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Hi there, and welcome!

This is a completely different post than usual as this will be the very first recipe I post! Now I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty damn excited.

As the title has already revealed, this is a recipe for ginger cookies. The story behind the intense part of the title is that my sister and I tried for the first time ever to make a badge of ginger cookies, and we were so excited to taste them! Unfortunately they did not taste as much of ginger as we had aimed for – even though we doubled the amount of fresh ginger to the original recipe!
The cookies were good, it’s not that, we had just imagined a more intense ginger taste. So with that in mind, I put four times the amount of fresh ginger in than instructed, and on top of that, doubled the amount of ground ginger. So if this badge isn’t intense ginger cookies, I don’t know what is happening to the world!

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Okay, enough with the babbling, lets get to it!

You will need an electrical whisk (or manual, if you’re more into the manual labor, that’s completely up to you!), two medium sized bowls for mixing, a knife, a small cutting board, a cup measurement, and lastly: a couple of tablespoons and a teaspoon.

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Ingredients:

•  3/8 cup butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons barley malt syrup (or molasses)
• 1/4 cup water
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 2 tablespoons chopped, fresh ginger

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Instructions:

• In one of your bowls, mix together butter and sugar until it gives you a white-ish mixture
• Add syrup, and stir together. (This can be quite messy… take it from someone who has tried it)
• Now add the water, and baking soda, and mix. (It doesn’t matter that most of the water will separate from your previous mixture, this will happen when you add your dry ingredients later on)
• In a different bowl, mix together the rest of your dry ingredients (i.e flour, salt, ground ginger, ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, and ground cloves)
  • Some people like to sift the dry ingredients to get rid of any lumps, but to be honest I hate cleaning a sifter, so I take my teaspoon and give it a good mix instead (Go team lazy!)
• Add dry ingredients to your previous mixture of butter, sugar, syrup, water, and baking powder. Mix together gradually to avoid flour going everywhere (unless this is something you find amusing.. I mean.. you do you)
• When your mixture is smooth, add the chopped ginger, and do one final mix.

Voila! Your mixture is all done! You might notice that the dough is not as hard as you might want a cookie dough to be, not to be worried!
If you’re making your cookies straight away, just add a bit of flour until you get the dough as you prefer. Otherwise put the dough in the fridge for an hour or two, and it will harden a bit, all the while the flavor will intensify. I have decided to leave my dough in the fridge for a couple of days, as my aim is to get that intense ginger flavor to stand out.

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Baking:

• Preheat oven to 350ºF or 176ºC
• Form dough into balls of preferred size
• Place onto baking sheet with some distance between.
  • I prefer using two tablespoons to pick up, and shape the dough. It keeps my hands from getting gross, and makes it very easy to get the same size for all the cookies.
• Flatten your balls (hehe) of dough slightly before putting into the oven, as they will not flatten too much on their own.
• Bake for 10-ish minutes. You know your oven the best, so you’ll have an idea of how hard it bakes

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A post-baking-note:

I ended up leaving the dough in the fridge for a full week. The flavor came out really good and intense as I wanted it to, so I got that one going for me! However, the cookies came out a bit soft, which can be really nice – don’t get me wrong! But I have some batter left, and next time I’ll try and bake them at a lower temperature for a while longer, hoping that they will get nice and crispy, as I think ginger cookies should be. Of course everyone has a different taste; My mom for example, really enjoyed that the cookies were soft! So you do you!

 

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I hope you liked this post, and who knows, maybe I’ll give it another go at some different recipes! We’ll see how it goes.

As always, you can find me on pinterest, where I pin on a regular basis. Currently I’m starting to try out tofu, and have dedicated a board just for tofu recipes. If you are interested in that, click here.

Find me on instagram where I post.. well… often

For today’s musical element, I have chosen this quirky little song.

xClara

 

 

Hello there,

Just a quick little post! Yesterday myself, and my parents went to the Boston Harbor-area for an afternoon walk as there was a local food market happening. There were a lot of stands, and fortunately we got to try a lot of really good food – most of it vegan actually. Aanyways, on the way home, and around town we bumped into some things, and I just happened to have brought my camera along.

 

This guy. The joy! He was totally rocking out, and quite a crowd had gathered around him as he sang/played/performed Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’

Further on, just as we were about to be home, a parade suddenly showed up! No kidding. It was the weirdest thing ever. Obviously I stopped and took some pictures. I must say however that I have absolutely no clue as to what type of parade it was or who they were … some were so ‘on’, and others quite literally looked like they’d been forced to participate, but nonetheless, quite amusing to watch.

 

            

I just love those days that you don’t really expect anything from, and then it just turns out to be one of the really good ones,

xClara

– And of course a little goodie for the ears

Finally the day came. The day where I upped and moved to Boston! (Or more precisely: Cambridge, MA)

 

I arrived Friday afternoon, after quite a long flight. It was a surprisingly good experience as all (and I mean ALL) the people we (my sister and I) interacted with were extremely nice, and it just helped with the whole uncomfortable-travel-on-a-plane-with-no-way-to-sit-comfortably-for-10-hours-and-several-crying-slash-screaming-babies-whilst-all-you-want-to-do-is-shut-everything-out-do-some-stretches-and-sleep-situation.

With all that over and done with, I must say that Boston Logan Airport did surprise us greatly – this said in the most positive way you can imagine. We were in a cap no more than 30 minutes (YES! 30 minutes!) after the plane had touched ground. Never have I ever experienced such a quick exit from ANY airport, and let me just say that last time i visited the US, it took me not one, but TWO hours(!) to get through immigration and all that jazz.
In fact, it was so fast that our ride (good old daddy-o) hadn’t even left the house yet! No joke.

 

Finally I am here. We have already been around Harvard’s campus, around cambridge, and found way too many things that will need to be bought later on. I will need to start organise, and decorate my room (yes, I moved back in with my parents – wohoo!). This process, which I am most excited about, will definitely be up on the blog sometime soon!

That was it for today, as jetlag and catching up with the parents has taken up most of the day-and-a-half I have currently spent here.

xClara

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As usual there is a little something to treat your ears:

Why, hello there! It’s been a while

For the past few months I have not posted on the blog.. I know. So many bad excuses, but to be honest, I was waiting for something. And that something is soon to be upon us. Or me. Only me actually. Not to sound egocentric or anything. ANYways! I recently decided to move to Boston! Yes, Boston, the United States, Boston! The reason for this is actually that my parents are moving, and as I am taking a gap year (or two) before going to college or whatever, I thought: “why not?!”.

I mean, seriously, why would I turn down an opportunity to move to a new city, on the other side of the Atlantic? A new culture to explore, along with so many new experiences!
The popular question, which is being asked by many is, “But Clara, what on earth are you going to do in Boston if you’re not going to university?” ‘Cause what could one possibly do with so much time and absolutely NO friends, only my parents? To be honest, I’m not quite sure. But that is the beauty of it! For the first time, since I’ve been in control of my life, I am without a plan. I will be doing some art, taking some classes here and there… that is literally the only thing I know! It is probably the most free I have ever been, knowing that I don’t know what’s about to happen.

My goals for this “trip” (not exactly sure for how long I’ll be staying) are:

• To try and narrow in on what I want to study later on. All I know is that it probably has something to do with either art or design – so many question marks
• Read many, many books! – Finally being out of high school and able to decide for my self, which books I read is probably one of the things I’ve been the most excited about!
• Meet new people (obviously)
• Spend some quality time with my mom, and maybe get her back into art, as we both will be without jobs (visa problems)

So this blog will probably transform into something a bit different than what I had planned. I’m thinking to use this as my ‘exploring Boston’ blog – taking you for a ride-along, as I move to a town that I have in fact never visited in my life. And we’ll see how it develops as it goes along (yay for little to no plans!).

Here is a little song that I’ve been pretty much obsessed with the past few weeks: probably the song of my summer!

Talk to you soon,

xClara

As I was biking home in the dark tonight, I realized that I was happy. It sounds cheesy, I know, trust you me. Even though I am a big sucker for romances and all those cheesy punchlines, I still have that “meeh that’s only in movies”-feeling (is that a recognized feeling?). Anyway, while I was riding my bike it just occurred to me how calm I felt right in that moment.

I had just been to a pre-christmas dinner at my parents’ house with my sister and her boyfriend + his Italian family. They had of course cooked this absolutely disgustingly delicious italian food (one of my favorite types of food btw, so Clara(me) was happy), we had a really nice evening, and after eating I was literally falling asleep in the chair, thus leading me to decide to jump on my bike and go home to my dorm.

I turned up the music – I am currently listening to Sam Smith’s album In the Lonely Hour on repeat. So on a full stomach, maybe a little too excited for Christmas eve the next day, with Sam Smith’s A-mazing voice in my ears, I got on my bike and headed home. Usually when going from A to B, it’s mostly out of having to, rather than wanting to, and I admit it, so was tonight, but while I was on my way home, I just relaxed, and I actually enjoyed it.

This is really just a super random update – I am so happy right now; Christmas is here, my American family is coming to visit in a couple of days (haven’t seen them since the summer of 2013), and everything is just pretty good to be honest. Maybe this upload can serve as a little reminder to myself, that once in a while you just need to remember to notice and appreciate the good. It is so easy to focus on the bad stuff – it’s easier to talk about. But tonight, in this moment, I am happy.

Here’s the tune of the day: Loving it! Sam Smith, your voice is divine.

Merry Christmas to everyone – enjoy it!

xClara