make life sweeter!

These little balls were part of the Middle Eastern style dessert I served on my birthday party. They are incredibly easy to make, require no baking or cooking, are gluten-free, vegan, sugar-free (well almost), dairy-free and most important: delicious! The only two real ingredients are walnuts and dates. Those two are made into a paste in the food processor, rolled into balls and (optionally) rolled in icing sugar. Their taste reminded me of marzipan but with a walnut taste. The dates make the balls moist and sweet but not heavy on the date taste. Will try making them with almonds next time, see if it's even closer to marzipan.
As this is a recipe that doesn't require any baking or cooking, I'm sending it over to Grace of A Southern Grace for her event Beat the Heat.

Halawa tamr or date and walnut balls (from the Dutch edition of A New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden)

250 g (9 oz) walnuts
250 g (9 oz) dates, stoned
icing sugar (optional)

Process the walnuts and dates in a food processor until they are a paste. Roll into small balls and roll through icing sugar if desired.

btw ever seen such a short recipe?

The first week of August is World Breastfeeding Week. World Breastfeeding Week is an annual event to promote breastfeeding on a global scale. (for Dutch readers: Wereld Borstvoeding Week will be later this year, in week 40).
So why would a food blogger who blogs about sweet stuff want to blog about breastfeeding? There are many reasons why, for starters, breast milk is FOOD and it's SWEET :) and besides that, it's the very best a child can get.
To help promote breastfeeding I'm organizing a foodblogging event. The rules are very simple: prepare a sweet dish (it's a sweet blog after all ;) with milk as an ingredient and post it on your blog if you have one, if not you can still enter (I'll give you the specifics at the bottom of the page).
To give you some background as to why I'm organizing this event I'd like to share a little of my personal experiences with breastfeeding.
I always knew I wanted to breastfeed my children but never really thought or knew much about it besides that it's a good thing. In the Netherlands 79% of the mothers start out breastfeeding but by the time babies are three months only about 35% are still breastfeeding (2005). And three months was what I sort of had in mind too. My classes would start when my oldest son was three months so formula would be more convenient or so I thought. During my pregnancy I read a bit more about breastfeeding and realized that it would be best to breastfeed for six months instead of three. So ok, I was going to do six months. At this point I realized there was something like a breast pump to help realize this goal as well.
I sort of romanticized the whole breastfeeding thing before my son was born. Turned out that breastfeeding wasn't all sunshine and roses...and I didn't even had any (major) problems! All of you breastfeeding mums know what suction power babies have ;) it doesn't feel completely comfortable, especially not in the beginning. So I breastfed but I can't say I really enjoyed doing it for the first three months, I didn't dislike it either though. After about three months I really started enjoying breastfeeding. I still thought, ok I'll do six months and we'll see how I feel by that time. So six months went by and the thought of stopping just never crossed my mind, breastfeeding was just so convenient. I couldn't imagine formula could be easier than breastfeeding. I breastfed my eldest till he was 19 months. He stopped drinking himself. That had everything to do with the fact that the milk flow subsided a lot due to me being pregnant again.
I'm still breastfeeding my youngest son (13 months) and haven't had any problems (I know I'm lucky that way). After breastfeeding for more than three years (with the exception of 3 ½ months during pregnancy) you could say I'm a pro ;) I've read a lot about it and am so happy I can give /have given my children all the benefits that come with it. And if this event will motivate even one mother (to-be) to breastfeed or breastfeed for a longer time it will make me feel like I've made a difference :)
Ok, enough with the personal stuff ;) let's go to some facts and figures that I found on www.breastfeeding.com.
Did you know that breastfed children:
Have a higher IQ?
Have less ear infections?
Have less food allergies?
Have lower chances of leukemia?
And the list goes on....

And not only the child benefits from breastfeeding, there's plenty of advantages for the mother too.
Did you know that breastfeeding:
Helps you loose weight faster? (didn't work for me unfortunately, luckily I didn't gain too much during pregnancy)
Helps you be more relaxed? (worked for me)
Saves money?
Gives protection against different kinds of cancer? (breast, uterine, ovarian)



DETAILS FOR Got Milk?

- Got Milk? is open to bloggers and non-bloggers.
- Entries submitted to Got Milk? must be made specifically for this event (pictures can be submitted to things like DMBLGiT though)

How to enter?

1. Prepare a sweet dish with milk as an ingredient.
You can use any type of milk (cow, goat, sheep, ...), non-dairy is allowed as long as is something that is generally substituted for milk.

2. Blog about it and link back to this post somewhere between now and August 7th

3. Send an email to: linda AT kovacevic DOT nl with your:
- name
- approximate location
- blog name
- blog url
- name dish
- permalink dish
- picture (maximum dimension of 150 pixels)

Non-bloggers: email me your name, location, name of your dish and a picture of your dish

Looking forward to your entries :)



As for the picture at the top, it's a Middle Eastern dessert called muhallabiya in Arabic or malabi in Hebrew. I've blogged about it a couple of years ago. It’s a milk pudding thickened with rice flour and flavoured with rosewater or orange flower water. I love it especially with rosewater!

Muhallabiya/Malabi (from The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden)

Serves 6

1 l (4 ¼ cup) milk
80 g (2 ¾ oz) rice flour
80 g (2 ¾ oz) sugar
2 tbs rose water
chopped pistachio nuts to garnish

Slowly add 50-100 ml (¼-½ cup) of the milk to the rice flour - whilst stirring - until all the rice flour has been dissolved. Make sure there are no lumps.
Bring the rest of the milk to a boil in a heavy bottomed saucepan. Add the rice flour mixture whilst stirring. Lower the heat and allow to simmer for 5 minutes, stirring often. Stir in the sugar. Add the rose water and stir to mix.
Pour the pudding into a big bowl or 6 small bowls. Sprinkle the tops with some caster sugar to prevent a skin. Allow to cool. Garnish with pistachio before serving.

Variations:
- substitute corn flour for rice flour (or use a mixture of the both)
- substitute orange flour water for rose water
- add 1 tsp ground cardamom seeds with the rose water

My mind went kind of blank when I started thinking about an entry for this month's breakfast themed Go Ahead Honey, It's Gluten Free! My breakfast consists of a very boring type of porridge. It consists of a mixture of 7 different precooked grain flakes. You just add hot milk and voila: breakfast! My breakfast used to be slices of bread with some cheese or peanut butter but during my last pregnancy I started with the porridge and sort of never stopped. So my creativity on breakfast is not very big. At first the only thing that came to mind was making kruidkoek, a Dutch treat that you can eat for breakfast too but I didn't feel like experimenting with gluten-free flour this time. I needed something a little more fool-proof, and that something was granola. I don't eat it that much for breakfast but now that summer is around the corner it's a nice change from my boring old porridge ;)
I found a recipe that was very very easy and simple in Trish Deseine's book I want CHOCOLATE! but it looked like it was a bit too easy so I consulted the big world of food blogs. I remembered Warda of 64 sq ft kitchen posting about it a while back. Turned out she used a recipe she found on The Traveler's Lunchbox. I sort of followed that one. Instead of using water I used orange blossom water hoping that the taste would come through, unfortunately you couldn't really taste it. Maybe you would notice if you left it out though. The recipe stated that it would take 1-1 1/4 hours to bake in total. It did mine the maximum amount of time but that was too much. Especially the hazelnuts started to taste a little too dark. The granola was still delicious but would have been even better without the 'dark' taste, maybe you would even have tasted the orange blossom water...

I'm sending this recipe over to Noami of Straight into Bed, Cakefree and Dried.



I halved the original recipe and used these amounts of 'filling':

50 g hazelnuts
50 g almonds
20 g sesame seeds
30 g dessicated coconut
50 g candied orange peel

Also I used orange blossom water instead of regular water.

For procedures check out the recipe here.

Barbara of winosandfoodies is supporting LIVESTRONG Day 2008 by hosting A Taste of Yellow. LIVESTRONG Day is the Lance Armstrong Foundation's one-day initiative to raise awareness and funds for the cancer fight. And this year it will occur on Tuesday, May 13.
To enter Barbara's A Taste of Yellow recipes must contain an element of yellow food.
This dessert was mainly made with ingredients that I had to use up and as one of them was pineapple it was eligible for A Taste of Yellow. I rarely make rice pudding but sometimes I come across a tasty version on a blog I keep thinking to myself that I have to make it more often. I even bought some short-grain rice for that purpose. It had been sitting in my pantry for quite a while before I finally made this lemon and coconut rice pudding. I only had 150 ml (⅔ cup) of coconut milk which turn out not being enough to give it a coconut-y taste, so after cooking the pudding I added some creamed coconut. You don't have to use both though. I would think that doubling the amount of coconut milk and leaving out the creamed coconut would get you the same result more or less. Or vice versa: doubling the creamed coconut and leaving out the coconut milk but than you'd have to use more milk.
I used fresh pineapple but was silly enough not to remember that (uncooked) fresh pineapple and diary do not combine well. There is this enzyme that makes it taste bitter. Totally forgot about that. It wasn't that bitter luckily but I would recommend either cooking fresh pineapple or simply using canned pineapple.
The pudding by itself is delicious as well and even better with some chopped banana. But I didn't think rice pudding with chopped banana was photogenic enough so I layered it with some pineapple puree :)



Lemon and coconut rice pudding layered with pineapple and banana

serves 6

1 lemon, slice off yellow part of the peel
850 ml (3 ⅔ cup) milk
150 ml (⅔ cup) coconut milk
100 g (3 ½) round rice
60 g (2 oz) sugar
25 g (1 oz) creamed coconut
375 ml (1 ½ cup) pineapple puree (when using fresh pineapple make sure to cook it before layering otherwise the combination with diary will create a bitter taste, alternatively you could use canned pineapple)
3-4 banana's, sliced

Bring the lemon together with the milk and coconut milk to a simmer. Allow the lemon to steep in the milk mixture for 20 minutes. Take out the pieces of lemon rind.
Add the rice while stirring. Allow to simmer for about 30 minutes, stir the mixture once in a while. Add the sugar and creamed coconut and stir until combined. Allow to cool down. Stir once in a while to prevent the forming of a skin.
Spoon a layer of rice pudding into a glass. Spoon about 2 tbs of pineapple puree onto the rice pudding. Add a layer of banana slices. Repeat with another series of layers.

A quick reminder that the deadline for Go Ahead Honey, it's Gluten Free! is coming Monday 24rd of March. So there is still some time to enter your gluten-free baked children's birthday treat!
Even though the truffles above are gluten-free they are not baked and not eligible for the event. However...they are eligible for this month's SHF hosted by Danielle of Habeas Brûlée. I made these orange truffles a while back as birthday presents for two girlfriends of mine. I was too quick trying to roll the ganache into truffles but I was pressed for time so it had to be done anyway. I used a round spoon to scoop out balls and dipped them into melted chocolate. The fact that the melted chocolate was warm (I know, this is logical) made the ganache balls turn into 'shape shifters'. So halfway dipping I stopped and just threw the truffles into the cocoa powder without dipping. At the time I already knew that it was a short-term solution. Not dipping and rolling in cocoa powder makes for cocoa powder saturated with fat and that makes for less appetizing looking truffles. So I made one plate with dipped 'free form' truffles. Their appearance wasn't great but at least they were covered in chocolate which gave them a bit of a bite and the cocoa powder stayed fresh. The non-dipped truffles went onto a second plate. At first the non-dipped truffles looked better but of course by the time I gave the truffles away the cocoa powder started getting saturated with fat and became dark. The ones in the picture are fresh undipped ones btw. The 'shape shifters' were less photogenic ;)
Although the truffle making didn't go all that well, they did taste good! I mean, what can go wrong with a combination of bittersweet chocolate, whipping cream, butter, orange and honey?

Also wanted to let you know that I have two exams in the near future so I won't be baking and posting a lot from now till 4th April.



Orange ganache

250 g (8 oz) bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
30 g butter
1 tbs honey
250 ml (1 cup) whipping cream
zest of 1 orange

Place the chocolate, butter and honey in a heat-proof bowl.
Heat the cream with the orange until just simmering. Let it steep for 30 minutes. Strain through a fine meshed sieve into a measuring cup. Press onto the orange with the back of a spoon to get more flavour out of it.
Fill up the measuring cup until you have 250 (1 cup) again. Reheat the cream. Pour the cream over the chocolate and allow to stand for a few minutes. Stir until smooth. Allow to come to room temperature for a several hours until firm enough to roll. Chill for some time if necessary.

Making truffles

cocoa powder, sifted
orange ganache
400 g (14 oz) bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

Put a piece of baking paper on your working surface to put the truffles on.
Put the cocoa powder in a bowl.
Scoop out balls with a melon baller. Roll between your hands to make a smoother ball. Place on the baking paper.
Melt the chocolate au bain marie (or in the microwave). Allow it to cool down (if necessary) to 40°C (104°F). Place a ganache ball on a fork, submerge the ball in the chocolate. Use a spoon to cover the top with chocolate. Tap the fork a few times on the bowl and slide the bottom of the fork over the lip of the bowl to remove excess chocolate. Tip the truffle in the cocoa powder and use your hand to move it around covering it completely with cocoa powder. Place the truffle onto the baking paper. Repeat with all the truffles.