Thursday,2nd October 2008

About jam and children´s birthday party

For this week I had three very important things in my time table. One was the making of a plum-Amaretto-jam, then the organisation of my son´s  birthday party and the third was the writing of an article for the newspaper about the Thanksgiving party in the kindergarten.

I started with the jam. You must know, I do like jam very much and I try constantly new recipes. Lately my friends asked me to make again my favourite Plum-Amaretto-Jam, hoping to participate on the hardware. So I decided to follow their request.
To get a fruity jam I need ripe, sweet and juicy prune plums. So I went to the market to purchase the required material. But no way. The fruits offered were just the opposite.
I searched shop by shop and at the end I was successful.
Now I am ready to start.

Ingredients:

Directions:

1. Put prune plums into a pot, add preserving sugar and lemon juice and boil it until plums are soft. Stir it every now and then.
2. Meanwhile, take the vanilla pod, slit it open lengthways and scrape out the seeds. Then add seeds to the plums.
3. Add cinnamon .
4. Puree plums with a hand blender .
5. Add Amaretto hinzugeben und reboil it again.
6. Then fill it into the cleaned jars, wipe the rims with a clean cloth or paper towel, and close the jars with the cleaned covers. And now turn the jars upside down for some minutes.

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The next “very important“ task was the preparation of the birthday party. My son asked me to make some Muffins. To improve the appearance of the pastries I painted them in different colours and spread some chocolate sprinkles or granules over it.
How they looked, see below.

Here the recipe:

Ingredients:

Zubereitung:

1. Preheat oven to auf 180° C (Umluft 160° C).
2. Grease baking dish.
3. Peel bananas and puree them.
4. Mix oat flakes, yoghurt, flour, cinnamon, grated chocolate, baking powder and natron.
5. Add bananas, oil and egg and mix it again.
6. Fill Teig batter into baking dish.
7. Bake it for about 20-25 min.Then let it cool down for 5 min and and take it out of the dish.
8. Icing: Mix icing sugar and lemon juice. Then add food colouring and stir it. Puderzucker mit Zitronensaft vermischen und Lebensmittelfarbe unterrühren. Please note: it has to be a semifluid, because the icing has to cover the muffin.
   If you like Muffins in different colours, you have to portion it an add different food colouring in each portion.
9. Then sprinkle icing with grated chocolate, coloured sprinkles, small chocolate beans.

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All is done, even the article was ready in time. Now I am waiting for the next challenge.