Sweet dreams are made of this...

... sugar, cinnamon, orange. For me these are the flavors of the Christmas season, as many of the Portuguese Christmas sweets have at least one of them. Especially cinnamon! Whenever I smell cinnamon, I smell Christmas!

Recently I have made one of the most popular sweets in the Portuguese cuisine at this time of the year for the Portuguese Christmas Party in Singapore, called "carrot cakes". The literal translation would actually be "carrot dreams" and they are nothing more nothing less than fried batter. Traditionally, they are either made with carrots or pumpkin. This time I used carrots, but they can be replaced by pumpkin.

Last year I posted a recipe to prepare the carrot cakes, but now I´ve tried a new one that I think to be even better. Here´s how to...

Ingredients

750 gr carrots
370 gr sugar
370 gr flour
3 eggs
Peel of 1 orange
Juice of 1 orange
1 tea spoon of baking powder
Oil to fry the cakes, sugar and cinnamon

Peel the carrots and boil them together with the orange peel until they are soft. Drain the water, remove the peel and puree the carrots. Then add all the ingredients by the following order: sugar, orange juice, eggs and finally flour, always mixing (it´s better if you use a mixing machine). The batter should rest for a few hours. Then deep fry table spoons of the batter (max 5 minutes), remove the excess oil and roll the cakes a mix of sugar and cinnamon.

The carrot cakes are ready to be savored!

All I want for Christmas...

Christmas has arrived earlier for me and my family... Lucas was born last friday, December 13th, and he´s so gorgeous and so sweet! Everything went so well, he´s healthy and he has not inherited the diabetes from me. So what better way to celebrate than with a box of doughnuts from Krispy Kream?
 
This American company recently opened its 1st shop in Singapore right next to the hospital where Lucas was born, so I had agreed with my husband in advance that he didn´t need to come to visit me with flowers, because all I wanted was to roll myself in sugar! And that´s what he did, he brought me doughnuts :)

Obviously I didn´t have all this myself, only ate 3 and it felt SOOOO good! Since then I haven´t really taken sugary food, I just needed to end my diet in a memorable way and understand all this fuss around Krispy Kream doughnuts!

Let the Christmas celebrations begin!

Last Saturday we had our 1st Christmas celebration of the year, also the 1st Portuguese Christmas party in Singapore for the Portuguese parents & children. The occasion couldn´t have been more perfect to meet other Portuguese parents, but also to share our traditional dishes at this time of the year. It´s amazing how we all have in common this passion for cooking and for keeping our Portuguese traditions alive miles away from home. Most Portuguese women I know and have met at this party have a genuine interest in cooking and are excellent cooks from what I could see.

Four large tables were hardly enough to place all the food that everybody prepared, from pies to cakes, meat, desserts and all the very typical Christmas delicacies that no one can resist... except me, due to the gestational diabetes. Hard though this might be, I try not to make many exceptions in my current diet, specially now that I´m only 2 weeks away from my due date. Yes, 2 weeks!

My contribution to the party was codfish cakes - that disappear in a blink of an eye! - and carrot cakes. Last year year I posted a recipe to prepare the carrot cakes, but last Saturday I tried a new recipe that it´s even better! I´m going to post it this week... unless Lucas decides it´s time to go to the hospital :)

For now I leave you some photos of our 1st Portuguese Christmas Celebration in Singapore and mouth-watering table!

 

Delicious Quiche in 15 minutes!

Looking for a super simple dish without compromising the flavours? Here´s one good example - a quiche of bacon and spinach. I made this recipe for the first time a few days ago for a potluck and it was a hit!

Ingredients for the dough:

200 gr of flour
90 gr of butter
45 gr of water
salt
1/2 teaspoon of sugar

Mix these ingredients altogether and kneed the dough. This should take about 5 minutes. As it doesn´t need to grow you can roll out the dough immediatelly by putting some flour on the counter and with a rolling pin roll it from the center out until you get a round shape. Place the dough on a round tray with a detachable bottom.

Ingredients for the filling:

150gr of bacon
150 gr of grated cheese, any you like
A hand full of spinach
4 eggs
200 gr of cream

Place the bacon, cheese and spinach on top of the dough. You can choose replace the bacon and spinach by other ingredients you like. I personally think bacon makes everything better! Then mix the eggs with the cream and pour it into the tray as well.

Bake the quiche in the oven for about 25 minutes at 180º, until the top gets this beautiful golden brown colour.

Could this recipe be any simpler?