Last Monday, Kitchen Impromptu turned one, which means I’ve been blogging for one year. Unbelievable! I was planning to celebrate my blog’s birthday with a fancy cake that writes “1” on it. But no, I didn’t have time for that.  Besides, it may seem funny to you to celebrate the blog’s birthday like it’s a hugely-read blog, since only like ten people follow the blog, and all of them are the friends & family. But, I don’t really care how many people read it. I write it for myself, and I feel good to share my recipes, even if nobody cares. And yes, I’ll still make some carrot cupcakes with “1” decorations, don’t worry. I started the blog with my famous carrot cake, and I’ll celebrate its first year with some more carrot cakes.

I also made some decisions on my first year. First of all, I’ll start my blog also in Turkish, under a Turkish name (“Oh well, now all your family and friends will start to follow the Turkish one, and nobody will follow your dear Kitchen Impromptu”). But it will have a slightly different purpose. It will be more focused on healthy eating and healthier alternatives to that greasy comfort food.

The other news is, I’ll start putting up guest posts every month. I asked my friends, and they accepted to share their gastronomical experiences all around the world.

I also made some decisions about my life, my eating habits. I decided to eat only cruelty-free and free-range meat and dairy products. I call them “happy animals’ happy products”. This is because I recently discovered that I feel uncomfortable when I eat some meat and found myself telling: “God knows how this cow lived in a dark, uncomfortable barn, fed with unhealthy food, injected with hormones and died in agony and fear.” Luckily, we can buy all these products from some farms we know, and therefore I can eat meat and dairy products at home. However, I know that 99.9% of the foods I consume outside are “guilty” products, so I decided not to eat them.

Being a vegetarian outside is not hard, since you can always eat some pizza margherita, Mediterranean salad, grilled vegetables, or pasta. However, being a vegan outside is the hardest thing. In fact, there’s simply nothing for you to eat, because everything has cheese or eggs in it. You can only eat grilled vegetables, but eating a dish without proteins is not healthy. So, it was easy for me to be a vegetarian outside, but I couldn’t manage to be a vegan outside yet. Maybe I can bring my own cheese to the restaurants and manage to eat them quickly before the waiter notices and stares at me like I’m mad (Because it’s something mad! I’ve seen many vegetarians in Turkey, including my mom, but I’ve never seen a vegan!).

And lastly, I want to give a quick vegetable and chicken pot recipe that uses leftover free-range chicken. It has a cream cheese mix that I like to use both in baked vegetables and in salads.

First I made that sauce by mixing one tablespoon low fat Turkish cream cheese called “labne” (you can use half tablespoon yogurt + half tablespoon cream cheese instead), ½ teaspoon Dijon mustard, drop of balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and 1 tablespoon olive oil. Then I mixed the sauce with some sliced vegetables (onion, eggplant and zucchini) and the leftover chicken and put them into four small pots. I cooked them for 30 minutes in the oven. Before taking the pots out of the oven, sprinkle with any cheese that can melt. And that’s it! As I said, that sauce goes well with salads too (but with only ¼ teaspoon mustard).

So, that’s it for today, and I’ll post the pictures of my celebration cupcakes ASAP.

Happy Birthday Kitchen Impromptu!!!!

]]> http://kitchenimpromptu.com/kitchen-impromptu-turns-1-a-quick-vegetable-pot-recipe/feed/ 2 http://kitchenimpromptu.com/apple-birthday-cake-with-homemade-cinnamon-whipped-cream/ http://kitchenimpromptu.com/apple-birthday-cake-with-homemade-cinnamon-whipped-cream/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:04:08 +0000 ulya http://kitchenimpromptu.com/?p=871

Another week has ended, so has my sister’s birthday celebration. She’s been suffering from gastritis recently, so she cannot eat chocolate, spices and a lot more things. I also had gastritis two years ago, so I can understand how she feels, and I decided to bake her a birthday cake, which is almost guilt-free for her. It’s an apple cake with some nice homemade whipped cream. I said it’s almost guilt-free, because I added some cinnamon to the cake (honestly, I cannot think of an apple cake without cinnamon!).The recipe is originally from Martha. I adapted the recipe and increased the amount of eggs, decreased the sugar (as usual). The original recipe called for buttercream as decoration, and I replaced it with my homemade cinnamon whipped cream with a hint of cream cheese. Why not buttercream? Because we don’t use buttercream in our cakes in Turkey. It’s just heavy and fatty for our taste. I once made some cupcakes and decorated them with buttercream, and everyone told me that the cupcakes were uneatable and the only thing they ate was butter. So yeah, whipped cream is just better for me.

There’s one more thing to add. I used 200 ml (about 1 cup) of heavy milk to make my whipped cream. But I could definitely add more. The secret of this cake is this cream. So, I think using 400 ml (2 cups) of heavy milk will do wonders. Enjoy!

Apple Birthday Cake

adapted from Martha Stewart

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 2 – 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (depends on the consistency of the batter)
• ½ cup olive oil
• 1 ½ cup brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• pinch of salt
• 2 apples (I used Starking), diced
• 1 apple, coarsely grated
• 1 carrot, finely grated (optional, you can use 1 coarsely grated apple instead)

for the whipped cream:

• 400 ml (2 cups) heavy cream
• ½ – ¾ cups powdered sugar (depends on your sweet tooth level)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon cream cheese

Directions:

For the whipped cream put your elecric mixer’s bowl to freezer and let it chill for an hour.

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C (350 degrees F).

In a bowl, beat together egg, oil and sugar. Add the apples and the carrot.

Stir in flour, salt, cinnamon and baking powder.

Pour the mixture into a round cake pan. If the pan is too small, use two small pans instead. Because if you put a lot of batter to the pan, it might not cook inside.

Bake for 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. If the insides don’t cook, cover the pan with aluminum foil and increase the heat to 180 degrees C ( degrees F)

Take out the bowl from the freezer. Put the heavy cream, powdered sugar and cinnamon to the bowl and beat for 3-4 minutes in the electric mixer. Add the cream cheese and mix 30 more seconds. Let it cool in the refrigerator.

When the cake cools down, separate it into two layers. On top of the first layer, spread some whipped cream and put the second layer. Decorate the whole cake with the remaining whipped cream. Store the cake in the refrigerator.

Being a senior year in college, I have to make my senior project (obviously). Our team is doing a “green” project for Unilever’s Heartbrand (ice-cream), and we have a project proposal meeting tomorrow. Since we are the host of this meeting, we thought it would be nice to serve some treats, other than the usual ones bought from a patisserie.

So, we decided to make some savory and sweet treats for the participants: the sweets are mini cupcakes and sugar cookies, and the savories are two types of cheesy canapés. We made all of them so improvisational that they don’t have any recipe. So, you have to enjoy the photos only..

Making Sinem’s cupcake base:

We filled the cupcakes with ready-to-use cake filling (Normally, I never use ready-to-use stuff, but we had no time!):

Decorating the cupcakes with an impromptu frosting (it has melted chocolate, whipping cream and some cake filling):

Sugar cookies from Joy of Baking:

Mozzarella, tomato and basil canapés on Wasabröd crispbread:

Herbed mild cream cheese canapés with olive & walnut topping:

And the leftovers: