Vanillicious.com – Easy Desserts

Vanilla Biscuits

A simple, basic cookies recipe, that can never be wrong. These cookies can be served as is, but can also be served in more interesting manners:

- You can serve the cookies with dips, such as lemon curd, smooth Berries Purée, cream cheese frosting, vanilla custard, chocolate genache and more.

- You can make sandwich cookies, by filling them with one or more of the above dips. This might take a little longer than just serving along with some dips, but this suggestion (and the following one) is a nice exercise in relaxation, creativity and can be a lot of fun, too.

- You can coat or decorate the cookies with a simple flavoured icing. Just mix icing sugar with a little bit of naturally flavoured liquid, such as freshly squeezed lemon juice, raspberry juice (that’s a good use for the liquids from frozen raspberry packs). If you wonder how much liquids, I can just say I always start with one tbsp, and add as much icing sugar as it can absorb. The ratio can be more that 1:3 (liquid:icing sugar) and the texture – a little bit thicker than a double cream. Once mixed, set aside for 15-20 minutes before applying on the cookies.

Few tips regarding the preparation:

- The easiest way to prepare the dough is by using a food processor. It’s OK if you don’t have one, just use your fingers. It’ll take few more minutes, but will end up with the same cookies.

- If you shape your cookies in different sizes, I recommend you’d bake them in more than one batch. In each batch bake the shapes that are similar in size.

Happy baking and decorating!

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Gingerbread cookies

This post is being published in a super-late manner. I initially planned to present you with this recipe way in advance , so you can enjoy it during the holidays. Seems like this Christmas, this recipe is going to be useful for the more spontaneous ones. Though it’ll always be useful for the years to follow. And besides, you can have gingerbread cookies all year long. There’s nothing wrong in re-living the holidays spirit!

The following recipe will provide approximately 50 cookies. The cutters I used were 7-8cm long (the tree and leaf shapes).

If you wish to decorate your cookies, the beginners’ way is by icing it. Icing is generally used as a simple top coating on a cookie. It makes a beautiful top coating, which can be considered as decoration. You can’t, however, decorate with it in the traditional (and more advanced) sense of piping with it, for example.

To create the icing, simply combine icing sugar with a little bit of liquid and food coloring. I used small portions of white, red and green icing. Each of the three icing mixtures contained 1 tbsp water, approximately4 tbsp of icing sugar and few drops of food colouring. If still too liquidy, add some more icing sugar. Allow the icing to rest for 15-20 minute. After decorating the cookies, allow to rest again, before you start enjoying them, as it will harden as it dries.

Disclaimer: I do not encourage the consumption of artificial food colouring in any shape or form and take no responsibility for such consumption.

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Pancakes

Here’s a not too original idea on how to upgrade your Sunday brunch for tomorrow – pancakes!

By the way, you don’t really need a photo, do you?.. I’m pretty sure you can imagine how wonderful they taste, especially since you get to decide what you’ll have with it!

I bring you the basic pancake recipe but highly recommend you play with it a little. How exactly? Use your imagination! And don’t forget to top the pancakes with some of your favourites.

Pancake ideas:

• Add crushed banana or two and some cinnamon to your mixture, and have banana-cinnamon pancakes
• Add finely chopped apple and cinnamon, and have apple-cinamon pancakes
• Add (fresh) berries to your mixture or spread some (frozen ones) when cooking your pancakes, and have berry-pancakes
• Add fruit salad to your mixture, and have fruity pancakes (thanks Elie)
• Add melted chocolate to your mixture, and have chocolate pancakes

And here are ideas for pancake toppings:

• Syrups and sauces: maple syrup, honey, hot blueberry sauce, jam
• Dairy and chocolate based: ice cream, whipped cream, vanilla cream, chocolate sauce (or melted chocolate), nutella spread
• Fruits: fresh berries,apricot, pineapple, apple, banana, cherries, fruit salad, hot blueberry sauce, Berries Purée
• All sorts of nuts and coconut

Click here to read up this recipe!

Berries Cheesecake

Sometimes it seems like my blog is all about the wonderful creations can be done with berries. Yes, I love berries almost as much as I love vanilla based desserts. I think I still have to make it up for the all the years blueberries were only in the movies, raspberry was only a kind of artificial juice and a name of a famous bunny, starring in a children’s book that used to be very famous somewhere in the Mediterranean. Other berries, by the way, simply didn’t exist. Well, were never known (not to mention grown) in that tiny Mediterranean state. We did have strawberries, though, during our very short wintertime.

I hope this explains all about my berries obsession. There’s another reason the only fruits I bake are berries – hubby. He’s very high-maintenance when it comes to baked fruits, and berries are probably the only acceptable

Today’s dessert is my favourite cake, cheesecake, of course, with an obsessed twist – the berries.

I usually just love the cookies crust. However, when baking this cake I used sweet shortcrust pastry instead, just because I ran out of cookies…  And I say, do whatever you can to have the best possible crust! Oh, and you can add a little bit of melted white chocolate to the crust mixture. Makes thins even more interesting. Can you imagine?! Click here to read up this recipe!

Alfajores

There are many recipes for Alfajores,  these wonderful, Argentinian sandwich cookies, and this recipe is probably the best one I came across. Preparing the cookies is very simple. However, you might want to free an hour of your time for filling and decorating the cookies.

These alfajores are amongst the simplest cookies to prepare but they taste so amazingly sophisticated! and the way they melt in the mouth is just yum! Need I say more? You should already be preparing the cookies! (Or at least on your way to buy the ingredients. Or preparing the dulce de leche. Now, go!)

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White Chocolate and Mascarpone tartlets

This dessert is very easy to prepare, the outcome looks impressivly sophisticated and tastes wonderful!

There are two phases when preparing the White Chocolate and Mascarpone tarts: 1. preparing the pastry cases 2. preparing the filling

The cases will be baked without the filling and this is called Blind Baking. When baking blind, we need to put some weight over the pastry base, so it won’t puff or rise. This is where the baking beans come for our rescue. You should line the pastry base with baking paper and fill it with baking beans. Baking beans can be either ceramic or dried ones. I usually use red kidney beans as they seem to be the haviest available, relatively cheap and are re-useable.

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Classic Cheesecake

Ever since I can remember, my mom used to make her famous cheesecake and this is the very first cake I’ve ever had. Our whole family is crazy about cheesecakes in general and hers in particular. My friends used to come over the weekends, asking whether my mom baked a cheesecake, or whether we have some cheesecake left from the weekend (Yeah, I sometime had the feeling I wasn’t the main reason for their visit, haha).

Few months ago my mom invited some of my (childhood) friends for dinner. They agreed to come only if she’s going to prepare her famous cheesecake for dessert.

The following recipe is not her famous cheesecake, but a very similar one. Though the texture of my cake and hers are completely different, since we live in different countries hence different cheeses. I was using low fat (6%) cream cheese while preparing the cake, available in almost every supermarket across europe (Philadelphia type of cheese). The texture of the cake is very creamy inside. Divine!

Back to my childhood cheesecakes, I remember sometimes the cake just sank after taken out of the oven. Before I baked my first cheesecake, I was searching for tips on how to keep my cheesecake tall and firm and prevent it from sinking. Here are the 2 tricks I put into practice and I must say I was very happy to discover they did the job:

(1) Place a tin with hot water at the bottom of the oven or place the cake tin inside a wider round tin (such as 28c one)

(2) Bake the cake in 220c for the first 5 minutes, then lower the temperature to 160c and bake for another hour.

Good luck!

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Raspberry Blondies

Basically, Blondies are white chocolate brownies. So why not adding some raspberries, another favourite ingredient of mine, and have a feast of tastes?

I learned that this is the ultimate potluck solution, everybody’s satisfaction is guarantied! This is no surprise, though, knowing how perfectly the sweetness of the white chocolate and sourness of the raspberries are combined.

Click here to read up this recipe!