Pastry shop gingerbread house

Merry Christmas!

I hope you had a nice year in 2019, mine was quite eventful, I didn't have time to bake a lot, or explore new recipes as I was studying graphic design besides working, and doing my driving license. :) 

But for Christmas, I can not resist, I am baking a LOT! :D

I started of course with gingerbread cookies, and my tradition to bake a gingerbread house for Hungary's biggest gingerbread village in Budapest. It is a free exchibition, held in the Bálna shopping mall, and volunteers like me bake the houses. Each year it is getting bigger, many families bake, and besides the adorable houses, famous and creative buildings are built as well, like the Big Ben, our Chain Bridge, Star Wars space ships, or in 2016 I baked the Gru's house. (Check previous years' review posts here) It will be open in January untill the end of February.

So, this year I baked a pastry shop with many happy customers. :) 

The recipe was the same I used in all of my previous gingerbread cookies recipes.

Let's see the steps, and the final photos below!

Wedding season started

Hi Dears, 

Summer just started, that means we can go on our holidays soon, but also that means that the WEDDING Season started, too. :)

There is a time in everybody's life when wedding means a lot to us, especially when we are having our own.

As I started to plan our own wedding, I realised that I know too little about weddings. I had an idea in my had, how I imagined my perfect wedding, me and my fiancé happily say yes to each other somewhere in the nature. 

But organising it to be perfect is a much more difficult job.

So, I decided to study wedding planning. :) Soon I will have my degree on it, who knows, besides mine, I will be able to plan other's special big day, too. :D

Ours will be next year if everything goes well, but this year one of my best friends had her wedding. 

It was her idea, to make bon-bons for the guests as a thank you gift. Of course I helped her make them :)

+ The same week one of my high school teacher, who I really liked, asked me to bake a wedding cake for her daughter. I was so afraid of it, as it was my first time to bake such an important cake :) Would I succeed? Will they like it? But she trusted me, and the cake was only 20 pieces so I accepted the challenge, and baked it.

They asked a carrot cake with white icing on top, no marzipan or fondant, and to decorate the top with the icing itself, modestly, and to have a note Mazel tov.

I enjoyed baking and decorating it, as they allowed me to go on my taste, I didn't have to follow any other guidelines. 

Gingy house project

Hi Dears,

So, I baked Gingerbread the first time of this year.

I know it is not even winter, yet, and You don't want to hear about Xmas yet, (do You?), but I have a deadline for baking a gingerbread house for the Advent season.

We will have a Gingy town, a complete town from gingerbread houses, in a big shopping mall in the centre of Budapest (in the Bálna from December 6). So, I participated in this event, and I have to give this house to the city, so all the children, families , and any passers-by can see our creations in one beautiful gingy town.

I am so excited to see my little house in a complete mini-town.

I brought You some pictures about the preparation, and of course I baked "normal" gingies as well. :D

Visiting the SÜTI. Home-made-style cakes, shop & manufactury

Hi Dears, 

It's time to introduce a really nice little Cake Shop & manufacture the SÜTI.  

I have visited it yesterday, and tried one of it's cakes...

Macaron challenge

 Hi Dears!

As You might know, I am not a macaron expert. 

I tried it a few times, the first became something totally different from a real macaron (pictures here), and the next was kind of a disaster (story here). 

But I found an easy-looking recipe on a Hungarian blog StreetKitchen. 

She makes it in a so easy way, I had to try it once more. I wanted to bake it for Valentine's Day for my fiancé.

The only question is, will I manage this challenge now? :D 

Free Dessert Calendars for 2015! 3 types for You

 Hey Guys! :) 

I brought a gift for You! 

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, and finally I know where I will go to celebrate :D 

After that it will be 2015! 

Usually we got too many calendars, like now we have one for each and every walls in our room. Crazy. But guess what? This year I only got 1, and it's a smaller size, so I decided to make my own...

Of course, I involved desserts, and what's even more obvious, that I used my own pictures from this blog. 

They appeared to be super cool, so I decided to share them with You.

I created 3 calendars, each is different in the style and the size. 

You know, one basic for a room, one with big spaces to write in, and one little to a reminder.

 You only have to download it (it's free), print them out, and stamp them together. :) 

Decorated Christmas Cookies

Merry Christmas Dears,

I hope You are feeling wonderful, and had a special Christmas this year.

We just had our 3rd big Christmas Lunch... (It's definitely not the time for starting a diet... :D )

As I mentioned before, this year, nearly all of my family members got a plate of decorated Christmas cookies from me. Here I will show the steps of the preparations...

Christmas whoopie cookie

Merry Christmas Eve to You! :)

Today I brought a nice Christmas stocking filling cookie idea. 

It's tastes so Christmas-y, as it contains all the great spices and ingredients, that we use during the Holidays. Some examples: cinnamon, gingerbread spice mix, grounded walnut, candied orange peel, cocoa, caramel....Yum! :)

When You are ready, you can pack them nicely in a little bag, with more cookies, gingerbread, anything You like, like I did... 

Advent crowns made with gingerbread

Hi Dears, 

Are You prepared for the Holidays? :)

I still need to bake a couple of things, like more Beiglis, some snow crescents, Chocolate roll etc... 

But I baked these Advent crowns a while ago, to decorate the dining tables of my family members. I baked 6 different crowns. 

I hope You will like them as well. 

As for me, I always loved creating home-made presents. They are cuter and more personal. And this one is easy as well, only You need some free-time, a few hours.

Smiley Natural Christmas fragrance - Orange~men

"All I want for Christmas...." besides You, is smelling the orangy, spicy fragrance of the Punch, with the mixture of the freshly baked cookies... :)

I created these sweet gifts for my family members, with lots of great spices. I love all of them, like the cinnamon, the cloves, the star anises and the laurel leaves. Pricked in the oranges they create a really nice fragrance... And the cloves are really useful for nails for the leaves. 

I decorated them with some rosehip and apple decorations.  :) Let's see the babies...

Walnut crescent ~ Pozsonyi kifli

Hi Dears, 

As I promised I brought this tasty walnut crescent recipe, that we learnt in school. 

The shining is not as beautiful as it was supposed to be. (It should be fragmented as the beiglis, you can reach it, if you lubricate the top of them with egg yolk a few times, and you should wait until it dries, then lubricate again. I didn't wait enough,because I baked them late in the evening, and I just couldn't wait. :D ) 

So, let's move on, I think they are still beauties. :)

Yogurt & Chocolate cake 2 in 1

Hi! :)

As I promised I brought the recipe of this yin-yang cake I baked last time! 

To be honest, I haven't decided yet, if I like the result or not. 

I wanted to make something different, than usual, something more interesting, and I think it worked. :)

Untill the yogurt solidified with the gelatin, I had placed a baking sheet in the middle to separate it from the chocolate part.

It needed a night to cool in the fridge.

I baked this for my father's, my brother's and for my birthdays, as we celebrated together. :)

Cocoa CheeseCake

Hi Dears! :)

I brought You these beauties, a little cake with lots of goodies inside.

I'm sorry for not posting for a while, omg, two weeks without cakes...

But as I mentioned, besides my job, I finally started my Confectioner studies. 

It will be 1 year studying in school and I will have an internship as well in a Confectionery. So I figured that I will post here regularly about the real kitchen studies. :) 

So as a kind of compensation, from now on You will have at least one post per week from me on the learning project. :D I am super excited about it. 

The first day was yesterday, although it was just theoretical, and those I have already learned in the University, so for me it will be easy to pass.

The real practices will be on every Wednesdays. :)  

And next year around this time I will take the biggest exam to become a professional Confectioner. :) 

OK, let's get back to this sweet. We celebrated our 5th anniversary with my Honey. We met in a high school camp and soon we were starting dating. 

Now, we are engaged and a couple of month ago we started looking for our own flat. We are still on the project. :) 

I baked this cake for him, and I wanted it to be special, so I used quite a lot of kinds of ingredients, but the good part is, that I managed to do it really fast.

3 cakes with one sponge

Hello Dears! 

I hope You enjoyed the summer, to finish it nicely I brought not just one, but 3 cakes for You! :)

As for us, we had our late-summer vacation last week, for 4 days.

It was short but we filled it with very-many adventures. :) 

It rained for two days, but we still could go sight-seeing, and to bathhouses, and we even took a little fairy train ride in the forest, so it was super joyful.

When we arrived back home, a birthday party was ahead of us, with 3 birthdays to celebrate, so I jumped in a baking project again.

As we hold it as a pic-nic party in the Margaret-island, I tried to prepare them to be easily take-aways. 

I used one main mixture, and as a last touch I flavored them differently. :) 

Let's see how...

Visiting the Chocolate Museum

Hello! :)

Guess where I was! 

I have been to a Chocolate Museum, and I can tell You it was like Heaven! :) 

We tasted so much chocolate, that usually I never consume half of that amount in a month, but since You are there, You just can't resist any of them.

I brought You many-many pictures, and a story of course, 

so let me start Your virtual-tour...

Peach cake with marzipan coverage

Hi Dears,

So I'm back from our 3-day-long holiday, we were at Lake Balaton, as You might know it from our FB page (where we can meet almost everyday, come and join :) ) 

But, before that we celebrated my Mother's birthday, and I baked here a light, summertime Peach cake. I covered it with yellow marzipan, and decorated it with marzipan flowers that I cut out with my new flower mold fondant cutters. 

(I ordered it from ebay, 4 pieces for just 1 dollar or so, and they make life so much easier, I love them. :) )

Eszterházy Cake

Hi Dears, and Welcome to the 100. post of Hungarian Food Guide! :D

Let's celebrate this milestone with one of the most popular cakes of Hungary, the well-known Eszterházy cake, that I actually baked for my favorite future to be Mother-in-law's birthday.

It's soft, creamy, and has a lot of walnut in it, which makes it really tasty, and as You can see, on top it has a significant decoration with white and brown chocolate. You can taste it in every confectioneries, but home-made is always better :). 

We have a National Holiday as well today, because it's the 15th of March, the celebration of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 for democracy and freedom.

So , let's see the cake's recipe...

Mole-hill cake with fondant

Hi Dears! :) 

Feeling good? I'm really fine, as I nearly finished my diploma work. /the clever ending is missing, but I think in another off day from work I can do that as well/ :D Yay! 

Recently my boyfriend celebrated his birthday, and this cake was my creation for him.

To be honest it wasn't intended to be a Mole-hill cake, haha, but as the pot-cake didn't come out nicely after it was baked, I decided to change the form of the cake... 

So this mole-hill cake happened, which I think is even more fun than a regular. 

I covered it with home-made fondant. It should represent a half apple, but my boyfriend thought it was a cherry, so... Whatever You think it is. :D

Greengage Jam

Hello! :)

I have good news Everyone! (says always the professor in Futurama, Have You ever seen an episode? My friends and me loves it, it's so funny.) 

But at  the moment this is my good news. 

It's time for making a lot of jars of jams. :) And after that You can have cookies, donuts with delicious home made jams. And they are perfect as gifts as well. :)

These ones were made by yellow Greggages from the garden, they are like small yellow plums. I flavored it with a pinch of gingerbread spice.

Chocolate Coconut Balls Cake

Hello! :) Do You like Coconut Balls? :D This is one of my fav. desserts. Why don't You make a cake of them? :D

I'm really busy these times, You can see that from my absence here. My table is full of papers, and books (this is the last period of the semester), and there's a bit untidiness around that, as I could lost a note with my recipe for a post. :( It was a really tasty apple pie recipe... I must find that, it was really good. :D 

But this cake is another piece of heaven. :D And actually as I'm short on time, it's a no-bake-cake, too. Quick, but delicious! 

I made it for my Sweetheart's niece's birthday. :)