The sweet beginning...

For the first recipe we picked something sweet and with lots of chocolate. We really love chocolate!

Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:

Streussel:

• 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 90g cold butter
• 3/4 cup chocolate chips 

Cake:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup cake flour
• 2/3 cup cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 125g /4 oz butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 1/4 cups sour cream
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

 The Recipe:

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F and prepare a baking pan.
2. Make streussel: combine all the ingredients except butter in a small bowl and mix well. Cut the butter into small pieces and then mix with other ingredients with your fingertips until you get coarse crumbs.
3. Mix all dry ingredients (but sugar) for the cake in a bowl.
4. Using electric mixer cream butter with sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one by one, until well combined. Add the dry ingredients in 2 or 3 increaments, alternating with the sour cream and vanilla. Beat until smooth.
5. Spoon the batter into prepared pan, spread evenly and cover with streussel.
6. Bake until golden brown, about 40-45 minutes.

Enjoy!

3, 2, 1 ...

It looks like it's a first post. I guess we should introduce ourselves. They didn't provide any manual for that... Damn, it's more complicated than we expected. Well, let's do it the simple way - here is some info about us and why we decided to start that blog :)
Our names are Sylwia and Pawel. We come from Poland. We both study computer science and yes, we have created a blog about cooking. Real cooking. We simply had way too many moments like "hmm... I'd like to eat something... something good... hmm... there is nothing good around... pizza is boring..." which turned us to cooking and experimenting in the kitchen. Actually it was Pawel dwelling into that area first, after his trip to China. You won't believe how attrocious so called "chinese" food in Poland is! So there were experiments with hard-to-get ingredients and one cookbook bought back in Shanghai... Later it spread to other areas, including home-made pizza, pralines, corn dogs, some disasters, lasagnas, soups, etc... Sylwia was a bit surprised at first that a computer science student can spend so much time in kitchen :) But soon it became time spent there together.
We have managed now to accumulate quite a collection of cookbooks and there are so many recipes tested by us. We want to share with you the best ones (and sometimes warn you from really bad ones, if they deserve it!) so that's why we are starting that blog. It will include cookbook reviews, great recipes, ingredient informations and maybe a bit of science :)
We hope you enjoy it!