Mini vanilla&lemon cupcakes

Hi there!

I guess nobody is reading it, even my mom who doesn't speak English but as she says she "adores the photos". Pfff, anyway, I finally managed to get over my first final tests and I found some time to bake something (I said it was my passion :D)

Today it will be vanilla&lemon minicupcakes. I
decided to do it once I made a serious decision and equiped myself with excellent Wilton bakeware.

I bought mini cupcakes pan, some basic decorating set and made these delicious cupcakes.

I wasn't too original and just because of being tired I used the recipe from The Joy of Baking website which is a super-dupa-fly source of all the recipes for cakes. The recipes include both measurements (very important in Europe) - oz., in., cm, kgs, etc. Below you can see all the ingredients which I used to make these cupcakes (except for butter which was being heated when the photo was taken - I was so impatient!) 

I simply adore the moment of filling muffin cups with the batter - it looks almost like some delicious cosmetic :)

Below I attach the photo of the tip no 32 thanks to which I made fantastic rosets on the cupcakes together with the photo of the icing color "sky blue". I thought it would look a bit darker (added really a lot of this to the buttercream icing) but it turned out to be like the Smurfs. Despite my personal criticism, my mom said: it's gorgeous. 

I hope you like the results of my work. It gave me lots of fun baking these wonderful cupcakes but I still think I need to practice more&more&more&more...

Cya,

AS

The Books

In order not to let my blog die I decided to show some of the books from which I will draw some ideas. 

                                                      

The oldest one is "W staropolskiej kuchni" by Maria Lemnis and Henryk Vitry. I really enjoy this book as it contains legends and recipes from the 14th century (?!). Even though, the dishes which are described there, are quite similar to our contemporary Polish food. Of course, there are some differences, such as the way of preparing poultry. Nowadays, you just go to the shop or to your farmer (if you're eco-friendly) and simply buy a chicken. The book describes the tradition of feeding chicken with walnuts as it ensured a better taste of meat. Unfortunately, I will not be able to do such things, I have to rely on what I have at my fingertips which is pretty sad. One of my fav recipes is the one for "Kołduny litewskie" (a kind of Lithuanian meat dumplings). It's quite simple, and as the authors of the book claim: "it's a symbol of friendship between Poland and Lithuania".

Another good book is "Technologia Gastronomiczna". It's a book from the 80s and I would kill myself if I lost it. It's one of those books which aren't in bookstores anymore. It includes technical tips about food preperation (plus some recipes) and I guess it's quite uncommon in contemporary cooking books. You may find the whole instruction how to prepare the fish or how to organize your workplace when you want to make a cream puff. An interesting detail of this book is the place of publishing: DDR (German Democratic Republic)

      

The rest of the books are those for baking. The one in English "Glorious Cakes" was bought in the secondhand shop. I really like the recipes there however it has one big fault: it has a recipe for the SACHERTORTE which is a crime for any baking book. 

                                        

I don't know why but each baking book has the recipe for this cake and no matter how hard you try, the recipe sucks. The reason is that the ingredients seem to be simple but of course Mr. Sacher had some secret ingredient which isn't known to ANYONE. Naturally, this ingredient is the one which give the dough the consistence of mousse, not of a typical sponge cake. The only place where you can try the only, original Sacher cake is Vienna in Austria. More specifically I mean THE DEMEL probably the most beautiful bakery I have ever been to. Because of the respect for the author of the cake, I will not even try to do it on my own. As a pessimist I know it won't be good. Even better, I have an excuse to go to Vienna one more time just to try the taste of this delicious cake :) Besides this baking crime, you will find lots of traditional recipes for English cakes. If you are interested in American cakes, I strongly reccomend you two websites: 

www.wilton.com - just enter and you'll understand why you can't love it.

http://www.joyofbaking.com/ - traditional recipes for American cakes.

One more book which I'm about to buy is the book from 1927 and probably this will be the first Bible I'll start my cooking experiments. Ok; that should be enough. I hope it's not too boring, although I get the feeling I'm writing to the void. :D

Anyway, lots of love,

Agnieszka

Hi. I'm New. :D

This is my first entry on the blog called Cook-Inn Tradition so it's easy to tell that it will be about cooking. Probably it's going to be one of thousands blogs about food, without too much sparkle (and I don't even expect that it will attract many people). This morose feeling is a result of my lack of experience in cooking. The question is "in cooking what"? What I intend to post are old fashioned recipes. Old fashioned recipes from prewar Poland. If one hears old fashioned, he or she doesn't feel like reading it anymore. What I really appreciate in those recipes is that at one point they are easy to prepare but on the other hand, when you eat it, you get the feeling you are in the past. Someone might say: the past is boring. However, in my opinion Polish food which was cooked by our great-grandmothers had more flavour, and the atmosphere in which it was eaten was somewhat special. And this is what I will try to show on this blog. So don't hesitate to focus a little bit on the recipes from the past and appreciate a good flavour (which is gradually disappearing nowadays). 


In the near future, I will post my first dishes. I hope I won't destroy my kitchen. As a basis, I will be using veeerrry old books from 1909, 1930, but also the 60s. I spent zillions of hours on the Internet searching for these books. Right now, I'm trying to understand the old version (or mutation :D) of Polish so please be patient. You may also expect some recipes of cakes, cookies, cupcakes (which are quite modern) but this is my other passion and I simply adore doing all the sweet things. 


Peace,
Agnieszka