Cowberry leather - not suitable for shoes

Some time back I stumbled across this article (in Norwegian) about dried fruit in a leather like appearance, so called fruit leather.This was something I had never heard about before. Since I have more than enough cowberries in the freezer I decided to give it a try.

So I produced the sheet shown in this picture. My family did their minimal tasting, but there was little enthusiasm. So I guess this is (yet) another thing that I can enjoy alone!

Cowberries are not very sweet, and I did not add anything - just cowberries. So the taste can be a bit overwhelming. Maybe a future batch will have some sweetener added, for example some of my stevia.

But I am looking for an application. Christmas is approaching and once again I am expected to make my own sweets. Maybe I can make containers of cowberry leather and fill them with chocolate. Almost like turning my previous cowberry chocolates inside out. We'll see!

Salami and tomato on lego

This year's topic for First Lego League is "food factor". This means that the participants shall study food quality issues, find ways to improve it, build lego robots to solve tasks etc. And my youngest kid has drafted me to help his team!

The different tasks in the challenge have not been distributed among the participants yet, but it feels like an adventure. At home we started by locating his brother's Lego Mindstorm set, so that we can practice at home. I even took some parts and build myself a salami and tomato on lego. What a treat!

Part of the challenge is to find some candidate food products for further study. I had hoped to find some fish products that carry information about the catch, the vessel and so on, but that proved more difficult than expected. I found one processed product from Domstein, but it contained too many ingredients compared to the limit in the challenge.

It remains to be seen where the project develops, but I hope for a memorable learning experience for the kids.

Cowberry chocolate cake

My Captain Cowberry alias may need substantiation. Cowberry is an alias for Vaccinium vitis-idaea, and many know that better as Lingonberry. Through my work with traceability I have given a number of courses in implementing traceability solutions, and a key example in those courses have been an example traceability modell for cowberry jam.

But now to today's subject - cowberry chocolate cake. You can either use your favourite recipe for French chocolate cake and sprinkle
cowberry over it, or use the following:

Ingredients:

• 0.3 liters of icing sugar
• 200 grams of chocolate (70%+ cocoa)
• 200 grams of butter
• 3 eggs
• 0.2 liters of flour
• 0.2 liters of cowberry
Recipe:
• heat oven to 175 degrees C,
• melt the butter, sugar and chocolate over moderate heat
• beat the eggs into the chocolate mixture one at a time
• stir in the flour
• pour the batter into a 20-24 cm springform cake tin
• sprinkle the cake with cowberry
• bake the cake for 25 minutes (add 5 minutes it the berries are frozen)
Serve with whipped, sour or ice cream.