Cranberry Bliss Bars

Cranberry Bliss Bars

Once upon a time, a boy stumbled across a recipe for a cake. It looked so delicious, so challenging that he, despite never baking anything before, decided to make it.
And the rest is a history.

This was the recipe that got me into baking. I picked an actually challenging one for the first try but it was definitely worth it. Cranberry bliss bars are very thick, awesomely sweet treats that are perfect to serve on a party or something, since they are really... substantial even in small pieces. However, I wouldn't be surprised if they all disappeared in the first 5 minutes :)

Anyway, baking it for the second time, I've been reminded that I can't make frosting properly. What is the secret? It was too runny this time. If you have an idea why, leave it in a comment, please.

Cinnamon Rolls

I've tried something I've never done before. I've never worked with dough like this. Well, not a full fledged dough dough - one that has yeast in it and needs to rest. I must say that the process didn't go exactly as I had imagined - there was some dough flying and I know that kneading shouldn't be done by handheld mixers - but whatever. The original recipe called for a pyrex dish. I don't have that (though it would be super cool if I did) so I needed to modify the process and figure out a way how to do it in a traditional rectangle pan.

All the trouble I had with it was eventually worth it. The rolls were very good, looked absolutely delicious and they disappeared faster then I excepted. Next time I'd put something nice into the dough too, either more sugar or some spice. Maybe cinnamon!

Why I don't like Settlers of Catan: A Rant

In all honesty, Settlers of Catan was pretty much the first geeky board game that I've ever played. By first geeky board game I mean that I don't count the games like Scrabble, Chess or Checkers, games with no theme and no abstract gameplay. Settlers of Catan were the first game where I played something like a settler colonizing an island, gathering resources and building cities. This make-believe style of playing was so refreshing, so intriguing to a 12 year old boy that I quickly fell in love with exchanging sheep for bricks and hoping to have the longest trade route.

As time went by, I played more and more board games and even watched as couple of my friends designed and published their own board game to a modest success. I started to understand the mechanism inside the games and I saw the two extremes of pure control (as in Chess) and pure luck (as in Monopoly).Settlers of Catan eventually gave way to other games and when I played Settlers again after about 2 years, I tried in vain to enjoy the game like I had used to. The rolling of dice, that seemed to hate the numbers I needed, made me groan as bad luck was indeed the prime factor that influenced the enjoyment from the whole game. I asked myself what changed, what happened to me that made this game so uninteresting?

Apple and Cinnamon Cake for Remoska

My first attempt on baking in Remoska and it was a nice success. I decided to use apples because they are cheap and I could finally start saving money :) Apple and cinnamon is a well known combination that just goes well together. I used about a spoon of vanilla sugar and I've heard that it is not so common in other countries. So in case anyone was interested in making their own, just get white sugar in a jar, stick a vanilla bean in it and in two weeks you have a jar of vanilla sugar. Or use vanilla extract instead I guess :)

Back to the cake. I didn't use any recipe, I tried going with what I know (almost the same ratio of flour and sugar, mix egg with milk, use butter) and see how it turns out. Maybe I used bit too much baking powder for my small remoska. The cake rose dramatically and the top got slightly burned but it was nothing that a knife wouldn't fix.

I'll see how good it is tomorrow but right now when it is still warm, it is DELICIOUS!

Chocolate Chip and Cranberry Muffins

To celebrate a family lunch with my grandma I looked for a recipe where I could use the rest of the cranberries. Muffins were the ideal thing to bake because they take short time to prepare and bake. My grandma said they were excellent and since she spent all her grandmotherhood baking, I'm sure she knows what's good and what's not :)

The original recipe called for lemon zest for some reason, I omitted it because it sounded weird. I changed the cranberry to chocolate chip ratio too, as the original used too much of cranberries that would supress the chocolate flavour IMO.

Personal memo: I wonder how different would it be if I used buttermilk instead of milk.

Cranberry Almond Osgood Pie

I was left with some of the pie dough from the quiche I made some time ago and I really really wanted to make a real pie and since none of the apple pie recipes I found caught my attention, I decided on an "osgood pie" I made twice last year. Why Osgood? Well, that's because it's OH-SO-GOOD... According to one explanation anyway.

And it's true. This pie is good, slightly sour and substituted dried cherries with dried cranberries and altered the recipe slightly. Since the pie dough part is the same as for the quiche, I've just copied it.

At the Gates of Loyang

The first time I saw At the Gates of Loyang was when I was still in Barcelona, it was sitting on a shelf in a games shop. The box’s crimson colour caught my eye and I recognized the art as similar to Agricola’s. Agricola is one of my favourite games that even my parents like to play too. So I imagined that Loyang, a game by the same designer – Uwe Rosenberg, might be similar in terms of enjoyment and complexity. It even uses one of the principles of Agricola – sowing and harvesting – “plant one, harvest multiple over time” element of the game which is a really smart concept that makes you think about your future progress.

So, I bought it about a month ago and played it several times since with various people (and even solo once) and I can tell that I’ve had enough time to make up my mind about it. First, even though that the game is practically just one part of Agricola expanded, it is not Agricola-lite by any means. Also, it’s not necessarily faster than Agricola, even if it lasts only for 9 rounds. And, I’m quite sure my parents don’t enjoy it as much as they do the game with sheep, boars and cows.

Sweet Vanilla Quiche

Another French recipe and again it's custardy like the last one. Originally, I set out to make a pie but then I came across this delicious looking, egg-and-milk sweet quiche and I simply couldn't resist.

Now, this was the first time I'd ever made a quiche so I wasn't entirely sure what to do. By the recipe, it seemed like a hybrid of a pie and a cheesecake. The quiche demanded a pie crust which is probably the easiest and most satisfying thing to make with your hands. Seriously, forget food processors and get personal with the dough (a trick that my mom taught me - get the sticky gobs of dough from your fingers with a butter knife). Anyway, since the dough needs to be refrigerated - from 2 hours to overnight - I suggest you plan baking this in advance.

a new game in my collection: At the Gates of Loyang

I bought a new game from my first pay. Its name is At the Gates of Loyang and it is considered another entry in so-called Harvest Trilogy by Uwe Rosenberg, the same guy who is behind Agricola.

The game is based on the plant-sow mechanism of Agricola with some additional tweaking. Since it lasts only 9 turns, the game is much much quicker than its more famous sister.

So far I've played it only once after some heavy studying of the rules. However, the game is actually not too difficult to understand once the player sees the cards and stuff. It seems to be heavy on math skills and  future planning.

I really like the graphic design and the veggiemeeples are a nice and cute touch. I bought the game in German so I have some difficulties understanding Helper Cards but I plan to print out translated versions and glue them on the cards.

Nevertheless, I'm gonna write a longer post once I play it couple more times. So far it seems like a game that even my parents might enjoy.

Plum and Ginger Cobbler

Autumn! The season of plums! I made this cobbler about a year ago in Barcelona but I didn't have the "advanced spices" there - cardamom and star anise. I used clove instead and it fit perfectly with the taste of plums, I decided to add it to the original recipe.

When I baked it on Saturday, I inadvertently bought plums that were a bit too ripe. When I cooked them in a pan, they actually dissolved into a purée so I'd recommend using plums that are not too soft. While the purée wasn't bad at all, cobblers should contain pieces of fruit. Anyway, purée or not, the cobbler was delicious and Especially when it was served still warm with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream. Yum!

Fruit & Nut Muffcake

I made a batch of these for an afternoon picnic and an interesting discussion arose. What's the difference between a cupcake and a muffin?

In my opinion, look-wise, muffins have a puffed head, cupcakes are flat and so they allow for being topped with forsting, icing, anything. Ingredient-wise, you use milk or at least buttermilk for muffins. Also cupcakes are supposed to be a bit thicker while muffins are fluffier.

Plum crumble cake

Still no finances for my planned plum surprise. however, as it is a plum season, my mom had her own way with a plum cake and let me share her recipe. I've tried my best to substitute her "finger width of butter" and "just enough plums" with real numbers based on some serious scientific calculation and observation, but since it's a pretty simple cake to bake, the amounts aren't as strict as with more complex cakes.

My mom bakes this cake in remoska (look here if you're interested http://www.remoska.co.uk/, remoska is the best thing since... umm... microwave oven?) but I'm quite sure you can make it in a standard oven.

Arkham Horror

Pew pew pew

How cool is that this game served as a gateway to the whole Cthulhu mythos thing for me? Pretty cool, I tell you. Coincidentally, it was one of the first modern, more complex board games that I've played and I fell in sort of love with it. It is a lot of fun and I accept almost every chance to play it. However, that's because the offers don't really come frequently.

Arkham Horror is a game of huge scope. It takes up a lot of space and you have to have a free day to play it (we rarely finished it under 6 hours) and it does require a lot of attention and a right mindset. New players are usually surprised by its ridiculously complicated rules and some casual players just can't get into the role-playing, story-telling aspect of the game and to be honest, without it, the game boggles down to a dice rolling frenzy, but more on that later. It just is not for everyone, but it's quite rewarding to those who enjoy Lovecraft's mythos and are not afraid to lose sanity to tentacles in shadows.

Cinnamon Tea Cake

I've stumbled upon this recipe one day when I was trying to find more ways to get spices into baked goods. After making batches of phenomenal Spicy oatmeal cookies with raisins, I wanted to put cinnamon into cakes. I tried some experimenting with cupcakes and strong flavours but I really found a gem in this simple cake. Tea cakes are not made from tea, as it may seem. They are usually enjoyed WITH a cup of afternoon tea, preferably one of slightly bitter taste. While the classification of tea cakes is pretty broad (in some regions, teacake is sort of a bread with dried fruit in it, in others it is not unlike a standard pound cake, somewhere even similar to cookies), they are sweet and tend not to be frosted.

White Chocolate Maple Muffins

Blessed is the day when I returned to my Muffin and cupcakes recipe book and had an oven to work with. I've just baked a batch of White Chocolate Maple Muffins for the weekend board game session I hold on our cottage. There's only 9, so that's enough for me, my brother and maybe my dad too.
I made these a year ago and my brother loved them, so I guess he'll like them even today.

White chocolate is not chocolate, it's actually only fat with sugar, so that's why it's so good. Its very sweet taste complements the bitterness of the walnuts here and since you don't use that much sugar in the dough anyway, it makes a pleasantly sweet product in the end. And what's surprising, the recipe asks for only one egg!

Music to bake to Vol. 2

Once again I turn to the music when I cannot bake. After the mild success when the last post was the most read post on my blog (at least before I started announcing posts on Reddit), I found myself thinking, as I was listening to some new music, that there are more songs to stimulate one's baking atmosphere. The lack of proper baking action in the past couple days made me bit anxious.

Unfortunately, my last.fm subscription for this month has failed so no radio as of last Monday. I gotta check not only my recent plays but my archives to come up with something mindblowing.

Chocolate Raspberry Friands

I was moving from Barcelona back to Prague and I couldn't bake anything and right now it's the middle of the week so I can't bake anyway (I'm on a diet) but since I'm finally home, I decided to post my favourite recipe for a cupcake. Well, it's not exactly a cupcake, it's a friand - an Australian and New Zelandian alternative to French financier, a small cake (according to wiki). This one is really really good, it's as easy as a cupcake but it has no frosting. Instead, you use raspberries to top the surface.

There's one thing about raspberries: they are delicious!

Especially with chocolate.

Peach Cobbler

I don't exactly remember when I heard about a cobbler for the first time but it might have been while playing The Sims 3 or Left 4 Dead 2. Then one day I found a recipe for a plum and ginger cobbler, tried it and it was fantastic (one day I'll share that recipe). I looked for more recipes for cobblers and found this great peach one. If you don't know what a cobbler is, well, the wikipedia says that cobbler is a dish "consisting of a fruit or savoury filling poured into a large baking dish and covered with a battered pastry which forms a thick crust when baked in an oven". Apparently you can make it from a variety of fruits, however, the last time I tried it with strawberries, I failed horribly. But here I am with a recipe for a great treat made of peaches and seriously, is there anyone who doesn't like peaches?

A Touch of Evil - cooperative game

I think it's about time I wrote about A Touch of Evil. I played the game couple times to be able to speak about it, however each of the time, I played a cooperative game. I'll devote two posts to the game, one to the cooperative mode I know quite well by now and one to the competitive mode when I get to it.

So the game's background is somewhat reminiscent of Arkham Horror. There is one big bad and the players are in roles of investigators who walk around a town of Shadowbrook and gather investigation tokens (clues) about the big bad's presence. When they feel ready, they go and challenge it in a showdown and kill it for good. In the meantime, the big bad spawns minions, kills town citizens and wreaks general havoc, slowly growing more and more powerful, so the investigators can't take forever to buff up or the evil will engulf the town.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

They're like the standard cookies. Also, everyone likes them. Like every cookies, they are ridiculously easy to make and the process takes from 1 to 2 hours only so it's good for anyone who doesn't want to spend whole afternoon baking something complex. I had some spare chopped almonds (they sell pre-chopped almonds here in Spain, so weird) so I added them in and they blended very well with the bitter-ish taste of chocolate for cooking I chopped roughly (each small square into 4 pieces) instead of buying chocolate chips. They don't sell them in Spain anyway, I think.

Agricola

My first encounter with Agricola was few years back on one of our annual board game sessions at our cottage. Some people in the back were playing it, I quickly glanced in their direction and was told that the game is fun but it's long and has sheep in it. That sparked my interest (I like sheep, I think they're funny), however I didn't play it.  Fast-forward to last year's April 26th when I bought the game. It was on sale in an internet shop, I had the money and BoardGameGeek ranks it as the third best game in their list.

In Agricola you play as a head of a family taking care of a farm in Europe of the 16th century. You have a small house for you and your spouse and a large lot to expand. Each member of the family is capable of performing one action during a turn and next to a choice of default actions at the beginning, a new action is added every turn.

RoboRally

ROBOTS!

I believe it was New Year's Eve 2009 that I played RoboRally for the first time. It was one of the games that I somehow knew about but never played - it turned out that it's much more fun than I expected.  It's one of the games that DOES have some kind of strategy to it but is much more fun playing without planning too much... Well, since I almost never win, perhaps I'm playing it wrong but at least I'm having fun.

As the name suggests, the game is a race between robots. Each player gets to play as a robot in a... well, some kind of factory. It's a place filled with moving conveyor belts, pushers, lasers and pits that cause much mayhem during the race. Fortunately, to avoid repetition, the game comes with an abundance of map-grids, some easier, some more difficult, some short, some longer but many of them have a theme of sorts... like "swirling vortex of terror" or "laser grid" or other fun things like that. But the fun is not only in being pushed to a bottomless pit by a pusher or blown to pieces by a fellow robot.

Cherry Clafoutis

I've been waiting for about 9 months to publish this recipe. I made my first cherry clafoutis sometime in last September when I paid a really ridiculous price for 350 g of cherries. I cannot say that it wasn't worth it, the cherry clafoutis became one of my favourite quick and easy recipes and I've tried one earlier this year with strawberries and it was still pretty good. But nothing beats cherries and now we're practically in the middle of cherry season, their prices won't get any lower, so I suggest you grab them while you can and make a clafoutis.

Lemon cake

Spot a raptor's head

As almost always, I wanted to make something with lemons this time. For a while, it seemed like I'll be making a lemon mousse (I found a recipe for it not a long time ago) but eventually I stumbled upon an even better recipe for a cake with lemon filling and frosting. Since I already had most of the ingredients needed at disposal, I went to buy the lemons and a pack of eggs. The procedure is not really difficult (it just takes a lot of time), I went through it practically with no mistakes and the result was VERY nice.

I think I might have put a bit too much lemon juice into it... Well, I like strong tastes, I don't mind it but someone might think it's too tangy. Also, don't be afraid of the insane amount of sugar in the frosting. I actually toned it down from almost half a kilo to "mere" 300 g and I think it still did the job well. And one last comment - about the frosting - the original recipe says to put some milk into it... I did it and OF COURSE it reacted with the lemon juice in it. So, I don't know, perhaps you don't need to put milk in to avoid an unsightly appearance.

a quick post: A new game in my collection

I received a new game yesterday. It's called A Touch of Evil, it's by the same guys as The Last Night on Earth. It looks similar but plays very differently (kind of like Arkham Horror). I managed to play it quickly yesterday but to write about it I'll have to play it few times more.

But I wrote a small literary transcription of the game, you can read it here at BGG.

I'll be back soon with more on this game :)

News: Plants vs. Zombies: The Board Game

PC game title screen

Today is a special sale on Plants vs. Zombies Game of the Year edition on Steam, for only 3,40 euro to celebrate its 2nd year anniversary. Through some extensive googling and jumping through links I found out that there is a board game based on this PC game coming out later this year. That's awesome!

Last Night on the Earth: The Zombie Game

Zombies have never received so much attention as they did in the past few years. Anything with zombies sells - doesn't matter if it's a computer game or a mod, a film or a book, zombies are popular and that's that. How lucky were the guys from Flying Frog Production that they based their first game on geek-favourite genre of gory zombie films, their game sold so well they've became a quite successful production company releasing a game every one or two years with a distinct style typical for all their games.

I bought the game along with its large expansion on a whim. I had money and wanted an impressive board game, zombies sounded good and the reviews weren't bad. So yeah, why not. And I must say I was quite pleased with what I got.

Music to bake to

Enjoying a cup of coffee in Ikea showroom... Like a boss

Since it seems I won't be baking anytime soon, I decided to share this thing of mine. Many will agree that baking is pretty awesome; it is actually quite epic, so why not listening to epic music while doing epic stuff? While my mum usually turn on radio and listen to traditional Czech songs sung by local folk groups or something (not very interesting), I like to play something that invokes of something great being made.

I either play something from my library or get last.fm to play me a customized radio based of tags. Seriously, you cannot go wrong with listening to a post-rock radio while baking, it usually invokes just the right atmosphere, however not every post-rock band makes glorious epic sound you'd expect them and they just make background ambient noise. How improper! :)

So I'll share couple of tracks that I think set the mood worthy of epic baking. Perhaps you'll find something you like and use it when it's time for feeling monumental.

Cookies with white chocolate and lime

Cookies!

I've bought a book called Galletas de último momento recently with a goal to learn some Spanish recipes for cookies (galletas). The cookies in the book are everything but "de último momento", usually they need special ingredient that I usually just DON'T have in my kitchen. But since I didn't bake anything for a month, I looked again into the book and found a relatively simple recipe for unusually sounding cookies. Lime and white chocolate? Hmmm....

Galaxy Trucker

Since my no-baking period has just been doubled by my dentist, I want to take this time to talk about a game that I played for the first time about a year ago. This game has an uninteresting name and box art, nothing that should capture your attention, but if you know something about board games then the name of its designer, Vlaada Chvatil, will probably hint you about its qualities. Let me say that Galaxy Trucker is an easy, enormously enjoyable and completely unforgiving game.

Battlestar Galactica

The show. No, The Show! Seriously, I hold Battlestar Galactica close to my heart. Not only it's the best sci-fi tv series ever (never been a fan of Star Trek) but it is also a pretty well-known board game. Some really smart people sat down and thought about how to put the concept of BSG into a board game and still make it fun to play. And I dare say that they succeeded... To a point. I mean, 85% of the time, I won't turn down a round of BSG, but there is such thing as too much of it.

If anyone is unfamiliar with the premise of the show, well, the story goes like this: there are humans and cylons - evil robot. Robots destroy the planets where the humans live and they kill almost all humanity, except for a small fleet of spaceships that escapes. The cylons are chasing them, and unknown to humans, they infiltrated their ships as well. There are two kinds of robot: metal robot-looking ones and those who look exactly like humans. Sometimes they even think they are human, but they can be activated by the cylons and sabotage things on the ships, ultimately leading the humanity to its demise.

Bábovka

HDR bábovka with coconut, nom nom!

The reason why it took me a week to make a new post is that I've been trying to find the best recipe for another Czech recipe - the wonderful bábovka [baah-boph-kah]. I made three different bábovkas in the past week, three different recipes and three different results. Since you probably have no idea what a bábovka is, I tried to find a translation and the most plausible one is "pound cake". Yet, my English flatmate has never heard about pound cakes so let me describe bábovka for you: it is a rather thick, somewhat heavy (as opposed to fluffy) cake that is VERY easy to bake and its charm is in its variability. You can bake bábovka theoretically with everything - fruit, nuts, jam, yogurth, heavy cream, poppy seeds, coconut, etc.

Palačinky

It was about time that I posted this recipe for palačinky [pah-lah-chin-keh], czech something-like-crepes. While it is not exactly a product of baking, the preparation process is completely fool-proof and the result is wonderful. I was very happy when I found out that I can make them on my own and not only ask my mom to make palačinky for dinner. Actually, palačinky can be eaten not only for dinner but as breakfast or brunch too. Their simplicity is their strength beacause they go well with a lot of fillings. French people would put Nutella in them but we Czechs know better - a strawberry, raspberry or blueberry jam, Spanish natilla or any similar vanilla pudding-y substance and even curd, that all goes very well with palačinky and the door to experimentation are always open. There's no excuse for not having palačinky at least once in a month.

Dorn

the box art

If there is one thing I don't like in board games, it's the amount of luck you need to have to succeed. Rolling five dices and failing in all 5 instances makes me rage like nothing else. The thing is that when you, as a board game designer, reduce the luck factor, the players' success depends purely on their skill and the game becomes more strategic and chess-like. Which is actually a very good way to describe Dorn, a fantasy themed turn-based RPG that is heavily based on mathematics.

The story of the game goes that there is a dungeon with an evil lord in it and there is a town which is in danger. A group of heroes appears and goes on a quest to kill the evil lord. The beautifully designed game plan contains several areas through which the heroes wander and defeat groups and groups of monsters summoned by the evil lord. Players play for both the heroes and the evil lord, they take turns in planning and performing their actions.

Orange Layer cake

a slice of orange heaven

It was really an idea that came late to me. I live in Spain now and yet I didn't bake anything with oranges. I found a link to a recipe for an orange cake on a board site I visit (not on 4chan) but I didn't like that cake too much. I took some parts of the recipe and tried to find good alternatives to ingredients they don't have here in Spain. After a stressful hour or two, a cake was born and while it could be sweeter, I think it was very well done. So if you like your cakes sweeter, up the amount of sugar in this one.

Carcassonne

I see Carcassonne as a good entry game into the whole board game business. It's simple, yet quite complex, it doesn't take too long, yet there is a good deal of strategy present. Unfortunately it took a turn similar to the Settlers of Catan and Talisman - the core game was expanded by many and many expansions and while some actually enhance the gameplay, some just crumble the core into a nonsense (I'm looking at you, Princess and Dragon).

The goal is to have the most points at the end of the game. You achieve that by expanding an area around the starting tile by adding another tiles. You can only add a tile in a fashion that it graphically connects with the already-laid tiles and doesn't clash with any neighbouring tile. The tiles have four different features on them, but not always they have all 4 of them present. There are roads, meadows, city and monastery, and connecting them to each other always somehow yields points.

The Stars Are Right

It is no big secret that I have a fondness for everything lovecraftian, green and with tentacles. When I saw a small box with cartoon Cthulhu on it, I was kinda intrigued. The price wasn't too bad (around 20 euro) and I wanted a game with Cthulhu ever since I played Arkham Horror (about which I'll talk some other time). Checking couple of reviews on the internet, I decided to buy it and I must say that I will never regret it.

To anyone who knows the Cthulhu mythos will the phrase "The stars are right," seem familiar as it is said that the sunken city of R'lyeh and Cthulhu will arise when the stars are aligned (they "are right"). Each player takes a role of a cultist who tries to align the stars to summon creatures from beyond the space. Whoever has 10 points worth of creatures at the end of his turn, wins.

Spicy Oatmeal cookies with Raisins

When I first tried baking cookies, I used this recipe and I fell in love with it immediately. Even my whole family and those lucky friends who were treated to the delicious spicy crumbleness of these cookies, everyone loved them. It also might have been the recipe that triggered the spice-freak in me, because I just can't get enough of the cinnamon-nutmeg-clove combo and when I'm asked to bake something out of the blue, I usually go for this easy yet delicious mix to prepare something non-standard.

Rat Hot

I decided to write about a little, simple boardgame as my first boardgame post, leaving the more complex games for later. The game du jour is Rat Hot, published by Queen Games, is a game for two players who alternate in placing tiles with different kinds of spices while trying to gain points by putting the same spices next to each other.

Carrot Cake

It's very yellow.

Baking a carrot cake was one of my first ideas when I turned my attention from fancy cakes to a more sponge cake variations. I found a great recipe on the internet, tried it and it was good... Sure, but it could be better. I baked another soon enough and added more carrot to it, as I found the original cake lacking the taste of the carrot. The second take on the carrot cake was a success, the taste of the carrot was there and still it complemented the sweetness of the cake without tasting too alien.