Raspberries and pistachio verrine

This week we decided to really do something of all our cookbooks, like … to put them into practice! And mainly to cook things we don’t usually cook.
So after some pretty awesome evenings, I found this recipe to finish nicely the dinner on a sweet taste mainly because I had a frozen bag of raspberries which once unfrozen looked totaaly mashed and I couldn’t figure out any better way to use them.

When doing it I thought the mascarpone was a bad choice as it is probably too heavy for the whipped egg whites, but the result was good so I’ll keep it as it is. Even the Husband liked it and he’s not a sweet tooth!).

Here is the recipe with the amendments I made:

Ingredients for about 6-8 verrines:
– 2 eggs
– Raspberries (I had a small bag of frozen raspberries, but probably used 50g of it)
– About 30 pistachios
– 40g of sugar
– a quarter of a lemon juice
– a few biscuits (like speculos)
– 200g of mascarpone

Recipe:
1. Mash the raspberries with the lemon juice and a little bit of sugar (taste it and make sure you have enough lemon or sugar to your liking) and put them at the bottom of the verrine.
2. Mash the biscuits in pieces and put them on top of the raspberries.
3. Mix the yalks with the sugar and whisk the whites in a different bowl.
Add the mached pistachios, the mascarpone and carefully the whites.
4. Put in the fridge for 2 hours.

Note & tips:
– I had enough for 6 verrines and a small cup but this depends of your verrines size, if you don’t have verrines, use some shooters or small bowl.
This would probably work in a big ball but might be not very good looking when serving compaired to the individual glass.
– I realized after that the rapberries absorbed quite some of the biscuits and that I should have put more of them, probably 1/3 of each layer would be better.

Chocolate chip cookies

Alright this gotta be the first post of this new adventure… The recipe for my chocolate chip cookies. I’ve been cooking those during whole last month of December for various occasions (birthdays, new year’s eve…) with chocolate chips or M&M’s mainly but you definitly can do these with any filling, it always got very successful.

The best time to eat those is when they’re still warm coming from the oven…. Yummie! Just thinking of these…. Ok, dear diet, can we talk again next month? Pleeeaaase?

Preparing the mixture is fast, the longest is to bake these (mainly when you’re doing 3 times of that amount…)

Ingredients for 20 cookies:
75g of melted butter
50g of sugar cane
2 bags of vanilla sugar (~40g)
1 egg
150g of flour
1/2 bag of baking powder
80g of crunched nuts (depends how much you like nuts)
1 bag of chocolate chip (or whatever filling you want)

Recipe:
1. Pre-warm your oven, it’s really important that by the time you’ll have your mixture ready your oven must be warm enough…. 180 °C.
2. Mix the butter, the sugar cane & vanilla sugar, and the egg.
3. Then add the rest of the ingredients and mix again.
4. Form small balls in your hands (basically try to do 20 of them with that amount of dow) and lay them on your baking tray on a baking paper (no need for extra butter, they will go on their own). Bake for 12 minutes and try to cool them on a flat area.

My oven is quite old and not precise, so I would recommend you to check around 10 minutes your cookies: the edge should slightly get brown and they should have grow. Sometimes it takes me up to 16-18minutes of baking because of this oven…

Hints:
– do various size of cookies, small, medium, large size so every body can find a cookie of his liking.
– M&M’s cookies: buy a small bag of M&M’s (I prefer those with the nuts), put these in a small plastic bag, and use a small hammer to get them in smaller pieces, not too much neither!
– if like me, you’re fighting with your oven: The cookies will be better cooked on lower temperature for a longer time than on higher temperature for a short time… Yes mum, it works also for cookies…

A mix of my chocolate and m&m’s version for last new year’s eve party…