CROCK POT CREATION: pork and mushroom yumminess

So the other day i made this pork and mushroom yumminess and i need your advise.

I made it and thought it was oh so good, but my husband just thought it was  "OK". Us ladies in the house (which consists of a 25, almost 4 and 1 1/2 year old) thought it was a yummy dish that made our palettes melt. 

This is how i need your help: Cook the meal at home and tell me what you think. It's that easy and so is the recipe:
Prep time: 25 minutes, Cooking time: 8 hours on low or 4 hours on high, plus 15 minutes on high on the end. Makes 4 servings.


Ingredients: 
1 1/2 lb boneless pork shoulder, cut into 1 inch cubes
1 tablespoon cooking oil
8 oz fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 onion, chopped
1 (14oz) can chopped tomatoes
1 cup water
1 teaspoon dried marjoram 
1 teaspoon dried thyme
2 teaspoon  instant beef bouillon granulates
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/3 cup cold water
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups of hot rice or your choice pasta

1. In a large pan brown meat half at a time in hot oil. Drain off fat. 
2. In slow cooker place mushrooms, onion, and meet. 
3. In a bowl combine tomatoes, 1 cup water, marjoram, thyme, bouillon granulates, salt and pepper.
4. Pour into crock pot. 
5. Cover, cook on low heat setting for 8-10 hours or on high heat setting 4-5 hours. 
6. After cooking desired time: Mix 1/2 cup cold water and flour in glass and pour into crock pot. Stir together. 
8. Turn crock pot to high heat setting and cook another 15 minutes.
9. Serve over hot rice or pasta.

Let me know what you think :) be as brutally honest as possible.

long time no bake

Ok so i have not posted in a while.
Here is a little update of my life: As of October 29th i am a USA residence. Getting used to life here in the USA did not exactly provide me with lots of time to bake. One of the problems is that a lot of my baking tools and my baking pantry needs to be restocked. So when i get fully settled and make friends that trust me with my creations then i can start blogging about cakes again. Until then, I might just write a few entry's about cooking in America. That on its own has shown to be a challenge. All kinds of new ingredients and temperatures to cook with. So bare with me until i got my kitchen together.


If you would like to help me get my kitchen set up so that you can see more of my blogs click here. Thanks!!!

And thanks for your patients,


Charity

Little Miss Hello Kitty

The summer kept me busy. There were many birthdays and events so i got to learn and try a lot of new techniques. So ended up worth showing and others i am afraid the "CAKE WRECK" lady might write about me. So i decided to only post the good ones.
Little Miss Sophie, also known as my niece, turned 4 the end of August and so i had the privilege to make her birthday cake. Totally obsessed with anything that has Hello Kitty on it, there was no other option than to make her birthday a Hello Kitty theme.
using my daughter to pick the design i showed her 5 cakes i had chosen and she picked the winner.

Never having done this kind of icing technique, i was nervous and excited at the same time. On the end i was excited the my sis-in-law was able to find the exact figures to place on top.
This time, to save time, i cheated and used funfetti cake mix. For the icing i used partly store bought icing and partly home made Decorators butter cream icing.
I have to say, that using a professional pipping bag really made a huge difference. it helped me have a lot more control as well as cut the time it took to decorate in half.


I was so happy about the result. Here it is :

Dad at the beach

So my parents went away on vacation to Croatia leaving the church a great opportunity to plan for my dad's (pastor of our church) birthday surprise.

my dad absolutely loves popcorn and so for my dads 53rd birthday the church got money together and bought him 53 kg of popcorn seed. hahahahaha!!!!!!!!! It was awesome seeing his face expression when we totally interrupted him while starting the service to present him the incredibly huge present :)

So since he was totally brown from his vacation in Croatia and since he loves the beach i created this cake for the church to share after the service.

have a good laugh. it is meant to be a funny cake :)

black and white cake

So i saw this picture about 9 months ago and decided that i wanted to give it a try.I thought long and hard to when i would want to until finally i decided to use either my dad our my husband as a guinea pig.

Being that my dad and husband have their birthdays back to back i thought it best to have them celebrate together. And so they did :)
As the date got close i started to become sad because i realized that most of the family would be out of town. How could i make such a huge cake and risk over half of it getting spoiled? So i opted for a smaller creation of the cake.

And here is my creation: White/dark chocolate Supreme

The top layer was a milk chocolate cake filled with milk chocolate frosting and the second layer was darker than dark chocolate sponge with dark chocolate fudge frosting.

The tricky part was the chocolate decoration. living in Europe has proven to be a challenge when it comes to creating any kind of chocolate statues, candies or in this case chocolate sheets with swivels all over. The chocolate is just not right for it. The chocolate tastes better in Europe however the consistency is just not right. it melts too fast. So in between each sheet i created i had to refrigerate them before making more or adding the swivels. It took me a whole day just to get the chocolate sheets prepared. The rest was easy. Once i had the sheets the baking layering and icing the cake was done in no time. once the cake is iced you simply stick on the chocolate sheets. It was a great cake to create!!! A real man-ly cake and it was very much enjoyed by my family and friends.

cakes soon to expect

Here is just what to look forward to:

> a black and white cake

> a cake of my dad laying on a beach

>My nieces birthday cake

> and of course other cakes and cupcake from before i started my blog

So stay posted and add yourself as a follower of my blog :)

Charity

Another Castle (HUGE)

So by now you are probably thinking that I am one of those people that start blogs and after a few stops. Nope, I have just been extremely busy. As well as it is very heard to type while baking and withing the time that i have not written i have actually baked and decorated two projects. Oh and I also decorated a hotel for a pastors retreat.
I am still waiting on the photos from the pastors retreat, and the cookie monster cupcakes did not exactly turn out picture perfect, so i will tell you about the caste i made.

This project actually come from a friend of mine seeing pictures of my daughters birthday cake.
They saw the castle on a hill cake and commented on the picture that they know that their daughter would really like something like that. So i offered to make her one as a birthday present. She had several choices, but this is the one she picked:

This cake was created by the company Simply Sweets

First i was very nervous about making this cake, but then i got very excited. It would give me another opportunity to work with fondant, but was a nice combo since it used icing as well.

This cake took me a total of 12 hours to make:This is not including the time i had to wait for the cake to cool. First i started with the fondant flowers, door and windows.I cheated a bit by using store bought fondant. I did not have a flower cookie cutter so i had to cut each flower out with a little knife. Then i laid them out to dry. Then i started baking the cake. The cake was made from scratch and it took me quite a while to make the batter. However, 24 eggs later and lots of stirring, it was in the oven. The cake consisted out of two vanilla cakes and one chocolate cake. Cutting them each in half, it ended up being a 6 layer cake.The towers were made out of store bought strawberry jelly rolls and store bought fondant.
I assembled the cake alternating each layer with homemade butter cream vanilla on one level and chocolate icing on the next.My favorite part of the cake making was placing the flowers and tubing the leaves and grass with green icing. Actually, no i am wrong. My favorite part was the next day when i saw my friends daughter's jaw drop open when the cake came around the corner. That was all the reward i needed to make it all worth it.