I personally prefer simple muffins, so this was the first time I made and iced cupcakes.  A friend tagged me on her facebook page convincing me to make cupcakes with her and I just could not resist. Those were made on the 19th of May, and I find it quite fun to play with them.

I merely used natural colours on hands so that’s it, only two colours. I know a lot of people are fond of those beautiful cupcakes but to me they are extremely sweet and sometimes just to beautiful or cute to eat.

The shades of brown and green are from cocoa powder and pandan leaf extract.

Banitsa- Bulgarian cheese pie (Баница) is “a Bulgarian traditional food, prepared by layering a mixture of whisked eggs” and Bulgarian white cheese “sirene” between filo pastry. Traditionally lucky charms/wishes are put into the pastry on special occasion such as Xmas or New Year’s Eve. Wishes people tend to send into the pies are often happiness, health, money, luck, love etc. Banitsa can be eaten hot or cold. And there are a few variations of it, including pumpkin fillings, apple fillings or spinach… (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banitsa )
I was first introduced to Banitsa while visiting my ant family in Bulgaria in 2009 for Xmas and New year, can’t remember which lucky charm I got that day though. My cousin, in my memory, was addicted to this pie 😡

When I see fresh strawberries in the supermarket, I think of strawberry charlotte, which is one of many favorite desserts that my boyfriend loves. His mom bought me a pretty mould last Easter and here comes the charlotte.

I made pizza once or twice long ago about two years ago when I was in Vietnam. It is just extremely convenient to buy either fresh pizza from a store or frozen one and add more toppings to it. Thus I find less and less motivation to making one at home. However I challenged myself today with something new, two versions of stuffed crust pizza, one will be stuffed with sausage from which I planed to make flower painting and the other is cheese stuffed.  I was enthusiastically rolling the dough into two big pizza’s which I did not know would not fit the oven. ( which is strangely funny as I always thought I had a wonderful big oven)

The lovely smell of freshly baked pizza was irresistible and lovely.

I was not lucky enough to manage making a pretty painting as drafted in my head, I might try it again sometimes.

A’s birthday party is scheduled to take place a week later due to the busy weekend of Queen’s day in the Netherlands. Since yesterday, all the party supplies have been delivered but I’d love to make some treats for his party. After thorough discussion we came to a list of cinnamon buns (Swedish in our way style), a mango chocolate cake (our creation as well since A is a big mango lover), “the brain cake” and some humble tiny teeny sausage rolls! I’m in the process of preparing but I keep you posted.  This is a batch of cinnamon buns I made this morning. My lovely boyfriend suggested putting some apples in so it really added a new great taste to the buns, tenderly sour from Granny smith apples did go well with cinnamon.