falafel adventures

Ever since my move I'm back in cooking mode. Not that I don't like being cooked for, but it is my way to relax and it makes my heart happy :)
I've thought about making falafels from scratch for a very long time now. I used to make them with a box mix when I was cooking for the Zekester years ago in London, but they were not the best. In Austria you can look everywhere for a pre-mix to no avail but to be honest I really like to know what goes into my food. One day while browsing the net I came across this recipe here.
If I would have known how simple it really is, I would have never used a pre-mix!!! Only thing I missed was a food processor, hooray for roomies who have awesome kitchen appliances :)

We feasted for two days!! So good, only thing I'd tweak next time to use a bit more salt and maybe put in a bit more parsley than I had on hand this time. You should definitely try it. It is so darn easy xx

recipe: coconut cake

Two days ago was a public holiday here in Austria (the upside of living in a "catholic" country - you get quite a lot of days off every year).
I went over to see the lovely peeps at EheG for an afternoon/evening of hanging out, playing cards and a very yummy bbq and one should never come empty handed. As I brought cookies and other things the last couple times, I decided to try something new this time :) Also thought that it would be fun to share a couple recipes every now and then on this blog - what do you think?

Coconut Cake

3 1/3 cups flour
1 tbsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
1 cup coconut milk
1/2 cup cream
vanilla extract or 1 pack vanilla sugar
190g butter
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs

Side note: I substituted all dairy products with lactose free products and flour with spelt flour and it still worked :)

Combine dry ingredients.
Combine wet ingredients.
Cream butter and sugar until it's soft - this should be really easy when you have a mixer, if you do it by hand, like me, you might take a bit longer but also get toned arms haha

Add eggs - one at a time.
Stir in 1/3 of the flour mixture, add half of the mild mix. Repeat.
Hooray
Pour it in a pan or two pans - if you don't want to cut it up in the middle for the filling.

Bake for 40 minutes at 180C

Icing
340g cream cheese
250g butter
vanilla in whatever form
3 cups icing sugar (I took less than that, hate overly sweet things and it was absolutely delicious)
2 cups shredded coconut
Cream it all together

 put it in between layers

and frost the entire cake (not that good on the frosting front as you can see, but I will practise).

Voila!
The batter tasted to die for and the cake itself was an instant winner with everyone. Even the boys who would always go for a second helping of meat over dessert :)

Three of us took leftovers to work the next day, yay!

Have a lovely weekend everyone, I'm off to celebrate the next birthday and enjoy the sun xx