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.