Mexico

Happy Día de los Muertos! Here in Mexico, November 2 is a very special day, a time to spend with family and connect with deceased relatives and friends and celebrate life. I think it's a very beautiful tradition.

Traditional treats and happy sugar skulls are part of the deal too. It's funny that up north (Canada and the US) skulls are usually portrayed as dark and evil, but down here they're often cheery and whimsical.... and sometimes very sweet too. To celebrate, C and I decorated our own little skull shortbread cookies. It was muy divertido (very fun!)

I used a couple of chilled rolls of cookie dough (from my last slice-n-bake cookie experiment) and after slicing 1/4" rounds of dough, I pinched the "chin area" and flattened them a bit more with my fingers to make a basic skull shape. No cookie cutters required - and they all turn out a little different. I threw them in the oven, and 5 minutes into baking had a good idea how to define the face. So I pulled them out of the oven and worked on half of them - leaving the other ones smooth. With a fork, I pressed down gently to make teeth. Using a chopstick, I pressed the fat tip in to make eye sockets, and the small tip to make the nose cavity. Yum. ;) Since they were already partially baked, they ended up cracking - which was actually pretty cool since skulls do have cracks and fissures. Check out my last blog entry to see how they look without the icing - they're pretty nice looking plain too.

The decorating was super fun. C got in on that action. I was inspired by these cookies, and these chocolate trees (learning that the fine lines were made using a ziplock bag as an icing bag with a tiny piece of the corner snipped off). I don't have a lot of fancy kitchen stuff here - but I do have ziplock bags! I made 3 simple icings (just squishing the ingredients right in the bags to mix):

White: 2-3 Tbps icing sugar with a few drops of rose water and just enough water to make a thick paste.

Orange/Brown: 2-3 Tbps icing sugar, ~1/4 tsp cinnamon and just enough water to make a thick paste. (mine was pretty dark because it had about 1 tsp of canela)

Dark Brown: Melted semi-sweet chocolate. (This worked very well, but I wasn't able to stack these cookies because the chocolate stuck to the other cookies. For cookies that need to be stored efficiently, I'd make an icing sugar icing like the ones above, but with vanilla and cocoa.)

^{Senior Skull courtesy of Crispin (Gracias!)}

This was seriously my first time making "fancy" decorated cookies. (Not counting the gingerbread men from kindergarten - or my recent iBooster app cookies hehe...) I was delighted with how easy and fun it was - and how effective the ziplock baggie icing bag/tip technique was.

Making funny little decorated skull cookies for Día de los Muertos is going to be a yearly tradition for us from now on - as well as remembering our beloved deceased relatives, sharing stories about them, and celebrating life. :)

A little something I came up with while living in the jungle: Chocolate and maseca black bean brownie mini-cakes made on the frying pan.

I've been spending so much time posting OPAPs (other people's awesome pics) on my other blog, that I've let my own photography slide a bit. I'm still baking away, having fun with the limitations I have baking here in a little town in tropical Mexico, in a little rental house with a very basic kitchen (i.e. limited access to ingredients and gear) as well as only baking on cool mornings (which are getting rare as it's starting to really heat up here). While finding, selecting, and posting awesome pics from all over the world  on Baking is Hot, I realized that I have to make an effort to take more photos of my own goods - and not just ok photos. Yes, that's tricky to do considering my semi-nomadic styles these days, but if I want to be a hot-shot designer/baker/producer then my pics have to be awesome, or at least look very delicious. :)

Here are a few photos of some of my Mexican chocolate experiments. (Not bad?) More recipes coming soon... Happy healthy baking and photo-taking!

Oh, and if you have any great-sneaky-crafty food photography tips or links, please share in the comments. :)

Fresh corn tortillas as crepes. I made a sweet chocolate spread (similar to my Noir Chocolate Spread) with local honey, cacao, coconut oil, and vanilla.

Experiments in rustic chocolate making.

For a couple of months, I was obsessed with making my own chocolate from scratch. I bought fermented beans from different produce markets, learned how to roast  them myself, ground them up and mixed in more ingredients, pressed it all into forms.... but could never get a really pronounced chocolate flavour out of my beans. What I found out after learning more about cacao quality and fermentation, is that most of the good cacao beans are exported to Europe. Sigh. My rustic chocolates were still pretty delicious. :)

I've been happily mucking about in the kitchen, baking with the little gas oven in the mornings when it's cool enough to do so. (Yes, I have an oven!) It's a fun challenge to bake-up delicious wheat-free healthy goods with the ingredients I have access to here.

The very first thing I whipped-up was a classic: hearty rustic banana bread, based on my recipe for Easy Gluten-free Banana Bread. Of course, I had to make a few alterations. I used a combination of white rice flour (surprisingly easy to find here) and home-made oat flour. My banana bread also had unrefined Mexican brown cane sugar (called piloncillo - delicious!), Mexican cinnamon (I always double the amount as it's more subtle than what I use in Canada), and of course - delectable aromatic Mexican vanilla. Local bananas, eggs, and a sprinkling of fresh pepitas on top - yum!

There's no aluminum-free baking powder here, or cream of tartar (so that I can make my own). Instead, I used a combination of baking soda and apple cider vinegar, and though my cake was a bit dense, the soda+acid did the trick.

I also used a small rectangular stainless steel pan, the only pan I brought from Canada, instead of a loaf pan. Worked like a charm.

The banana bread was hearty and delicious (though I'd like to make a few tweaks before sharing the recipe...) It made a lovely breakfast, enjoyed with my sweetie and a cup of exquisite Chiapas coffee in a hammock watching the sunrise. La vida es buena. Life is good.

Thanks for the awesome pic Crispin.

Just can't get enough: fresh tropical fruit at the Campeche market. Photo by Crispin.

¡Hola amigos! Just wanted to let you all know where I'm at: currently in Canada, enjoying the beautiful summer produce, and then heading back down to Mexico for the winter. My posts will be super-sporadic for the next several months, as I'm in transit - traveling around the continent in a caravan of one with my sweetheart. Hoping I'll get the chance to share some travel pics and recipes while on the road... Thanks for all your comments and great feedback!

xo Patty