a little visit to eat food in torvehallerne market | copenhagen.

I think one of my better moves this year was to book a walking tour around Copenhagen which finished at Torvehallerne, Copenhagen's pretty fancy food market. My Dad is convinced I'd already been to the food market the last time I went to Copenhagen, but as that was ten years ago I couldn't remember going at all. Also, Torvehallerne has completely changed since then and looks pretty fancy now. For a start, it's now under cover which was pretty handy considering how cold it was when we were in Copenhagen in November and also, it's now set in two different buildings which follow a vague theme of having sweet in one building and savoury in another. Also, unlike Borough Market, it's all shiny and new and made of glass. I'm not saying one is better than the other - Borough Market has a certain kind of charm and Torvehallerne seems all bright and Scandi. 

I've mentioned before on this blog how I'm a bit of a sucker for a food market and I think it would have been wrong to miss this one even though our trip to Copenhagen wasn't very long. It's not the cheapest food market you'll ever come across, and you probably are paying off for the glass buildings and the "squeaky cleanness" of the buildings - but at the same time, Denmark isn't the cheapest country you'll ever visit either, so you just have to kind of pick up and accept it. 

There are over 60 stalls packed into Torvehallerne and one of the only downsides to the market is that when you're travelling on hand luggage only, you can't possibly buy everything you really want to and get it home! We spent a while wondering between the two buildings working out what we wanted to eat, and then back again. There was an incredible amount of choice. 

In the end, we did what all good tourists in Copenhagen do, and settled with joining the massive queues to have some smørrebrød, which we had been told to try over and over again before we went to Denmarket. Smørrebrød are basically open topped sandwiches, consisting of a dark rye bread with various toppings added on the top. Hallernes was the stall we picked ours from, and it was hard to miss being one of the only stalls which had an added queue system in place and a flood of tourists surrounding it. There were quite a few different sandwiches to choose from. I ended up going with chicken (I think?!) but I could have had pretty much any sandwich combination you can think of. They were pretty tasty, and even though it was insanely toursity, I've always thought that things are popular for a reason. 

Afterwards, we headed outside to have a look at all the flowers which were on offer. I started to wonder whether it would have been nice to have Borough Market and Columbia Road combined back in London, before I realised just how much of an utter bum fight that would be. Chaos. There were some pretty wintery displays already out for early November and I've never actually seen so much lavender in one place before (I missed out on the whole lavender farm thing) and it smelt bloody gorgeous. 

Afterwards, deciding we weren't happy with just sandwiches, we went back inside and found a stall which served egg wraps and honestly some of the best tomato soup I've ever had. I don't know whether it was just the best because I was freezing and it did a pretty good job of warming me up or what, but I think I might still think about that soup a little bit even now. I wish I could remember the name of the stall that did the egg wraps and soup because they were amazing, but I can't, although I do know that they served a whole range of Paleo food - so if that's your thing you wouldn't go too far wrong by heading there. 

Also deserving of a special mention is The Coffee Collective, which has one branch in Torvehallerne. The Coffee Collective work to a Direct Trade model, where their aim is to try and get Kenyan coffee growers the same status as a wine grower in France. It means that they pay their coffee producers 25% more than the fair trade price and visit them once a year. Who could argue with that? 

So give Torvehallerne a chance if you're ever in Copenhagen. It's easy to get to, right by Nørreport station and it really is pretty much the perfect place to grab lunch on a weekend break. 

rice krispie christmas puddings | recipe

Time to get a little bit Christmassy over here! I'd say I've always felt a little bit of a fraud calling anything which involves chocolate Rice Krispies a recipe, but I'm not sure what else it would be called. And anyway, when I lived in Holland I remember making some small Rice Krispie cakes for my Dutch friends and not a single one of them had had one before. I thought they were something everyone did when their parents first started teaching them to bake, something easy to whip up with four-year-olds. But they'd genuinely never heard of them, and one of my Dutch friends even asked me how I'd made them, which pretty much blew my mind.

It seems a little wrong to write a recipe for these, but I'm going for it! These are great for Christmas - they went down well at work and I think they'd be great for a Christmassy gathering too - easy to make a massive batch loads and they keep well in the fridge for quite a while! 

Ingredients:

400g milk chocolate (basically two big bars)
200g Rice Krispies
200g white chocolate
100g butter
5 tablespoons of fluff (or melt down 150g of marshmallows with a bit of water in a pan!)
Red fondant icing
Green fondant icing

Method:

Break the milk chocolate into small chunks
Add the chocolate and butter into a bowl
Using the microwave, melt down the chocolate ten seconds at a time
Give the mixture a good stir
Add in the fluff
Give a good stir until the mix is combined
Add the Rice Krispies
Make sure that all the Rice Krispies are coated in chocolate and there are no pale patches
Leave to cool for five minutes
Spoon a tablespoon of mixture into your hands and roll into a ball
If you have trouble with this, spray your hands with oil first
Whack in the fridge and leave to cool for ten minutes
In this time, make your holly decorations
Break off teeny bits of the red fondant and roll into balls
Cut out teeny squares of the green fondant
Using a straw, push the straw into the small square at each little sections
Break the white chocolate into small chunks
Using the microwave, melt down the chocolate ten seconds at a time
Pour bits of the white chocolate onto the puddings
While the chocolate is still wet, add the holly decorations

Ta da!

a bloody good carrot cake | recipe

In terms of classic cakes to make, it doesn't hurt to get yourself on the other side of a carrot cake. For years I didn't eat them, convinced that because I thought carrots were the devil's work I wouldn't like carrot cake. Wrong. I take solace in knowing I wasn't the only one. Carrot cakes were originally popular during the second world war as a way of using up excess carrots, but the cake was in a slightly different format with rations. Then they fell out of fashion, and when carrot cakes reappeared from America with the addition of cream cheese frosting, it took a little while for everyone to get back on side. But it does seem that the addition of cake to most things never really hurts, and cream cheese frosting is usually a winner too. I now have some considerable making up to do.

One of the best things about a carrot cake is that they're so easy to make, and they pretty much always taste good. This is the recipe I've settled on, the cake turns out moist, plus it's simple and easy to make. Using light muscovado sugar keeps the flavour pretty light and using butter too instead of the usual oil means that it's pretty fluffy still. Also remember to always use full fat cream cheese. 

Ingredients:

Cake:

150g butter - melted
300g self-raising flour
225g light muscovado sugar
200g carrots - peeled and grated
75g walnuts - shelled and chopped
4 large eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground ginger
Walnuts to decorate, as you wish!

Icing:

250g full-fat cream cheese
50g butter
25g icing sugar
Squeeze of lemon juice

Recipe: 

Cake:

Preheat the oven to 180°C.
Grease two deep 20cm sandwich tins
Line the cake tins with baking paper
Put the melted butter, eggs and sugar into a bowl
Whisk until the mixture is combined and slightly thicker
Fold in the carrot until evenly spread out
Stir in the flour
Then stir in the baking powder, ginger and chopped walnuts
Make sure the mixture is fully combined then spread into the cake tins
Bake for about 35 minutes
Leave to cool when finished

Icing:

Make sure the butter and cream cheese is at room temperature
Add butter, cream cheese, icing sugar and lemon juice into a bowl
Whisk with an electric bowl until blended
Once the cake is cool, spread the mixture on both cakes and sit one on top of the other
Decorate with remaining walnuts - if you're that way included

Eat and be happy!

nyhavn christmas market | copenhagen

I have to admit here and now that Christmas markets aren't really my thing. To be fair, Christmas isn't really one of my favourite things either. Don't get me wrong, I look forward to it, but I can never work out if that's because I enjoy the break from work and seeing all my family, or because it's actually Christmas. Plus Birmingham Christmas Market always seemed to get so badly in my way when I was trying to do Christmas shopping there, when I still lived in the Midlands. I'm also one of those massive Scrooges that gets annoyed that Christmas seems to be getting earlier and earlier each year. 

Having moaned about that, it didn't stop me from visiting Nyhavn Christmas market during a trip to Copenhagen last month - quite possibly by chance more than determination. Nyhavn is one of the must visit places when you're in Copenhagen, so of course we were already planning to visit. It seems like the Danes were on to something when they decided to make this is a must visit tourist attraction (even if that was also by chance more than determination) because who can resist brightly coloured houses alongside a canal, with the added benefit of one of their more famous exports - Hans Christian Anderson - having lived there? Most locals during the ~hot~ summer months will head there and grab a beer and sit on the quayside - but we didn't have that luxury, as the temperature didn't exceed much more than three degrees for the entire time we were there. 

So the Christmas Market which was taking place actually came to our rescue and perhaps I will have to change my mind about them! Instead of beer we were able to warm ourselves up with a cup of Gløgg - which is basically a Nordic mulled wine - the only difference I could see between the British version and the Danish version being that it had raisins in it, but nothing warms you up like a cup of mulled wine right? And if you're going to do a Christmas market, there's nothing more scenic than doing it in Scandinavia - especially on Nyhavn. Even though it's just a street and even though it's incredibly "touristy", I do think touristy things are often popular for a reason and I loved it.

Anyone else been?