Thumbprint cookies

 foto: Onar Originals

These cookies are a big hit at workshops and I have been asked for the recipe numerous times so here it is:

225gr selfraising flour
100gr cold butter
75gr sugar
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
Raspberry jam

Heat the oven to 200°C. Add the selfraising flour and the butter in a bowl and mix it with your fingers. If neccesary, add some more flour. Add the milk little by little through the mixture until you have a soft dough. If the dough is too dry you can add more milk. Put teaspoons of the mixture onto a baking tray. I use a baking sheet to put the mixture on. It saves washing up. The biscuits will become twice as big as the dough so leave enough room in between the biscuits. Press the top of the dough a little and make with your finger a little dent into the top. Add a little bit of raspberry jam into the hole. Bake the biscuits 15 tot 20 minutes in the oven until they are golden brown. You can keep these 3 tot 4 days in an airtight container and for a month if you freeze them. You need to defrost them at room temperature and warm them again to get the crunchiness back. This recipe is for 12 cookies

En ook in het Nederlands voor de niet-engels-sprekers onder ons:

225gr zelfrijzende bloem
100gr koude roomboter
75gr fijne suiker
1 ei
2 soeplepels melk
Frambozenjam

Verwarm de oven voor op 220°C. Meng de zelfrijzende bloem en de boter in een kom en kneed het met je vingers. Indien nodig, voeg een beetje meer bloem toe. Dan voeg je de melk er beetje bij beetje bij tot je een zacht deeg hebt. Als het deeg te droog is, dan kan je meer melk toevoegen. Maak een hoopje met een koffielepel en leg het op bakpapier op een bakplaat. Ik rol er eigenlijk bolletjes van en druk ze dan een beetje plat. De koekjes worden 2 keer zo groot dus laat voldoende ruimte tussen de koekjes. Druk een beetje op de top van het deeg en druk met je vinger in het deeg zodat er een kuiltje ontstaat. Doe in het kuiltje een beetje frambozen jam.
Bak de koekjes 15 tot 2à minuten in de oven tot ze mooi bruin zijn.
Je kan de koekjes 3 tot 4 dagen bewaren in een luchtdichte container en voor een maand als je ze invriest. Je moet ze ontdooien op kamertemperatuur en opnieuw opwarmen om ze terug krokant te maken. Dit recept is voor 12 koekjes.

Launch new collaboration line 'Sea Level'

Today is the big day! Anna and I have been talking about tableware for some time now and at last we decided we should just make it. While I'm very busy with my 9 month old baby girl, Julie, I don't have much spare time to make the tableware myself so we decided to buy tableware which was already manufactured. Much easier as making and glazing the tableware would be such an intense, time-consuming job. Besides that the tableware we selected is such a fun collection that fits our goal exactly: it's innovative and looks great.

When we decided on the theme of the new line, Anna started drawing and since I love her work, I wasn't surprised to see beautiful illustrations. I ordered the transfers, applied them to the tableware & fired them in my ceramic kiln. I love the result of the blue tones on the white ceramics. It reminds me of Delfts blue but in a contemporary way. The collection is called 'Sea level' as the theme is plants and animals living in or by the water.

We made 4 different designs on 4 different tableware pieces: a bowl, a plate, a cup and a saucer. All pieces are available seperately and you can mix and match as you like. For the next few days I'll be listing all designs in my shop. Hope you will come by and check 'em out.
With every order of this new line you will receive this beautiful postcard to send or to frame.

Curious about the recipe of the cookie in the images? They are divine so I can recommend baking them.

They are called thumbprint biscuits and here's the recipe for you:

Ingredients:
225g selfraising flour
100g cold butter
75g sugar
1 egg
2 spoons milk
raspberry jam

Preheat the oven at 200°C and grease a baking pan or use a baking sheet.
Add the flour and the butter in a bowl and mix it with your fingers until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs.
Add the sugar. Whisk the egg and stir it through the mixture.
Add the milk little by little through the mixture until your dough is soft. If the dough is too dry, add some more milk.
Scoop teaspoons of the mixture onto the baking tray. If all goes well, you have enough for at least 12 biscuits.
They grow a bit while baking so leave so
Make the top of the biscuit a bit flat with your spoon or hand and press your thumb into the middle.
Add a bit raspberry jam into the thumbprint hole.
Bake the bisquits 15 to 20 minutes in the oven until they are golden brown.

Take the biscuits out of the oven and let them cool down.
You can keep 'em 3 to 4 days in an airtight container.
me space in between them while baking.

Testing, testing 1, 2, 3

I have this love/hate relationship with making my own glazes.
At the academy of fine arts, we used to make lots and lots of samples and while all I wanted to do was clay, we were 'forced' to make test tiles. Ugh!
I know it's a learning process that we had to go through but it is so time consuming that it kind of turned me off to make my own glaze. I never really intended to be an Alchemist and get to know the secret world of ingredients so it was more of a pest then a pleasure...
But when I set up my studio, I decided to buy all the ingredients so that I could experiment if I ever got the urge or need...


The urge is kind of a statement so lets just say that it's the need that calls for experimenting right now. I made these porcelain plates and glazed 'em with transparant glaze from the brand 'Welte'. Since I don't own a spraying room, I apply all of my glazes by hand which is rather time consuming but it also adds to the charm of the profession.
To cut a long story short: I really, really, really dislike the glaze I use. I have never managed to apply it evenly as it just sucks itself into the poreus bisquefired piece so quickly that I'm hardly ever satisfied with the result. No matter how thin I make it, it's horror!


So here is where the bare ingredients come in handy so that I can test and make my own transparant and more fluid glaze. I got out my glaze recipes from art school and sweet Anne also send me a few to try out. Thank you, Anne!


I need to be really organised and write down each and every recipe and number all the samples so that I know which recipe to use after they are fired. It's a chore but hopefully one with satisfaction in the end. *sigh*


The hardest part of making your own glaze is waiting for the fired results...
Even though I know they will all be transparant, it is still exciting as there are so many different kinds of transparant.
Besides, with one of the glazes, I used my gut feeling and changed the original recipe by replacing some ingredients and that is really triggering my curiousity.
I'll have to wait until thursday when I unload the kiln. The patience a ceramicist needs to have...

Nom nom: black berries!

I picked these yesterday.
There were so many on the bushes but only these were ready to pick, the others were still growing. I'll have to go back soon as I love black berries.
Now what to make with them?
Thank goodness there is Smitten Kitchen
Since I only picked about 200g, I adjusted the recipe.
I'll have less crumb bars but that's OK, my neighbor who I exchange baking experiments with is on holiday. Her loss as they are delicious! :)

How to make Egyptian paste?

A little while ago, I decided that I needed to try out some recipes of Egyptian paste.
Egyptian Paste was used by the Egyptians, as far back as 7,000 years ago.
Lots of items made from this material have been found in Egyptian burial tombs. Egyptian Paste is a self-glazing, low-firing clay body that was probably discovered by accident back in those days. The typical 'turquoise' color of some Egyptian jewellery might remind you of Egyptian paste.
I did this to step out of my comfort zone and it was merely an experiment. I took some pictures while making the paste and I will share 2 recipes.
I have to warn you about the end result though, it is not what I thought it would be. But it's my own mistake as I fired the pieces too high. Silly me... I knew it was a low firing clay body but didn't want to fire my 'big' kiln for a few beads on that temperature so I just stuck it in my regular firing... ;)

Here is what you need:
(recipe of Sylvia Hyman)
39 gram of Nepheline seynite
6 gram of Soda Ash (natriumcarbonate)
6 gram of Soda bicarbonate
6 gram of Kaolien (China clay)
6 gram of Ball clay
37 gram of Flint (Quarts)
2 gram of Bentonite
2 gram of Coppercarbonate

Weigh all the ingredients.

Put 'em in a plastic bag.

Add water.

Kneed the mixture.

Put the mixture on a plaster plaque.

Move it about to get the excess water away
until the body was a bit more solid to work with.

But I soon found out that this is a 'short' body with little plasticity so I needed to add more water to actually be able to make small pieces with it.

I made some beads and placed them on stilts. I did this because I didn't want to place the beads on the kiln shelves as I didn't know how badly they would glaze itself.

The above beads were made with the first recipe. It was a dry and very difficult to handle body so I tried a second recipe which turned out to be very flexible and fun to work with. Here it is:

30 gram flint
30 gram quarts
40 gram bentonite
20 gram Natriumbicarbonate
4 gram copper carbonate

I could actually press it into some lace.

And roll over it...

I use a cutter to make it round.

And add holes to it to make it a button.

Let them dry thoroughly and it's important not to touch the pieces and disrupt the crystalline surface after the drying. Then fire it. Egyptian Paste is usually fired to a temperature range of 900°-1000°C (1650^o - 1800^o F, Cone 010 - 06) and I fired it at 1050°C.

This is how they came out of the kiln and obviously I knew instantly that they were fired too high as the turquoise beads (light geen, flexible paste) had a very rough surface and were not easy to get off the stilt. They can not be used for anything really as they scratch a lot.The black/green beads on the other hand look super - too bad that the body was so hard to work with as I love the luster that it has too it's surface.
I have more recipes if you are interested in trying out some.
I certainly had fun stepping out of my comfort zone!

How to make a crumble?

This has got to be one of my favorite desserts! My family loves it too and we mainly all have birthday's in fall/winter so when we have a little dinnerparty I am usually asked to make a crumble. With all these ingredients, this just makes for a lovely fall dessert!

Here is what you need:

apples, pears, raisins (golden & brown), dried apricots,
walnuts, almond slices, 75g sugar, 75g butter, 75g flour, baking dish
(the original recipe also adds grapes and dried prunes but
I didn't have 'em when I made this)
You can converse the metric here.

Poor some hot water over the raisins and let them
sit in the water for a while so that they can get soft.
Peel the apples and pears and chop 'em up in small pieces.
Put them in a baking dish.

Squeeze the water out of the raisins and put them on top of the apples/pears.

Cut the dried apricots in little pieces and add them to the dish.

Chop up some walnuts and add 80% of them to the dish and put 20% in bowl.

Chop up some almonds and add 80% of them to the dish and put 20% in bowl.

This is how it should look.

Mix all the fruit & nuts in the baking dish with a spoon.

Add the sugar to the chopped up nuts/almonds.

Add the flour to the chopped up nuts/almonds.

Add the melted butter to the chopped up nuts/almonds.

Mix it all up with a spoon or your hands. It should crumble a bit.
If it's too sticky, add a bit of flour until you can crumble the dough.

Crumble the dough over the dish with mixed up fruit.

It should look like this:

Put the crumble in a preheated oven for 40 à 45 minutes at 180°C.

Serve hot with icecream on the side.

D E L I C I O U S

Life is uncertain...

I once read on a menu card: 'Life is uncertain, eat dessert first'
Now that is a sentence I clearly understand! :)
We had a street BBQ yesterday and I was on the dessert team. I made a sort of ice cake but since it was difficult to distribute if it was a cake, I put them in little glass cups. I'll share the recipe with you in case you want to try it out.
Ingredients:
* two packages of biscuits (ex. Petit Beurre 200g)
* 3 egg yolks
* 200g powdered sugar
* 3 sachets 'Klop-Klop' (this is a kind of whipped cream powder)
* 18 tablespoons of cold milk
The ingredients on this picture is 3 times the above ingredients. It makes for about 45 cups of dessert.

Roll the biscuits all flat so they become little crumbs and fill the cups with a layer of crumbs.
Mix the egg yolks with the powdered sugar.
Mix the Klop-Klop whipped cream powder with the milk until it is all fluffy. When that is done, you mix both together with a wooden spoon until it is one smooth mixture. Then you take a spoon and fill the cups half way.
Add another layer of biscuit crumbs and on top of that you add another spoon of the mixture.
Finish of with some chocolate beans and put in the freezer to set for 12 hours.

Since I had a lot of egg whites left, I decided to make some coconut-cookies too.

Ingredients:
* 2 egg whites
* 80g sugar
* 100g minced coconut
* 2 tablespoons of flour

The cookies on this picture is 3 times the above ingredients.


Stir on a low fire the eggwhite with the sugar until it turns white and fluffy. Add the minced coconut and flour. Put little bits of the mixture on a baking sheet and bake 20 à 30 minutes in a preheated oven at 175°C. Let them cool off and leave them in open air otherwise they will loose their crunch!

Hmmmmmmm, both recipes are heavenly! :) Enjoy!