Spearmint, coconut and lemon cake

Today we bring you one of those cakes that comes off almost by chance, and the result...well, you keep the recipe you've invented forever and ever! 
I absolutely love aromatic and medicinal herbs, I use them so much, and lately I have many of them planted everywhere around my house he he he! So I thought: why don't we use them in sweets too?


This cake is made with spearmint, which gave to the cake a fresh and different touch.
it's made with olive oil instead of butter too, which makes it lightier too, without losing the moisture of this sweet. I suggest you to try it!



Ingredients:

• 1 coconut yogurt (or a natural one)
• 125 ml. of olive oil
• 250 of brown sugar
• 4eggs
• 125 ml of buttermilk*
• 450 g. of all purpose flour
• 1 lemon (juice and zest too)
• 1 pinch of salt
• spearmint (some 20 leaves)
• 80 g. of grated coconut
• 15 g. of baking powder

* You can buy the buttermilk, but I tend to prepare it at home. Some 15 minutes before you start doing your cake, prepare in a mug the needed quantity of milk, and add the juice of an half of a lemon. Let it rest enough time, and you'll see a sort of sour milk: do not worry, it's good like that! Stir it and use it as it is. This ingredient add will help your cakes to be super moist.

Preparation:

1- In a bowl, put the eggs (both the yolk and the egg white) and the sugar. Mix it well at medium speed.

2- We add to the mix of the eggs the olive oil, the lemon juice and the yogurt. Mix it well.

3- Mince finely the spearmint with a knife and toss it into our mix, together with the lemon zest.

4- In another bowl, put some flour, the yeast and the salt. Sift it all and put it aside.

5- We add our mix of flour little by little, mixing it well, after that we pour some buttermilk and then return to flour. Repeat the operation. We want to add 1/3 of our flour, then 1/3 of our buttermilk, and go on like this until there's no flour and buttermilk left.

6- Grease the mould, add the mix and pop it into the preheated oven at 180°C, for about 45 to 50 minutes. Be careful to put the mould in the middle rack of the oven, and if it starts to becoming golden brown the surface but the interior is still not baked, cover the surface with an aluminium foil or a baking sheet.

7- When it is baked, we take it off its mould and we let it cool completely over a rack, and after that we sprinkle with icing sugar to decorate it.

It is quite perfect to be eaten with a good ol' cup of tea, so...please, prepare the tea, that we'll bring the cake! ;)

Greetings!

AnGie

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

Carrot lemon juice

Today we bring you a different and delicious lemonade: the Carrot lemon juice! Lemonade are not just made with lemons, and we encourage you to try this one!
It's super healthy! Ideal for breakfast, for a morning or an afternoon snack, this drink  is perfect for this season of springtime!
 

It's known how healthy are carrots, and in our version we bring you today the carrots will be even healthier, because we do not cook them, preserving their nutritional richness.
Carrots are healthy for so many things that I don't even know where to start! They clean our liver, they help our immune system, help our skin, help keeping the correct levels of sugar in our blood, they brings lots of calcium (ideal for teeth or bones), helps with breast milk, it's a natural counter measure for acne and literally other thousands of things! And now that summertime is getting closer, helps us tanning faster! Start with carrot juice a couple of week before sunbathing, and you'll see how tanned you'll get! Yes, carrots are really helpful for a lot of things!

Ingredients: 

5 o 6 carrots
2 lemons
500 ml of water
Honey, you choose the how much (optional)

Preparation:


1º- Peel the carrots and the lemons.

2º- With a food processor, get the carrot and lemon juice. Add water and/or ice cubes, if you want a densier juice, then add less water.

3º- I usually drink it as it is, without adding any sweetener, but if you don't dig sour and the lemons you've choosen are actually sour, then I would advice you to add some sugar or some honey, according to your taste. I recommend for example sunflower honey, that can sweeten your juice with just a little amount of it. It's a very dense honey, but we can melt it easily warming it up a little bit. In this way, we would sweeten our juice in a much more natural way than we would using sugar. It's preferable to always choose the purest and the most ecological of all honeys. We can have also an orange juice, adding oranges instead of lemons, of course! ;).
Furthermore, adding lemon or oranges, we will retard the oxidation of the carrot juice.


This kind of juices or lemonades are really healthy, and it's very recommendable to change often the kind of fruit we choose, in order to have a larger variety of nutrients. The more coloured is our food, the best!

Angie