Gingerbread Toffees

Christmas is coming!

At this time of year, for the last half a dozen years or so, I've made gingerbread toffee. The year before that, the consultant company I worked for at the time sent along some to where I was assigned. I loved it so much, that when they didn't do the same next year, I looked up a recipe and made some. It's now become a sort of tradition.

This is a bit of a cheat recipe, fast and easy, made in the microwave oven. Don't let that fool you though, they are very, very delicious. It's the taste of gingerbread, but it permeates your mouth in a way that the biscuits never can.

So if you like gingerbread, I highly recommend trying these. As I said, they are incredibly quick and easy to make.

Gingerbread Toffees

Ingredients
1 dl Whipping cream 
½ dl Golden molasses
½ dl Sugar
2 ml Ground cloves
2 ml Ground ginger
2 ml Ground cinnamon

Ingredients

Warning #1: Don't try to double the recipe, it would change the cooking time completely.
Warning #2: Be careful, while you are doing ti in the microwave, you are melting sugar. It is extremely hot, and will stick to your skin if you get in on you.

Get a large glass bowl. It must be glass, plastic will melt. It also must be large, or the toffee will boil over the edge.

Get an oven tray out, and put some parchment paper on it. 

Whisk all the ingredients in the bowl until combined. Put into the microwave oven and cook on full blast for 5 minutes. Take it out, give it a stir, and cook for a further 2 minutes.

It should have bubbled up quite a bit. Stir until it's no longer bubbling, and pour out onto the oven tray. Let it cool.

Cut into pieces, either with scissors or a knife, form to your desired shape, and wrap in greaseproof paper.

All mixed up

After 5 minutes

After another 2 minutes

Cooling

SSH/SFTP login without password

I just finished setting up password-less login for SSH and SFTP, suing public key authentication. This is something I've been meaning to do for some time, but I could never seem to get around to it. Now though, it's done, and I thought I'd share some of my troubles, and, of course, the solutions to them.

I started by generating the SSH key-pair and transferring the public key to the server. This is quite simple, so I won't go into details, except to provide a link to the ArchWiki article I used as reference.

Next, edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the server side, and make sure that PubkeyAuthentication is set to Yes.

If you want to make things even more secure, you might want to think about disabling password login completely. Just remember, if you do that, and you loose you private key file, you won't be able to access the server remotely anymore.

After a restart of the ssh daemon on the server, it should now be possible to login without being prompted for a password. This was not the case however...

The problem turns out to be that SSH is a bit cranky when it comes to file permissions. After a fair bit of googling, it turns out that not only does this apply to the authorized_keys files, and the .ssh directory, but also to the $home directory used (this last one caused me a bit of trouble).

Here are the commands for setting the correct file permissions:

chmod go-w ~/
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

 Once this was done, I was able to access the server without providing a password, both for SSH and SFTP.

Yeay, no more Samba for me!

Tosca Cake

This isn't really the "traditional" tosca cake, but I prefer this version. It's a basic sponge cake, with an almond toffee on top. The toffee provides a nice bit of extra flavor and crunch.

Tosca Cake

Ingredients - Cake
150g Butter
2 dl Sugar
2 Eggs
2 tsp Vanilla powder
½ dl Water
3 dl Flour
1 tsp Baking powder

Ingredients - Cake

Ingredients - Toffee
1 dl Almonds
1 dl Sugar
50g Butter
2 tbsp Flour
2 tbsp Milk

Ingredients - Toffee

Start by making the cake. Whisk the butter and sugar until completely incorporated. Whisk in the eggs, one at a time. Add the vanilla powder and water and whisk. Mix the flour and baking powder together, and stir it into the batter.
Butter and breadcrumb a mold, the one I use has a diameter of 24cm. Put the batter into the mold and spread it out somewhat evenly.
Bake in the lower part of the oven, at 175°C, for 30 minutes.
In the mean time, prepare the almond toffee. Chop the almonds, then put all the ingredients into a pot, and bring to the boil while whisking. Try to time it so that it's done not too long before the cake is done.
Once the cake is done, take it out of the oven, and spread the toffee over it. Bake for a further 10 minutes, in the top part of the oven.

Batter

Toffee, pre-boil

Toffee, post-boil

Spread across the top

BankID with card reader on Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit

I made a guide for this for Ubuntu 13.04, but after installing it for Ubuntu 13.10, I found there were some differences (and difficulties for that matter), so I thought I'd write one for 13.10 as well.

The main difference is that ia32-libs is no longer available, which makes it much harder to figure out dependancies.

There is a lot of good information on the Ubuntu wiki for Nexus Personal, but since it tries to encompass everything, I find it a little difficult to follow. It's a good resource for debugging though.

The card reader that I have is a Digipass 920, so if you are using something else, you may need to change out the driver for the one appropriate for you device.

Do keep in mind that the BankID application will not be automatically updated. If you need to update to a new version you'll have to download and install it again as described below.

• Get the BankID application from https://install.bankid.com/Download?defaultFileId=Linux (the website blocks 64-bit Linux from the "regular" download procedure, so if you're downloading from that you need to use this direct link)
• Unzip the application
• Open a terminal and go to the directory that you unzipped the application to, and type in the following command (Please note that the version number will change):
• sudo ./install.4.19.1.11663.sh i
• Install the needed packages (pcscd:i386 is the driver, in case you need a different one)
• sudo apt-get install nspluginwrapper pcscd:i386 pkcs11-data:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libidn11:i386
• There will be quite a few dependancies (mostly for nspluginwrapper), just accept them
• Go back to the terminal and give the following command:
• sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/local/lib/personal/libplugins.so
• Start/restart Firefox, go to Tools -> Addons and check that you can see Nexus Personal under Plugins
• Give it a try, it should now work

Update: Confirmed to work also on Linux Mint 17, i.e. it should also work on Ubuntu 14.04.

Lemon Squares

It's my turn to bring, what we call "fika", or cookies/cakes to be had with coffee or tea, to work this week. We all takes turns bringing it on Fridays, and it's quite a nice tradition.

I've made raspberry macarons, but since they are the same as I made recently, I won't bother writing up the same thing again. Just follow the link, or scroll down, if you're interested. Macarons are quite small and delicate though, so I wanted to bring something else as well. The choice fell on lemon squares, which I've never made before, but they sounded delicious, and as it turns out, they are.

Lemon Squares

Ingredients (16 pieces)
100g Butter
3/4 dl Powdered sugar
2 dl + ½ dl Flour
3 Eggs
2 1/4 dl Caster sugar
1 lemon
White chocolate (optional)

Ingredients

Butter and crumb a square baking dish (I used one that was about 21x21 cm, but slightly larger or smaller should not make a huge difference).

Put the room temperature butter, powdered sugar, and 2 dl of the flour into a large bowl. Beat with an electric whisk until it comes together. Make sure that the bowl is large, and preferable put a towel over the top, since this is a very dry dough before it starts to stick and you will just end up covered in flour otherwise. Don't worry, while it will seem very dry at first, when it's done it will be light, soft and malleable.

Press the dough out evenly in the oven dish, and bake for about 15 minutes at 175°C. When it's done it will have a very, very light golden tinge to it.

Grate the rind of of the lemon, and squeeze out the juice. Whisk the eggs, lemon rind, lemon juice, caster sugar, and the last ½ dl of flour together.

Once the dough is done baking, pour the filling into the dish and bake for a further 20 minutes.

When it's done baking, take it out and allow to cool. Once cool, cut into pieces and sprinkle with grated white chocolate.

Buttered & breaded

Dough

Lined

Filling

A tinge of gold

Done

Jitterbugg

This is a cookie that I first made at the request of my mother. She told me that my grandmother used to make them for her when she was young. Unfortunately, this is not her recipe, it's just one that I found, but they still taste pretty amazing, and I try to make them at least once a year, for my mothers birthday.

The real "point" of these cookies is the shortness of the pastry, combined with the chewiness of the meringue. Don't get me wrong, there absolutely nothing wrong with the taste either, they're buttery, sweet, and delicious.

Jitterbugg

Ingredients (~40 cookies)
5 dl flour
1 dl + ½ dl sugar
200g butter
2 tsp vanilla powder
2 egg whites

Ingredients

Put the flour, room temperature butter, vanilla powder, and 1dl sugar into a bowl and mix (it's easiest to do with your fingers). This is quite a crumbly dough, try not to work it too much. Split the dough into 2 equal parts, and place in the fridge for ½-1 hour.

To make the meringue, whisk the egg whites to a stiff peak. Add the ½ dl of sugar, gradually, while whisking, then keep whisking for a couple minutes more. The meringue should be stiff and shiny.

Take one of the doughs out of the fridge, and roll it out between 2 sheets of parchment paper. The result you are looking for is a square, 20x30 cm in size, I like to measure and mark the top layer of parchment paper with a pen.

Spread half the meringue over the sheet of dough, as evenly as you can. Roll the dough, from the longer side, using the parchment paper to help, into a cylinder, so the internals will have a spiral pattern. Wrap in the parchment paper and put in the fridge to firm up.

Repeat for the other piece of dough.

The amount of time needed in the fridge can vary a little bit, usually it's ½-1 hour, but the important thing is that they are hard before you take them out, otherwise they will be impossible to cut cleanly.

Cut each roll into about 20 slices, approximately 1 - 1½ cm thick. Don't worry too much if your slices aren't perfect, or the dough breaks a bit, it'll meld during the baking. Place the slices onto an oven tray covered with parchment paper.

Preheat the oven to 200°C, place the tray in the middle of the oven and immediately lower the temperature to 175°C. Bake for 14-15 minutes. When done, the meringue turns a sort of peach color.

Dough

Meringue

Dough between 2 sheets

Rolled out

Top removed

With meringue

Rolled

Ready for the oven

Linux and Cookies is now Bake-a-Byte

I decided to change the name of the blog. While "Linux and Cookies" is very descriptive, it lacks a certain something. So I came up with "Bake-a-Byte" (pronounced like megabyte, but with bake instead of meg). Anyway, the only thing that's different is the name, everything else remains the same.

Raspberry macarons - take 2

This is my story of woe and joy.

About 3 months ago, I made some Lemon and Blueberry Macarons for the birthday party of one of my nephews. My other nephew, who is a bit of a cookie monster, told me that I had to make them for his birthday party as well, and this weekend it was time. Since raspberry is my favorite flavor for macarons, that's what I did.

I decided that I would make them smaller than I usually do (I normally make them to big), which I did. The downside to this, was that it (obviously, in hindsight) changed the cooking time required, so the whole first batch were overcooked. Instead of a crispy outside with a chewy center, they were crispy all the way through...

So, start again. The first half of the second batch came out even more burnt than the first batch, and they were cracked besides. Turned out that I had set the oven to 175°C instead of, as it should be 125°C.

Once I figured all that out though, the second half of the second batch turned out beautifully. With this recipe, unlike with previous recipes that I've tried, all the macarons "popped up" and hardly any of them cracked in the oven. All in all, I'm very happy with the results, and I feel like I'll be able to reproduce them with this recipe.

Raspberry macarons

Ingredients (80-100 "halves", ie 40-50 macarons):

Macarons:
165g Almonds
255g Powdered sugar
135g Egg whites
3 tbsp Caster sugar
Red food coloring (Optional)

Ingredients for the cookies

Raspberry butter cream (You probably won't need all of it):
200g Butter
3 dl Powdered sugar
2 tsp Vanilla powder
1 Egg yolk
Raspberries (to taste, I used about 250g)

Ingredients for the raspberry butter cream

For the macarons, we first need to peel and grate the almonds. If you like, you can buy peeled almonds, or even ready-made almond flour instead.

Assuming you have ordinary almonds, with the peel on, drop them into boiling water for about 1 minute, take them out and allow them to cool. Now peel them, the peel should pop right of. Let them sit for a couple of hours, preferably over night, to dry.

Grate the peeled almonds, my almond grater isn't fine enough for macarons, so after having grated them, I also run them through the food processor for a while. Pass the grated almonds and the powdered sugar through a fine mesh sieve and set aside.

Whisk the egg whites, starting slowly and then increasing the speed. Once it starts to become stiff, add in the caster sugar a little at a time. Keep whisking for a few minutes more, the egg whites should be stiff and shiny.

Add a few drops of red food coloring, the almonds and the powdered sugar, and fold together to a batter. It shouldn't be runny, but nor should it be too firm.

Pipe the mixture onto an oven tray covered with parchment paper, in round "blobs", about 4cm in diameter. Give the tray a couple of good bangs against the table, this should smooth them out a little and get rid of the "peak". Then allow them to rest for a full hour. This lets a coating form on top of the cookies, which keeps them from cracking in the oven, and gives you that ring on the bottom that means that they have "popped up".

Bake at 125°C, in the bottom of the oven, for about 20 minutes. If you can, GENTLY, lift them up from the tray in one piece, then you know that they are done. When you take them out, immediately remove the sheet of parchment paper with the cookies from the tray, and allow to cool.

Now for the raspberry butter cream, super easy and super delicious.

Place the raspberries in a pot and mush them up, then bring to the boil while stirring (I'm using frozen raspberries, but of course you can use fresh ones if you want). Strain the raspberry coolie to get rid of the seeds.

Whisk the butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla powder until white and fluffy. Add the egg yolk and the raspberry coolie and mix. Store in the fridge until it's time to assemble the macarons.

To assemble, pipe some butter cream on a cookie, and place another on top.

Below, the first 4 pictures are from batch 1, and the last 2 from batch 2, that's why there is a difference in shading. I decided that I liked a paler pink, rather than the almost neon of batch 1. Also, I didn't make any pictures for the butter cream, it's really simple.

Meringue

Add the rest

Mix well

Not environmental, but easy

Pre-bake

Post-bake

Cognac flavored swiss roll

I was flipping through a cookbook the other day, and came across a swiss roll flavored with punsh. It occurred to me that despite its status as a "classic" (at least in Sweden), I've never actually made a swiss roll.

A swiss roll is basically a thin sponge cake, covered with jam, buttercream or similar, rolled and cut into slices.

Now, I don't really like punsh, so that was out. For some reason the idea of a swiss roll with cognac (which I do like) butter cream popped into my head, so I thought I'd try to adapt the recipe. Aside from using cognac instead of punsh, I also decided to flavor the sponge part of the cake with orange.

With regards to the type of cognac, I would say to use the same rule that I always hear with regards to cooking with wine. That is, don't use anything in cooking that you wouldn't drink. Actually, it's probably even more important here, since most of the flavor comes from the cognac, and you aren't cooking it. I went with Braastad XO, and I really like the flavor.

I use quite a bit of cognac, because I like it to taste of cognac quite a lot. But I would say to start with a little less than the full amount in the butter cream, then taste and decide if you want to add more.

Please don't let the picture fool you, it's a lot more flavorsome and a lot juicier than they look here.

Cognac flavored swiss roll

Ingredients - sponge

3 eggs
1½ dl sugar
2 dl flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp cognac
1½ tbsp milk
Peel of 3/4 of an orange

Ingredients for the sponge

Ingredients - buttercream
125g butter
2 dl powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla powder
1 egg yolk
½ dl cognac

Ingredients for the buttercream

Pear OS 8 Beta 1 Review

Pear OS is a distro based on Ubuntu, with a heavily customized version of Gnome Shell, such that it kinda sorta looks like Mac OS X.

I've used Pear OS before, version 6, and I quite liked it. It was good looking, fast, and user friendly. 

My main problem with the "standard" Gnome Shell is that it tries to cram everything into one "hot corner", dock, program selector, workspace selector and program launchers. What Pear OS does, is separate these things so that it's less cluttered and easier to use. There's one hot corner for program selection, another for workspace selection, and the program launchers is accessed from an icon on the dock.

This new version brings quite a lot of changes, both in looks and functionality.

Gone is the standard black panel of Gnome Shell, it's have been replaced by a grey one, making it look a lot more like Mac OS X than before. Now, I quite liked the black, but the grey look pretty good too. Pear OS is still a very pretty distro. 

My favorite new thing is the menu bar integration into the panel, in the same way that it is in Ubuntu. It saves vertical space by utilizing what would otherwise be dead space in the panel. For a lot of people, the slight saving in desktop space probably doesn't matter, but on a small screen laptop, it can make a big difference. In addition, I like the fact that the menu items are always in the same place, regardless of where the window is.

This is a beta, and an early one at that, so of course there are bugs and things missing. The hot corners wouldn't work unless I logged in and out again (and selecting Pear OS 8 session). There aren't any really good wallpapers yet, previous versions have had really nice ones.

I won't go through the default programs that are included, if there's something you don't like, you can always replace it after all. Pear OS does come with a few bespoke applications though, such as for customization, PPA handling, system cleanup, and now also a cloud service.

In summary, Pear OS 8 Beta 1 still has a few bugs, it's clear that it isn't ready, but it looks like it'll be a great distro, one I'll probably be installing as my main OS once it's released.

Chocolate Brownies

This is, pretty much, a recipe that Gary Mehigan demonstrated in season 2 of Masterchef Australia, in one of the "Masterclass" segments.

I'm not really much of a fan of brownies and such, but I thought this looked good, so I gave it a shot. Brownies will never be my favorite, but as brownies go, this is a really nice one. It's soft and gooey, and the peanuts add a really nice texture and flavor.

Chocolate brownie with peanuts

Ingredients
250g Butter
5,5 dl Sugar
90g Cocoa powder
2,35 dl Flour
½ tsp Baking powder
5 Eggs
2½ dl Roasted and salted peanuts
2½ dl Dark chocolate (70%)

Ingredients

The root device is not configured to be read-write

"The root device is not configured to be read-write", this is the message that I was greeted with, during boot, when starting up my HTPC yesterday.

The HTPC is running Arch Linux with XBMC, and XBMC started up just fine afterwards and everything seemed to be working. Nevertheless, I thought it strange, since I hadn't updated the system or changed any settings recently.

First I thought it might be a one-off event, but rebooting displayed the same message. A little googling told me that at least a few others had seen the same thing and that the solution was simple: just rebuild the grub configuration file.

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

It looks like somehow something had gone wrong with my GRUB installation, I noticed also that the changes that I had made to /etc/default/grub had also disappeared, so I made the changes and rebuilt the configuration file again.

It bugs me a bit that I don't know the cause of this, but at least it was fixed quickly and without any real difficulties.

Pear Ice Cream

First off, if you make this ice cream, don't be surprised that it doesn't taste anything like the one from the supermarket. In a sense, this doesn't taste like pear ice cream, it tastes of pears. In addition, it has a nice hit of vanilla which goes nicely with the pears.

Pear ice cream is something that I loved as a child, but it's been a long time since I had it, so there's a fair bit of nostalgia here for me, but I have to say that this is, by far, the best pear ice cream that I have ever eaten.

I used a recipe from Dansukker (in Swedish), with a couple of modification of my own. It's the first time that I've used an ice cream recipe with glucose syrup in it, and it makes quite a bit of difference. The glucose doesn't really affect the taste, but it seems that it keeps the ice cream from freezing solid, the way home made ice cream tends to do. This ice cream was soft enough to eat straight away after a night in the freezer.

I increased the amounts in the original recipe by 50%, so this is quite a lot, I had to churn it in 2 batches.

Pear ice cream with vanilla

Ingredients
1120 g pears (approximately)
6 egg yolks
1 ½ dl sugar
3 dl milk
2,25 dl whipping cream
1 ½ dl glucose syrup
1 vanilla pod
Greed food coloring (optional)

To cook the pears in:
6 dl water
4 ½ dl sugar
1 ½ dl lemon juice

Ingredients

Jimmy's Dreams

This is a recipe that I got from my grandmother, mostly because it literally has my name on it.

"Dreams" are traditional Swedish cookies, flavored with vanilla. They have a very crisp and light texture because of the rising agent used. I actually had to look up what it's called in English, and it is apparently quite rare outside of Scandinavia. The rising agent used is called "hjorthornsalt", literal translation would be "deerhornsalt". In days gone by it was extracted from the horns of deer, but nowadays it is manufactured chemically. Anyway, the English translation is powdered ammonium carbonate, or baker's ammonia. When baking the cookies, the ammonia will be released, so it's a good idea to hold your breath as you open the oven door. Don't worry, the cookies will not smell or taste of it.

You can replace the "hjorthornsalt" with baking powder, if so double the amount, but the cookies won't become quite so crisp and light.

The part that makes these a little different from "normal" dreams is that they contain cornflakes, which adds an additional crispy texture.

This recipe produces about 70 cookies.

Jimmy's dreams

Ingredients
4 dl sugar
200g butter
2 dl vegetable oil
8 dl plain flour
2 tbsp vanilla powder
2 tsp powdered ammonium carbonate (hjorthornsalt)
4 tbsp potato flour
4 dl cornflakes

Ingredients