will NOT find professionally taken pictures here. If you want that, why not visit two of my favorite food blogs:

The Pioneerwoman Cooks: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/

and

Everybody Likes Sandwiches: http://everybodylikessandwiches.blogspot.com/

In the meantime, this is the story of my day with my daughter.


First, I don't normally use recipes when I cook food. I'm more of what you would call an intuitive chef. However, I do know where my boundaries lie.... usually anything that comes after dinner and involves dessert. This would include cupcakes.

My recipe came from a Norwegian recipe book pictured below. spis drikk lev, which translates as eat drink liv.



Oh yes, and before I get sued, I should say that this book was created and put together by Fran Ward, to whom I am eternally grateful for. Her hard, industrious work will be an inspiration to me for many years to come.


The recipe chose is called SPICED CUPCAKES, found on page 32, as seen below.



Unlike most North American recipes, the ingredients are measured out in weight.


First, 250 grams of flour are tossed into a bowl of your choice.



Next, 2 teaspoons of baking powder.

And then 175 grams of brown sugar. Mine was quite hard since I had not used it for quite some time (perhaps close to a year?) and I needed to spend a lot of time breaking it apart with a fork.

Next go the spices: .25 teaspon of cinnamon and .25 teaspoon of freshlly ground nutmeg. I ignored the instructions here. First, I added a lot more spices (Norwegians are NOT known for spicing up their foods) and added ginger as well. Secondly, I doubt I will ever in my life have a fresh nutmeg to ground, so dried powder had to suffice.

In the meantime, my daughter needed a job to do, so that she could rightfully say that she made the cupcakes with a little help from me. Thus I gave her the most important job: chopping up two bananas into tiny pieces.

We just won't tell anyone that after 4 minutes she thought that this was not fun any more and wanted me to finish the job she started.

I chopped up the apple needed.

As for the liquid ingredients, one needs to whip together: 1 deciliter (100 ml) of milk, one egg and 3 tablespoons of peanut oil (I only had raps oil).

Then you pour the mixture into your dry ingredients:

And mix it together until it is nice and thick like this:

Then you put in all the chopped up fruit:

And mix these until the batter looks like this:

Then you fill up the cup cake tins.....

And give the bowl to your daughter who is eternally grateful because she has NOT had ANY fun this week.

And ignore her when she's still working on it 15 minutes later.

Now, as the cup cakes were baking, the house filled with a wonderful smell that reminded me of autumn: apples, spices, thick breads.... Mmmmmm......

Now when the cup cakes came out of the oven, they certainly looked a lot different than what was in the book...

One cannot see it from the picture below, but they really did look a lot different.

But they tasted wonderfully. I would definitely make these again any time soon. Even if my daughter refuses to help me chop up bananas.