...am hopefully done with are the cookies.

And as I promised yesterday, I'll be making quite a long post once again... full with our favorite holiday snacks.



All right, first, let's start with the salty ones. Here's what you will need:


For those who don't understand the pic, let me write it out: puff pastry, a little salt, some sesame seeds, some cumin seeds, one egg (we had a few eggs broken in a little accident from before, that's the reason why you see three there), and a bit of grated cheese. 

All of this are for three different kind of snacks. 

So now what you have to do is this. First off, cut up the pastry. 


One third of it will be used to make the cheesy ones, for that you'll have to roll them up like a little crescent, like this: 


When you are done with the rolling up, coat it with some egg, so the cheese would stick to it, then place the cheese. 


When it's done, place them all in a pan -on top of some baking paper, of course - and salt them up a little - then into the oven with them. 

Now, until this one gets ready, here's the second option: cut up the second third of the pastry, coat it all with egg, and then sprinkle some cumin (and salt) on top. You don't need to do anything else with these, just place them in the oven. 



They will look like this: 


Tasty, isn't it? 

And now, for the third and last part. 

Cut all of the pastry up the same way. Then take each of them in your hand, and twist them 2 times, until it will look like a nice little bow: 


Place the egg on each side of the bow, then scatter sesame seeds on it - and don't forget the salt! 

All goes into the oven, and when it's done it will look like this: 


See? Easy, fast and tasty. You can never go wrong with these. (It's always good to have some puff pastry in your freezer just in case) 

These are really popular, especially the sesame ones. We actually used to buy them from a store, but then we figured out how to make it on our own, and believe me, they are even better this way. 

But now, let's start off with the special sweets. 

For the first one you will need the following: 

40 dkg flour
25 dkg powdered sugar 
2 eggs
1 baking powder
2,5 dl milk
10 dkg margarine 

These are for the pastry. For the cream, you'll have to get the following:

25 dkg margarine (or butter)
20 dkg powdered sugar
6-8 tablespoons of milk
4 tablespoons of rum
4 tablespoons of cocoa powder
1 big pack of grated coconut 

Now, simply mix together everything for the pastry - or is it a cake? a sponge? whatever. 


Yeah, mom used a grater for the margarine so we could mix it together more easily. 

Once you get a nice, smooth cream, pour it all out in a pan and bake it in the oven for about 25-30 minutes. 


It will look something like this. Now, place it somewhere safe so it can cool down, and until then get the chocolate cream ready: 

You will have to mix together everything I wrote up there - but leave the the coconut out! That's for later use. Melt them down and mix them together, so you'll get something that looks like melted chocolate. 


Simple, right? 

Now put this somewhere safe too, so it cools a bit also. But don't forget to stir it from time to time, so the top of it doesn't crust up. 

Until they wait to be handled some more, let's prepare another one. 

For this, you'll need the following: 




All right, so let me write it all down: about 1kg of biscuits should suffice. I'm saying this, because it will eat up all your cream and you'll probably be left with the only option to heat up some more milk so it will be enough. 

You'll also need 1 margarine, 3 tablespoons of cocoa, 30 dkg of sugar, 30 dkg of walnuts, rum, milk, and pitted sour cherry (we always have some home made sour cherry compotes just for this purpose). 

Now, what you need to do is to take the walnuts and the biscuits and grate them down until they become a fine powder, about like this: 


Now, melt down the margarine with the sugar, cocoa, rum and milk, until you get basically the same consistency as with the previous one. While it is still hot, pour it on the walnut and biscuit, then mix them all together WITH A SPOON. At least, until it gets just cold enough so you can handle it. Which means, it should still be pretty warm, because if the whole thing gets absolutely cold, you'll have a hard time shaping it. 



When it's cold enough, you'll have to mix it with your hand - don't worry about getting messy, you'll have to get messy with this one anyway! Also, you'll need to do this with your hand, so you can see if it's still too dry or not. As I said the biscuits tend to differ every single time, thus sometimes the chocolate cream you made won't be enough. In this case you can either make some more chocolate cream, either just heat up some milk and pour it on top. You'll know when it's ready, because it won't crumble in your hands when you press it together, instead it will leave a little oily feel on it. 

So, now that you have this, get out a little powdered sugar. You don't need much, just to coat your cookie figurines. We have a specially made one, that looks like a pine tree. 


See, what I mean? 

Now get a blob of the cookie, and press it nicely into the form. (Since our has a larger bottom than top, we have to elongate the blob's top, so it would will it till the end). 


Once it's all nicely in there, make a little hole in it, and put in there one of those sour cherries. It will be a delicious surprise! 


Then cover it nicely up, make sure that it's all nice and straight, and with a smooth thrust against your hand unsheathe the tasty little morsel from the form. It will look like this: 


See, the powdered sugar made sure that it didn't stick to the form - and now that you took it out of it, it also kinda looks like the pine has snow on it. Neat! 

And now that you are done with this, let's get back to the other. 

You will have to cut the whole cake up in big squares. And since the cream must be all nice and cool by now, you can get messy once again. Place the cake into the cream, so it's coated in all 6 sides, then roll it around in the coconut. It looks awesome, doesn't it? 


Oh, by the way. 

The previous one's dough can be also used to make some awesome roulade. 

You can place some of it on a big plastic food wrap, and then make some yummy filling. We chose raspberry, cause my sister is a fan of those things. 


See? Just like that. Now, stick to the wrap, an droll it up, first from one end and then the other, than wrap it all up and put it in the freezer so it will maintain its shame when you gut it up. 

For this one you'll have to make sure, tho, that both the dough and the cream are hard enough, otherwise you'll get quite a mess, with them mixing together on one side and pouring out on your table on the other. (Thus, we will more than likely stick to eating this one on our own :P) 

So what do you thing about these? Did you learn anything new? 
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