Our winter recipes

We have loooong holidays in the kindergarten and at school, so we spend a lot of time together *sigh* The girl hates walking, so we are mostly at home. And not to get crazy I decided to bake every day. So here are some of the good recipes we tried. 

Carrot fruit cake

I bake this cake very often. Originally it was a recipe of carrot cake with cream cheese and the first variant (with ground almond and without dried fruit) looked like this:

 

Then I used walnut flour (not ground nut) instead of almonds, reduced sugar and oil and added dried fruit. And I got a fantastic fruit cake! It's moist and has a rich flavor.



🥕150 ml oil
🥕150 gr sugar
Beat well with a mixer. Then add
🥕2 eggs
And continue beating. Mix in
🥕250 gr finely grated carrot
🥕1/2 cup (or more) of chopped dried fruit

In a separate bowl mix (all sifted):
🥕70 gr nut flour (I prefer walnut)
🥕1 cup of flour
🥕1 tsp of baking powder
🥕2/3 tsp of baking soda (it'll soften the carrots)
🥕3/4 tsp of cinnamon or mix of spice (cinnamon, cloves, ginger etc.)
Mix everything together with a spatula. Pour the batch into a baking form and bake at 160° C (320° F) for ~30 min (depends on the thickness of your cakes).
Leave it in a rack to cool. Cover with icing and decorate to taste.

Gingerbread cookies

We bake cookies every days. In most cases the kids eat them immediately :-) It's convenient to make dough, store it in the fridge and bake small batches every day.

Mix in a pot:

🍪100 gr honey

🍪50 gr sugar

🍪90 gr butter

And heat until it's all melted. Leave to cool. Then mix in

🍪2 eggs

And beat the mixture well. Mix in sifted mixture of

🍪375 gr flour

🍪15 gr cocoa (I used carob)

🍪1 tsp of gingerbread spice mix

🍪3/4 tsp of baking soda

Knead the dough until smooth. Wrap and leave it in fridge for 5+ hrs (you can leave it for days - it'll become even better).

I roll the dough 6 mm (1/4 inch) thick, cut the cookies and bake for 7-8 mins at 180° C (350° F). Take care to take them out when still soft. They'll harden as they cool.

Honey cookies

In fact, it's a recipe of honey layered cake my mom bakes all my life. I don't bake layered cakes but I do like the taste, so I decided to try it as a cookie dough. 

Put in a heatproof bowl:

🍯3 tbsp of honey
🍯150 gr sugar

🍯5 tbsp of milk 

🍯100 gr butter

🍯1 tsp of baking soda

🍯2 eggs

Mix well with a whisk and put the bowl over a pot with boiling water (the water mustn't touch the bowl). Heat the mixture, constantly mixing it, until it starts to thicken (10-15 min). Leave to cool, then add gradually

🍯2 1/2 cups of sifted flour

The dough must be still a bit sticky. Wrap it and leave in a fridge for 2+ hours.

Bake the cookies about 7 mins at 180° C (350° F).

Wholewheat Snickerdoodles

These cookies are quick and easy to make - no cutting, you put the dough with a spoon.

Mix the dough in a bowl:

🌲1 3/4 cup of wholewheat flower

🌲1 1/2 tsp of baking powder (sift them)

🌲1 cup of sugar

🌲60 gr butter (or 45 gr oil - I tried both variants)

You'll get a sticky dough. Then take a spoon of the dough, form a ball and roll it in sugar mix:

🌲2 tbsp of sugar

🌲1/2 tsp of cinnamon

Bake them at 190 C° (375° F) and take care to leave lots of space between the balls on the baking sheet.

Sugar cookies

Simple sugar cookies but they are tasty and very good for cutting cookies. Sorry, it's the only photo I have.

Beat well
🥨1 cup of butter
🥨1 cup of sugar
Until it's white and fluffy. Add
🥨1 egg

And beat again. Then add sifted
🥨2 tsp of baking powder
🥨3 cups of flour
And knead the dough. No need to chill it, you can bake immediately.

I'll add the recipes as we try more cookies :-)

Christmas peg dolls

In fact, they are not Christmas, but we (all parents in the kindergarten) had to make 3 peg dolls for our kid for Christmas. I have twins in the kindergarten, so I had to make 2 sets. The kids got them 'from Santa', so they don't know I'm the Santa :-)

Strawberry and raspberry

Flower gnomes (the sunflower was from a store)

Rainbow gnomes (the kids are rainbow fans)

And the cases

Some December crafts

I made three different gnomes from wool and the kids called them 'trije dobri možje', i.e. three good men - St. Nicolas, Santa and Father Frost. I didn't know how to use them and ended up with a door wreath.

And I finally finished the aviator hat for the younger son (I started it about 4 years ago for the older son)

Here's the older one (leather glasses are the same, I made them 2-sided)

And we practiced making paper 3D trees

The best homemade play dough (cooked)

I've been cooking this play dough for 3 years and I feel like it's time to share the recipe and my experience with it. I must confess I never tried other recipes for play dough, but those, who tried, admit this one is the best. It's so soft, elastic, no grease, easy and cheap to make and store. I call it 'fried play dough', because it needs to be cooked in a frying pan. There's no need to fry it, just heat well and it becomes similar to eclair pastry. Of course, I didn't invent it and you can find the recipe on the internet. The reason I'm writing this post is that I never saw some tips on it in the recipes, which help get a very smooth consistency.

The recipe

The ingredients are simple:
- all-purpose white flour: you need simple flour without any additives. The last time I was making tons of this dough I tried type 'ostra' (Slovenian type), because I had 2 packs of it and wanted to get rid of them. It worked even better, because it was easier to mix it without clumps and the dough turned out whiter;
- water - room temperature or lukewarm;
- salt - any salt, but the smaller its crystals are, the easier it is to dissolve it;
- acid (citric acid, cream of tartar or lemon juice) - I use citric acid, because I always have it for cleaning the kettle. Acid allows the dough to be stored longer, so if you don't store it, you can omit it;
- oil (refined) - makes it more elastic;
- food coloring.

The general proportions are:
1 cup of flour
1 cup of water
1/3 cup of salt
1 tsp of citric acid/ 6 tsp of lemon juice/ 2 tsp of cream of tartar
1 tbsp of oil

What's the trick?

The process is simple: mix well everything and cook. And this is where I feel important to share the main trick: dissolve the salt first! Types of salt are different and its weight in 1/3 cup is different. If you don't dissolve it, you'll get hard crystals in the play dough. No catastrophe but we want the smoothest dough, don't we? So, from our school chemistry we remember (do we? 😉) that max. amount of salt we can dissolve in 100 gr of water is 36 gr. You can use kitchen scales and take 250 gr of water and 90 gr of salt. But I take it roughly and mix until the salt (and acid crystals) is dissolved. Usually some salt can't be dissolved and I leave it on the bottom. For the dough I mix a cup of flour and and a cup of salty-acidic solution.

I don't recommend cooking (on the frying pan I mean) more than that amount of dough (1 cup of flour etc) at a time, because it becomes harder to mix it and control the consistency.

As for the coloring, you can add it to the dough mix before cooking. If you want to make several colors, you can also cook a lot of white dough, divide it and then mix in the coloring. In that case take care to use gloves (for each color) and knead the dough on a surface you can easily clean after each color. For my kids I cook only 1-2 colors every time (and add the coloring before cooking), because they'll mix all colors and it'll become brownish.

Here's a video (not mine) of the cooking process: VIDEO

The last time we cooked 7,2 kg of the play dough for the winter fair at school.

 How to store

You need to wrap your play dough in a plastic film and that's it. We store it wrapped in a box with cutters for the dough. However, you can also make bigger amounts and store it in a fridge. Once, I stored it in a fridge for a year! And it was still fine. You may only need to peel white salty layer if it appears. Also if kids leave it unwrapped (and they always do), it won't dry out immediately. Actually, you can make something of it, brush it with acrylic finish and leave it dry. Without finish it'll get white salty layer. 

Winter is here!

Snowflakes for my kids

Queen Snowstorm for the kindergarten

Queen Winter for the 3rd form

Queen Snow for the 1st form