• 1 tbs butter
• 3 large ripe plums
• 2-3 tbs brown sugar
• ½ cup rum
• 1 cinnamon stick

Slice the plums into half inch discs. Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the brown sugar and plums. Coat the plums with the butter and brown sugar mixture and let simmer on low heat until plum skin isn’t firm any more. Add the rum and drop a match stick into it. Let the fire burn out by itself and add the cinnamon stick. Let simmer in the remnants for about 5-10 minutes or until plums are soft.

Pro tip: Serve with vanilla ice cream, I didn’t have any – but any compote is good on ice cream ;)

The recipes for the basic meringues and the espresso zabaglione are the same, so I will only tell you what you need extra.

For the meringues you will need about 1.5oz of dark chocolate (around 54%). Melt the chocolate in a double boiler and let cool down, but not stiffen. Just so it doesn’t burn your fingers, stir it down carefully in the meringue batter. Make small cookie shapes and bake at 300F for about 10-15 minutes.If you did it right they will rise a tiny bit and be fluffy on the inside. If you did it wrong, like I did, they will be flat, crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. Still good though :)

And for the zabaglione we are trading the Grand Marnier for 1 cup hot espresso. So whisk up the egg yolks and sugar in a double boiler and when thickened and ready just add the hot espresso slowly and whisk it to a smooth liquid and serve in espresso cups.

Delicious!

It requires a bit of work but all in all this shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.

Here’s what we need:

• 4-5 apples
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ cup gluten free flour (you can use regular flour too, same amount!)
• 2 oz of butter

Chop up the apples and put them in a greased up pan. Peeled apples are preferable. Mix the flour and the sugar together and pour the mix evenly over the apples. Cut up the butter in really thin leaves and cover the whole pan with almost no space in between the butter leaves. You can mix the butter into the sugar/flour mix before you pour it over the apples, but it’s not fun trying to mix 2 oz of butter into a cup mixture.

Put into the oven at 375F for about 25 minutes, until the top of the pie is golden brown and the butter and sugars has mixed together so there is no more floury parts. If after 25 minutes there still is, just add a tiny bit of butter on top of the floury areas.

When baked it will look crumbly and be a bit crunchy, sweet and fruity. Serve with vanilla custard. I used Marsan-sauce, a Swedish style vanilla custard that you can find at IKEA. Hey, you can even serve it with Zabaglione, it’s a custard too!

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

So it’s a hot dessert so it should be served immediately after prepared.

What we’ll need:

• 2 egg yolks
• 1 tbs sugar
• ½ tbs Grand Marnier

In a double boiler whisk together yolks and sugar until thickened like custard. Be careful about the boiling water touching the bowl you’re using as a double boiler, we don’t want the eggs to scramble! Mix in the Grand Marnier and serve in espresso cups.

The blend:

• 2 egg whites
• ½ cup of sugar

Make sure your eggs are room temperature, or leave them out of the fridge for about 30 minutes. This will allow them to fluff more than refrigerated eggs. Crack the eggs and separate the white from the yolks in two separate bowls. We will use the yolks later in the second Valentine’s Weekend recipe.

In the bowl with the two egg whites, start stirring and pour in the sugar. Stir constantly for about 6-10 minutes (or longer, depending on the temperature of your eggs). The batter should be white and shiny and you should be able to turn the bowl upside down. But you don’t want it to have hard peaks. Hard peaks as in when you lift up your whisk the little tops that form stands solid.

Now pour the batter into cupcake tins and bake in the over for about 45 minutes at 300F. After about 30 minutes check in on them to make sure they haven’t burned.

The top of the meringue will be hard and crunchy while the inside is soft and spongy. You can tap the top gently with a fork or whatever tool you chose to use to see how the crust is doing while cooking.

Let them cool and serve :)

Exotic flavours is trendy right now in the chocolate business. Bacon, curry, rosemary and ginger/wasabi. Plus many, many more. I decided to try it out and copy one of these on a nutella like hazelnut spread by Leonidas Chocolate.

For this I used:

• Leonidas Chocolate hazelnut spread
• A pinch of ground red hot chilli peppers

I spread it out on a bagel and sprinkled the chilli on top. Simple as that. I don’t think I will make it again, not because it was bad. But spicy desserts just isn’t my thing.

What you will need:
1-2 bananas
2 kiwis
2-3 tablespoons of honey

It is super easy to make, just peel the bananas and cut them up like little coins. Cut off the skin of the kiwis and do the same. Mix them together and pour on the honey. Don’t mix after the honey. Finally garnish with some mint (and if you want to imitate fully also garnish with part of a honey comb).

The strawberries: These makes a big mess, I tell you. Have some wax paper or aluminium foil ready for them after dipping desired amount of berry into the chocolate. Then let the chocolate set and harden for about 30-60 minutes. I had enough chocolate over for probably one or two more dips where it would only go half way or I could throw in all the remaining strawberries and roll them around on the bottom for a somewhat even coating. Still good!

The blueberry bar: So even AFTER the strawberry chocolate bath there was melted chocolate leftovers, so I mixed down some dried blueberries and put the mix in aluminium foil and wrapped them up. Then I slammed each side flat, so it would get the bar shape. Took a few beatings before it took a good square shape, but as you can see in the picture it was well worth it. And it tastes good too!

Here’s a post to enjoy over the weekend! Part two on Monday!

This post could pretty much have the images speak for themselves =)

^ – the true meaning of chocolate covered strawberries!

There were chocolate leftovers so I mixed down some dried blueberries into the melted chocolate and made a blueberry chocolate bar.

Everything was dipped/made with pure dark chocolate from Leonidas Chocolate!

Looks good huh ^___^

Just chopped up some strawberries, maybe 5-8 big ones. Poured them into a little cup, sprinkled sugar on them. Poured some milk over them and sprinkled some more sugar on them, yes. I like them sweet! Very Swedish!