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