Simple Hazelnut Christmas Cookies

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010


These christmas cookies are easy to make and fast too. In Germany they are called Haselnussmakronen. The cookies are crunchy after baking and have some cracks on the outside and some bigger holes inside. The icing with chocolate is optional. You will find many variation sof this type of christmas cookies in Germany.

Haselnussmakronen
(numbers of cookies is depending on size)

2 eggs (medium size, in Germany: size M)
250 g powder sugar
250 g Hazelnuts (grounded finely)
grated peel of 0.5 lemons

Optional:
chocolate for icing

Preheat oven to 180°C. Line baking tray with baking paper.

Mix the eggs with powder sugar until very foamy. It is important that the sugar is completely dissolved. It can take about 10 minutes. As longer as you mix as better the cookies will get. Fold in the grounded hazelnuts and lemon peel. Using a pipe bag pipe little cookies on the baking paper. Bake the cookies for 12 to 15 munzes. The cookies will slightly brown and will get cracks on the outside. Let cool on the baking tray for some minutes before you transfer them to the cooling rack.

If you like you can dip the cooled cookies into icing chocolate.


On the photo
I was using a color setting with browns (wood, cookies, backdrop) and sprinkle in some more christmassy green and red. Because you can not tell from the cookies I have added some hazelnuts as reference. I use natural light coming from upper right from a window. A bounce from lower left for fill lights and to reduced shadows. I have tried it with more shadows, but then the chocolate icing gets too dark for my idea.

Almond Cookies Matches

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

It's November and it is getting closer and closer to christmas. And christmas is cookies time. And fun. Here is a very easy recipe based on an almond piped cookies. By using a different piping nozzle you can turn them into cookies matches by glacing the tip of the cookies with red color icing or into burnt matches by using chocolate.

Almond Cookies Matches
(depending on size)

70g almonds (grounded)
100g powder sugar
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons milk
2 tablespoons Amaretto
60g softened butter
160g all-purpose flour
0.5 teaspoon baking powder

Red Icing:
100g powder sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
a few drops red food coloring

Toast the grounded almonds in a pan until golden. remove immediately from heat and let cool on a plate. Mix sugar, egg yolk, milk and amaretto until the sugar is dissolved . Add butter and mix until well blended. Add almonds and mix. Mix flour and baking powder, then add it to the butter mixture. Mix until blended. Don't overmix.

Fill dough into a piping bag (round piping nozle with a diameter of 8-10 mm). Pipe cookies onto a baking paper with a lenght of 8 to 10 cm. Place the cookies on baking paper in the fridge for 1 hour. Meanwhile pre-heat oven to 210°c. Take cookies out of fridge and bake for about 10 minutes. Take out of the oven and let cool completely.

For the icing mix the ingredients. The mixture should not be running. Dip the tips of the cookies into icing and place them on a rack. If you like melt some chocolate on low heat. Dip tip of cookies into chocolate for burnt tip of the matches.

Decorating: Make a small box which looks like a match box. Put some cookies into the box.

Coconut Rice (Thengai Sadam)

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

I found the original recipe for coconut rice in cookbook for vegetarian cuisine from South India and adapted it slightly to my needs and preparation. I love nutty flavors in this recipe by the sauted coconut, the roasted sesame seeds and the cashew nuts.

Coconut Rices
(should serve 4e)

1 cup long-grained rice (I used Basmati Rice)
1 tablespoon oil (in the original recipe ghee is used)
0.5 fresh coconut
1 green chili (or more, if you like it hot)
0.5 teaspoons salt

Tempering:
1 tablespoon oil
1 teaspoon brown mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon black gram dal
1 teaspoon Bengal gram dal
1 red chili (halved, seeds removed)
0.5 teaspoons Asafoetida
8-10 curry leaves

Garnish
2 table spoons oil (in the original recipe ghee is used)
4 Tablespoons cashew nuts
Sugar to taste (optional)
2 Tablespoons white sesame seeds


Prepare the coconut. Then grate the coconut flesh. I like bigger pieces. Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a pan and add the grated coconut. Sauté on medium high heat until the coconut is golden brown. Take from heat and take coconut out. Let dry on some paper towels. Set aside.

Dry roast the white sesame seeds until they are sligthly brown. Immediately take out of the pan and set aside.

Heat two tablespoons oil over medium high heat and add the halved cashew nuts. Sauté the nuts until golden. At last add some sugar to taste to caramelize the nuts. This will give them a delicat sweet touch: I like them this way, but you can omit this step. Remove from heat and let them dry on paper towels. Set aside.

Cook rice according to package directions with 0.5 teaspoon salt. When rice is done add finely diced or chopped green chillies and the sautéed coconut. Set aside.

When the rice is done make the tempering. Heat two teaspoons oil on high heat. Add first mustard seeds. Let cook for about 30 seconds. Then add cumin seeds, black gram dal, Bengal gram dal and the halved chili. At last add the Asafoetida and curry leaves. The tempering is done when the mustard seeds start to pop. Then add the mixture to the rice and mix. Garnish with the cashew nuts and roasted sesame seeds. Enjoy.

On the photo
I stayed here in a monochromatic color setting with brown the dominant color, except for some green. I used a wider depth of field here to get a more busier appearance of the scene. I wanted an impression of a table with plenty other dishes, although I show only one part of it. Therefore I cropped it harder, so that it looks like on a serving tray with the garnishes on the side. The coconut in the food is/was hard to highlight, but the coconut in the back does it. The whole coconut also adds a nice strcutural contrast to the brown basket and the brown backdrop. To highlight the rice more I laced it in a white bowl that acts as a framing and seprates it from the rest. The three other white circles (little bowls and coconut) are not overlapping to have them as own structural elements. The lighting was easy. Ligth from a window from upper right. On left back and back I used black flags to get a darker background. On the very fron I used a bounce from top to get some fill light in front of the bowl.

Moonblush Tomatoes

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

I found the recipe for moonblush tomatoes on Sylvie's Blog 'A Pot of Tea and a Biscuit'. I was hooked by this easy recipe and by adding the flavors of olive oil and thyme. The first time I have made it as described by Sylvie. The 2nd time I couldn't resist and did it my way and it did work too (at least for me).

Oven-Dried Tomatoes
(Moonblush Tomatoes lazy man's style)

Preheat ovent o 220°C. Take as much cherry or/and date tomatoes as you like and half them. Put them cut side up into an oven proofed dish. Brush them with olive oil, sprinkle them with a bit of salt, then with sugar to your taste. Rip off the little leaves from thyme sprigs and sprinkle them over the tomatoes to. Put tomatoes into the oven and keep temperature for 5 minutes at 220°C. Then reduce heat to 70°C and let the tomatoes in the oven as long as they are as dry as you want them.

This is a recipe with no amounts and times given. I do amounts and timing here as I like it in that moment.


About the Photo
A very easy setting using a high angle. The color setting is based on primary colors of red, blue and a bit of green. Again I'm using a warm (red food) vs. cold (blue background) color contrast. The blue is not just the cooler color here. It also stands for freshness and sea (referring to a mediterranean setting). The red tomatoes in a soft backlight are of a warm red. For the styling I added the fork with a single selected toamto on it. The fork acts here like a kind of framing to get the attention to that tomato. I used this styling idea here to the attention of the viewer focussed more. Otherwise an anchor point would be missing here for me. The addition of the thyme sprigs and the olive oil bottle are just to make reference to the recipe.

Torta di Fregoloti

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

I found the recipe for Torta di Fregoloti a while ago and forget about it. I rediscovered it in a food journal lately and found the idea interesting not only to use almonds as in many other recipes for Torta di Fregoloti but also more of it. That makes the cake or pie much more nuttily. Instead of just using almonds I used hazelnuts and walnuts along with the almonds. So maybe this is not a Torta di Fregoloti as you know it or as it is written down in the books, but I tried to catch the idea of it and to make it my own.

In German one could call it a 'Streuselkuchen mit Nüssen' and in English I would translate it as crumble cake or pie with nuts. The cake is based on a very simple shortcrust cake (Mürbeteig). It makes for a dry crumble cake. Instead of cutting it into pieces everyone is breaking off a piece of the Torta di Fregoloti. Serve it with a good cup of coffee (or red wine). Kids will like it with a glass of milk or a cup of cocoa.


Torta di Fregoloti
(makes one cake of 24 cm)
250 g all-purpose flour
150 g sugar
70 g almonds (coarsly chopped)
70 g walnuts (coarsly chopped)
70 g hazelnuts (coarsly chopped)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 pinch salt
200 g unsalted butter (cold)
2 tablespoons Brandy (you can omit the Brandy, if you bake for kids)
Topping: powder sugar


Preaheat the oven to 200 C. Grease a spring form of 24 cm in diameter (you could also use one of 20 cm, but the cake will be higher and baking time longer). Chop the almonds, hazelnuts and walnuts as coarse as you want them. I like to have bigger pieces of them in the cake. Mix the nuts with flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Add cold butter (cut into chunks) and brandy and using your hand form a crumbly dough. DO not over-knead it with your hand. The dough should be crumby. Fill dough into baking form and bake for about 25 minutes until cake is golden.
Let cool cake completely on cooling rack. Then dust generousely with powder sugar. Serve cake as it is and invite everyone to break off pieces of the cake to enjoy with coffee, red wine, milk, cacao or whatever you want.

One remark on greasing the form. I do not use butter. I line out the form with a large piece of baking paper in a way that the paper looks over the rim of the form. In that way you will get the cake out easily and you can use the paper to wrap the cake into it. It looks very rustic and it is great way to take it with you for a picnic.



© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010


About the photos
I started with a view from above to show the crumbly top of the cake (2nd photo). Instead of dusting it with powder sugar through as sieve (as shown in the photo) I use the powder sugar directly because the sieved sugar wasn't good to see in the photo. By that I found out that I like it that way even more. Because of the sugar the nuts weren't that visible and so I added some roasted one for the styling on the cake and some beside. I already started to get a more casual look by having some of the sugar on the baking paper, but still have a more clean look. The lighting was simple. Natural light from a window and just a very slight fill from lower right (2nd photo). The structural composition is made by two circles and by a square (paper). The cake is almost centered to make for a very balanced shot. The one side of the paper is overlapping the cake to get more tension into the composition. The color scheme is based on a warm (brown of cake, paper) and cold (dark blue-grey of the background) contrast. Beside the sieve I didn't use proppings to keep the attention on the textures and structures of the cake. I used a 50mm lens at f=11.
Although the photo shows the cake well I though it was a bit too clean and not casual and messy enough. So I go for a messy setting as shown in the 1st photo. Basically it is the same concept as in the 2nd photo. I go closer and used a slightly leveled angle with a 70mm lens at f=4.0. The lower angle and closer setting is getting the focus on the break up of the cake. With a more shallow depth of field I add some dimension to the composition by not having the whole cake in focus now. But you can still see the textures of it. The break up of the cake add just the messyness I wanted to have for it. The lighting wasn't changed except that I used a fill light from lower left to get more light on the 'inside' of the cake. I didn't use a bounce on right side here. Iwanted to have some shadows here.

Mediterranean Filled Tomatoes

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010


These filled tomatoes bring together some mediterranean herbs with rice, miunced meat and feta cheese. The filled tomatoes are easy to make and you can easily made them in advance and also for many guests. You can serve them straight from the oven or even just luke warm. If you have some leftovers, out them in the freezer for the next day. Re-heat them in the oven for 10 minutes.



Mediterranean Filled Tomatoes
(depending on size, for about 8 tomatoes)

100 g rice (cooked and cooled)
2 medium sized onions
1 garlic clove
150 mL Olive Oil
250 g minced meat
150 g Feta Cheese
4 sprigs Thyme (about 10 cm long, just the leaves)
3 sprigs Rosemary (about 10 cm long, jsut the leaves)
5 Sage Leaves
2 heeped teaspoons paprika powder
salt and pepper to taste.

Chop onions and garlic clove and cook them in about 50 mL of the olive oil over medium high heat until softened. Remove from heat and let cool down. Add minced meat and rice and mix. Cut the leaves of rosemary and sage into pieces and add them with the thyme leaves to mixture. Add paprika powder and mix all to form the filling. Crumble the feta cheese into mixture and mix carefully so that the cheese still show some bigger pieces. Add salt and pepper to taste, but take into account that the feta is already salty. Set aside.

Wash and clean tomatoes. Cut off the upper part to form the lid. Let the stem remain on the tomatoes. Using a teaspoon removed the flesh and inside of the tomatoes so that you can fill the tomatoes. Don't thow the flesh away. You can make a great tomato juice from it, just puree it.

Preheat oven to 200 C. Fill the tomatoes with the filling generousely. During baking the filling will shrink a bit. Set the tomatoes losely into an oven proofed dish and drizzle the rest of the olive oil over the tomatoes. Salt and pepper the tomatoes again to taste. You can add an additional sprig of thyme or rosemary to flavor the olove oil during baking, but keep an eye on the herbs, because they should not gett too brown. Bake tomatoes for about 20 minutes. To avoid browning of the green stems you can wrap or cover them losely with aluminium foil. After 10 minutes you can brush the tomatoes with the olive oil again.

Remove from oven and serve with toasted baguette.

About the photo
Almost no propping this time (except for some herbs in the back). I wanted a minimalsitic setting to refer to the "straight from the oven" idea. To mbring out the red of the tomatoes I have used a backlight and slightly over exposed the image. To make the red work I used a well saturated green as color contrast. This complimentary color contrast can make the red more dominant, especially if the green is not as bright as the red. With the blue of the oven proofed dish and the yellow of the olive oil I have together the proimary colors (red, blue and yello) which is a very active and popping color triangle, which often gives the impression of freshness and sunny feeling. I alos used a cool-vs-warm color contrast. The red and yellow are the warm colors (food) which are in contrast to the cool colors green and blue (background, dish). As main structural element I have used the diagonal line made by the tomatoes. Together with the fron side of the oven proofed dish they make a triangle which opens to the front side. At last I have focussed on one tomato only and make it dominant. The other tomatoes are blurry or cropped. There was not much of styling. I have just selected the tomato which should be in front and placed the other behind and beside. The whole arrangement was done in less thean 5 minutes, because the overall arrangement was made while the tomatoes were in the oven. After I have had my tomatoes I tried other settings with the leftover tomatoes, but nothing worked as this setting: straight from the oven.

Apple-Blueberry-Salad

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

Now during the dog days I don't like to cook. For these hot summer days a fruit salad is the best. And with blueberries in season now here in Germany I made an apple blueberry salad. There is a bit of cooking though, because the apple slices have to be seared in the pan with walnuts for a few minutes to caramelize them.


Apple-Blueberry-Salad
(up to 4 servings)

500 g blueberries
2 apples (cut in slices)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
3 tablespoons walnuts (cut in pieces as you like them)
3 tablespoons sugar
mint leaves

Marinade for the blueberries:
1 tablespoons honey
juice of a lime

Cream-Cheese jogurt:
3 tablespoons honey
90 g Cream Cheese (I use Philadelphia)
3 or more tablespoons jogurt
lime juice to taste

To make in advance: Marinade the blueberries in a mixture of honey and lime juice. Keep in the fridge for about 30 minutes or longer. So the blueberries will be cool when serving later for the salad.

To make the salad: on medium high heat melt the butter, add apple slices and walnuts and sear them until the apple slice get soft. Add sugar and caramelize apples and walnuts. Remove from heat and arrange the apple slices and walnuts on plate. Top the mixture with the blueberries and if you like add some of the marinade too. Sprinkle with small mint leaves (or with chopped mint leaves).

Mix the ingredients for the cream cheese jogurt. If you like it smoother add more than 3 tablespoons jogurt. Add some lime juice to taste.

Serve the apple-blueberry-salda with thre jogurt on the side. Enjoy!



© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010



About the Photos
At first you may find that both photos are not that different, but they are from a technical point of view. The 1st one was made with a 70mm macro lens at f=2.8 and the 2nd one with a 50mm at f=1.7
I often get the question which lens I use for food photography. And there is only one answer: the one which I could get the result with I have in mind.
For the first one I chose a longer focal lens to get a narrow angular field (perspective). With longer focal length the persepctive difference between front and back is narrow. This gives a good balance of front and back and the long focal length is avoiding distortions with this kind of angles.
In the 2nd I used the 50mm lens which has (compared to the 70mm) a wider angular field. Things in the back seems to be smaller as compared to thos in the very front. In a leveld angle photo this can add some dynamic to the composition. In the angle I used here in combination with the ascending diagonal line one could get the impression the fruit has a motion towards the front.