The Pumpkin Pie Spice

The Fall brings with it a wonderful variety of colours, of shades, of flavour and...tastes! We here at the Bowl are really in love with the Fall, it's the perfect season for poets, for artists, for sensitive soul and...geat yummy food! Today we want to talk to you about a special ingredient, a great companion for one of the Fall's gastronomical stars: the Pumpkin Pie Spice!

This mix of spices was invented in America in order to have a stronger pumpkin experience. The spices that form this mix are quite strong, if you take them one by one, but alltogether they're great and so harmonious.  You can make it at home using cloves, the Jamaica "Allspice" pepper, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg. The Pumpkin Pie spice is used also in a very well known coffeehouse chain, for its typical Pumpkin Pie Spice Latte, a very original "latte". Many was upset when they found out that their pumpkin latte actually had no pumpkin taste in it! og course, you can use at home you Pumpkin Pie Spice to sip a great cappuccino! 

It is worth saying that the Jamaica "Allspice" it isn't actually a "true" pepper, is rather a dried "berry", and its taste may reminds you a mix of spices like the nutmeg, the cinnamon and the ginger. The Pumpkin Pie Spice is used in many pumkin-based pies and drinks. A very versatile ingredients, indeed! Let's see how to prepare it!

Ingredients:

1 tbsp of cloves powder
1 tbsp of Jamaica "Allspice" pepper in powder
3 tbsp of cinnamon in powder
2 tbsp of ginger
2 tbsp of nutmeg

Procedure:

Ready? Mix all the spices together until you obtain a pretty homogeneous mix. When you mix it, you'll smell the magic taste of these spices becoming one! You can put your Pumpkin Pie Spice in a little jar and keep it ready to use. We advice you: this spice may cause serious addiction! Use this mix for your Fall pumpkin pies, or also for your frappè or your smoothies! There's no best way to enjoy the fall and the foliage than tasting fall's very own tastes! It's a great colourful season, you gotta love it!

(Fall) Season greetings!

Canary Island's Vilana Cake

In the month of May we celebrate the day of Canary Islands, and therefore we want to share with you regional recipes from the rich gastronomy of these islands.

Today we start with a traditional sweet dish from the Gomera Island, the Vilana Cake!
It is called vilana because it is named after the rectangular tinpot called vilana or milana. This sweet dish looks like a traditional cake, but its peculiarity is that its dough has potatoes as the main ingredient, and in addition almonds and currants. Canary islands have a huge variety of potatoes, as we previously mentioned in other posts, and the almonds and dried fruits are very presents in the islands, and therefore those products are often used in the gastronomy of Canary islands.

Blossoming almond flowers. Tenerife Island.

The vilana cake is a traditional cake with a very smooth taste and texture that we can find in every typical Canary feast, like feasts of artisans, school's feasts, family celebrations, romerias...this delicious dish is also so easy to do! Today I bring to you the vilana recipe of my mother.

ingredients

Ingredients:

• 250 g.of flour
• 200 g. of sugar (or according to your taste) 
• 500 g. of potatoes
• 30 g.  of royal yeast
• 6 eggs
• 150 g. of butter
• 200 g. of almonds
• 200 g. of currants
• 1 spoonful of cinnamon
• 1 lemon zest

Preparation:

1º- We peel the potatoes and we put them to cook. Once they're ready, we mash them with a fork.

2º- In a bowl, we put the mashed potatoes with sugar, the butter, the eggs, the cinnamon and we mix it all well.

3º. Add the sifted flour, the yeast, the almonds (that we previously peeled and minced in not so small pieces), the currant and the lemon zest. Mix it all well.

4º-  Put some butter on the interiors of a rectangular baking pan in order to not let stick our cake to the pan and we put our dough inside of it, and decorate the surface with almonds (no need to peel or mince them here).

5º- Bake it in a preheated oven at 150° Celsius for about an hour. We will keep an eye to the oven every time, because as we all know every oven it's a world of its own. If we see that it's getting too much golden brown on the surface, we can cover it with an alluminium foil or a baking sheet, and we'll just keep baking. To be sure that our cake is ready, we'll put a kitchen needle of a knife inside of the cake, and if it get out of it clean, then the cake's ready!

6º- Let it cool until it's warm, then put it out of the baking pan, and let it cool completely on a rack, and if you can, try to resist the urge to eat it until it's cool!

Enjoy it!

AnGie

Coconut and Cinnamon Bundt Cake

Today we bring you our own C&C bundt cake (with coconut and cinnamon), a sweet and different cake , ideal for breakfast and teas.

Bundt cake comes from north America, and they seems to be related with Kugelhopf of Germany. Their typical golden brown colour define them, which is made possible by a mold called, appropriately enough, bundt pan. The peculiarity of those molds is that they presents a sort of "chimney", or a central hole, that allows the heat to distribute uniformly all around the surface of the cake. Those molds generally shows exhuberant shapes.

The word "bundt" began to appear related with this kind of cakes in year 1901 in a book called "The Settlement Cookbook" by Lizzie Cander. Then the firm Nordic Ware started to produce the molds that still nowadays are just so fashon. The very thick alluminium molds are based upon those, made of iron or ceramic, used in parts of Europe (overall in Hungary, Germany and Scandinavia) to bake similar cakes.
During the Fifties and the Sixties, these molds gained a lot of popularity, and we can find Nordic Ware molds even in design museums. The molds by Nordic Ware have even a National day in the US! It's the 15th of November...there you have, that day I want everyone baking his own bundt cake!

And now let us go with our recipe for this delicious bundt cake with coconut and cinnamon...call it how you like it best, bund, cake, bizcocho, ciambella, torta...the most important thing is that you try it!

Ingredients: 

• 200 g. of sugar
• 175 grams of butter at room temperature
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 spoonful of cinnamon powder ( 1/2 tsp)
• 350 g. wheat flour
• 1 pinch of salt
• 50 g. of dried coconut
• 250 ml. coconut milk
• 2 y 1/2 spoonful of yeast ( Royal)
• 1 y 1/2baking soda

To obtain the syrup:
-We will use the remaing parts of coconut milk, that is some 150 ml.
- 35 g. approximately of sugar.

Preparation:

1º- Start shaking the sugar with the butter for some minute, until the mix is well integrated and start looking somewhat white.

2º- Add eggs one by one, taking care that the previous egg is well incorporated before adding another one.

3º- In another bowl, add all the dry ingredients, that is the cinnamon, the flour, the salt, the baking soda and the yeast. Sift everything together and add to this ingredients dry coconut.

4º- Now add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, that is the eggs, the sugar and the butter. We will do it thrice, so that we can incorporate a third part of the dry ingredients and a third part of coconut milk, alternating and beating until we finish all the ingredients.
 
5º- Put some butter around the interior surface of our molding pan and add the mix. Bundt cake are typically rather dense, so do not worry, it will not result dry at all! Once we introduce the mix into the molding pan, flat the surface with a spatula and give the pan little hits against the table in order not to create air bubbles.

Before entering the oven

6º- We put our bundt cake in the oven that's been previously preheated at 180°C with no fan. Put the mold in the lower part of our oven, always above a grill and never above a tray, to let the air circulate in the central hole.

7º- Let it bake for about 40 minutes. When this time is over, insert a cooking needle into the cake to be sure that your sweet threat is ready. If we see that it is baking too much, we can add above an alluminium foil so that the cake will not burn.

8º- Whilst the bundt is in the oven, we can prepare our syrup to wet the cake. Put the coconut milk in a pot heating up along with the sugar, and when the latter melts, turn off the fire and put it aside. In this way we can use the rest of the coconut milk. This is an optional step.

8º-Take the mold out of the oven and let it cool above a rack for some 10 minutes.

cooling on a rack

9º- Use your cooking needle, a fork or a knife to open little holes the upper part of our bundt. Then pour delicately the syrup above our cake.

pouring the syrup above the cake

10º- In general terms, bundt cake are to remove from their mould some 10 minutes after they went out of the oven, but in this case, I would advice you to let the cake cooling for a little bit more, or until it is almost completely cold. This is because, being the cake wet, it can be particularly delicate to remove from the mold.

11º- Decorate it with dry coconut and...bite it right now! Yummy!

This bundt can still be super moist even after days. To preserve it better you can enroll it with a plastic wrap or put it into an airtight box, or you can even frost it...but you will see that you'll have no time to put it into the fridge!

Our Bowl felt in love at first sight with the curves of Bundt Cake of Nordic Ware!

Serve it with a jolly good tea and...have a nice time with your C&C bundt cake!

AnGie