Butternut Squash and Licorice Muffins / Muffins alla zucca butternut e liquirizia

Butternut squash mon amour. I started appreciating pumpkin and butternut squash quite late into my twenties, but since my father grows these vegetables in his garden I now cannot wait for the arrival of the cold season in order to taste sweet and savoury dishes cooked with this versatile ingredient. Its natural sweetness makes it an excellent ingredient for cakes and muffins so why not do a little experiment and combine it with one of my favourite ingredients ever? And here it is…the omnipresent liquorice! Needless to say the pairing is superb, these muffin are soft and sweet (but not too much). You can’t get any better than this!

Chestnuts Flour and Walnut Bread / Pane alla farina di castagne e noci

How I love the cold season. Vendors at every turn of a corner, the thick smoke coming from the roasting racks. Paper cones filled with roasted chestnuts keep my hands warm. Autumn and winter are my favourite season for their distinctive perfumes and flavours. Chestnuts come in the first place of my cold season food top ten. Sweet and fragrant, once amongst the staple food of our ancestors here in Ticino it has now become quite an expensive ingredient to buy in stores. Definitely not an every day ingredient if not for those who have the chance of being able to go in the woods and pick some. Every now and then I treat myself with a bag of chestnut flour and bake kolache. Lately I have been experimenting a bit and came up for this recipe for a bread I took to a dinner with friends. It’s flavour is intense and lends itself well to accompany a vegetable soup which is so seasonal. Chestnuts, walnuts and polenta are all products which are typical of my region and blend perfectly. This bread is one with a strong personality, it is rich and dense and keeps fresh for several days…a bit like bread did in the old days.

MTChallenge April: Chestnut flour, Toasted Hazelnuts, Orange Peel and Pepper biscuits / MTChallenge Aprile: Frolla montata alla farina di castagne, nocciole tostate, scorza d’arancia e pepe

MTChallenge, mon amour! Unfortunately last month, due to an overload of work, I had to skip the challenge around the theme broth. To have to give up a challenge is never nice. I don’t deny that skipping an MTChallenge often fills me with guilt. With such a compact community, where everyone does its best a lot in terms of effort in developing new recipes as in providing support and help throughout all the challenge feeling guilty at not taking part comes easily. I scroll the Facebook page, look at that wonderful recipes posted daily…and I’m there sitting on the bench with my hands tied. Fortunately some of the work I’ve been doing last month allows me to take part to April’s challenge, set by Dani and Juri of Acqua e Menta blog. The challenge is not an easy one, don’t be fooled by what seems to be an easy peasy topic. Biscuits are far from easy without foolproof recipes, especially the fearsome “frolla montata”, a kind of biscuit that until now I have never, and I mean NEVER EVER, managed to bake with success. I lost track of the amount of frolla montata biscuits I baked in the past exuding butter, which crumbled miserably at the first touch or worse, that were dramatically chewy and greasy on the palate. Thanks to the generous post by Dani and Juri I finally managed to come up with some noteworthy biscuits. In short, MTC strikes again in teaching me something new.

Spiced Baumkuchen, a layered cake for Daring Bakers / Torta albero speziata per i Daring Bakers

The January 2014 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Francijn of “Koken in de Brouwerij“. She challenged us all to bake layered cakes in the tradition of Baumkuchen (tree cake) and Schichttorte (layered cake).

I admit it, when reading Baumkuchen on this month’s Daring Bakers pdf’s document for just a slight moment I had the illusion we had to bake the Polish version (Secakz)
of this cake common in Northern Europe regions such as Germany, Austria, Hungary and funnily quite popular in Japan too. Scrolling down to read more, excited and quite scared, I won’t deny my relief discovering that Francijn choice’s had fallen on the German version of this sweet loaf.

MTC Challenge’s Chestnuts: Chestnut flour Ravioli, stuffed with walnuts and bread, topped with melted cheese / Le Castagne dell’MTC Challenge: Ravioli alla farina di castagne ripieni di noci e pane, con fonduta di formaggella ticinese

And here I am, out of breath, red faced and perpetually late. Kind of funny, because this is not my usual self. Indeed, more than often I am the one standing at the meeting point staring nervously at the clock ten minutes in advance (In fact I was almost one hour in advance at the Migros contest!). But with the blog things work differently and last minute posts are the rule.

Autumn Kolache with Chestnut flour and Persimmon Jam / Kolache con farina di castagne e marmellata di cachi per Sourdough Surprises

It’s Sourdough Surprises time again! This month’s theme, kolache, was initially a bad surprise but in the end provided me with an excuse to brainstorm and come over with a new and original recipe. What happened?